Overview
Users are usually assigned to a department within their user profile. However, in addition to departments, users can also be assigned to a group or a team.
Groups
Any collection of users; typically a cohort of users who share an attribute. Common attributes are location (i.e. New York office, California office, etc.) and seniority (i.e. hired before [date]). Groups can only be created by administrators with Super Admin permissions and are primarily used when scheduling conversation cycles (i.e. all users who have been with the organization for 3 months or more are having their quarterly performance review, so the conversation will be scheduled for a group of users hired before the last 3 months).
To learn more about groups, see this article.
Teams
Any collection of users; typically made up of users from different departments working on the same project. Teams can be created by any user and are primarily used to assign an objective that is tied to the project.
To lean more about teams, see this article.
Comparing Each Approach
The benefits of each method are covered in the table below:
| Department | Group | Team | |
| Creation method | Manual. Need to create department, then update all user records with that department. | Automated. Can use existing filters to make groups quickly. Can import a custom field via the HRIS integration and use this for creating groups. | Manual. Each user can create and maintain their own, but will need to search one person at a time to add them. |
| Who can create? | Administrators with Super Admin permissions. | Administrators with Super Admin permissions. | Any user. |
| Standardized? | Yes, department hierarchy is maintained by administrators. | Yes, administrators maintain them. | No, every user can create teams and may duplicate with teams already created if they don't search first. |
| Visible? | Seen throughout the platform (i.e. org chart, when viewing objectives, in reports and exports). | Mostly in Program Insights and when creating scheduled conversations. Not visible in user profile. | Mostly in Program Insights and viewing objectives. Is visible in user profile. |
| Can be assigned to objectives? | Yes, if configured. | No. | Yes, if configured. |
| Can be assigned to key results? | Yes, if configured. | No | Yes, if configured. |
| Permissions? | Yes, departments can be used to assign objective permissions. | No, groups cannot be used to assign objective permissions. | Yes, teams can be used to assign objective permissions. |
| Used to define HR Admin scope? | Yes. | Yes. | No. |
| Used as an objective filter? | Yes. | No. | Yes. |