Employee Community Admin Setup Overview
How do I set up the Employee Community?
Purpose: To walk you through the process of setting up the Employee Community from start to finish.
Setting up the Employee Community
- Non-Employee Users with Full Admin access cannot enable or set up Employee Community. They will receive an error that indicates "Failed to communicate with Employee Community Service".
- An active employee profile is required for the Full Admin to activate and set this up.
By default, the Employee Community is in an “off” state. To turn "on" the Employee Community, navigate to Settings and click Employee Community on the left menu.
From here, click Let’s Get Started and this will turn on the Employee Community and a new environment will automatically be created.
You will need to complete a couple of steps before your employees have access to the Employee Community. Clicking Let’s Get Started button will advance you to the next phase of the setup process.
Once you enable the Employee Community, the next step will be syncing your employees.
When ready, toggle on Sync Employees from Settings in BambooHR. This action will add all employees from your company to the Employee Community.
Who is added?
- All active employees (including contractors and part-time employees)
- Employees with a "pre-hire" status if their hire date is in the past
- This ensures that employees are included in company communications, even if they have outstanding tasks to complete from their onboarding experience.
Who is not added?
- Employees with a “pre-hire” status with a hire date in the future
- They should not see internal communications until they officially start their job. This is for both for security and privacy reasons.
- Terminated employees
What personal information is shown for each employee?
- Employee's preferred first name
- Employee's last name
- Employee's email address
Admins can also sync the following information:
- Title
- Location
- Department
- Manager
- Hire Date
- Birthday
- Profile Picture
- Phone Number
How frequently will the information sync?
Admins can also choose the frequency of synchronization from the following options:
- Never: The information will never move from BambooHR to the Employee Community.
- Once: The information will populate in the Employee Community during the setup but will never be automatically updated again.
- Always: The information will populate in the Employee Community during the setup and will continue to be updated whenever any changes occur.
What happens when an employee is added to the Employee Community?
- The employee will appear in the Employee Community's member directory.
- Departments and locations will automatically populate in the member directory and the admin settings page in the Employee Community.
- After adding employees, admins can begin to assign employees to groups and audiences.
- Employees will not yet be able to view the Employee Community widget on BambooHR Home. That will happen during the last step when you go live.
This is an interim setup phase when no new content should be added to the Employee Community. Even though these employees do not have access to the Employee Community just yet, new content may trigger an email notification, which employees could receive.
Employees will be able to open and view the email notification, but if they attempt to click through any of the links, they will encounter an error because they do not have permission to access the Employee Community yet.
The next step is to familiarize yourself with the Employee Community before you go live and reveal the Employee Community Widget to your employees.
Clicking Set Up Employee Community on the BambooHR Settings page will take you to the Employee Community - community.bamboohr.com - away from the BambooHR Settings page.
Additionally, The Beginner’s Guide to Employee Community learning course can be found here. This course discusses a few ways to create and add content so when you are ready to launch there is material for your employees to engage with (be mindful not to create an Announcement or broadcast post to prevent an automatic email being sent to your employee before launch).
When you create a new Employee Community, it will be automatically populated with your company's logo, name, and colors (if one is selected in BambooHR). If you do not have your company colors updated in BambooHR, a color will be randomly selected.
If you want to change the logo, name, or header color, you can do so from your admin settings page in the Employee Community by going to Settings > Admin > General.
The Employee Community will also have a default group created called “Company News.” This group will be marked as a required group, meaning that all employees will be required to be members of it.
You can edit this group just as you would any other Group; you can change the name, logo, settings, or delete the group, if desired.
The main reason for having this default group is that it will streamline the set up process as a group must be created in order to publish a post and announce the Employee Community to your employees.
Once you have set up the Employee Community and successfully synchronized employees, it’s time to go live. Switch on the Go Live toggle at the bottom of the Employee Community page in Settings.
When toggled on, the Employee Community widget will appear on BambooHR Home of employee profiles, and the feature is fully functional.
Admins should quickly follow up by publishing a welcome post announcing the Employee Community and kicking off the experience for everybody.
If you want to turn off the Employee Community can do so by clicking on Turn off Employee Community on the top right corner of the BambooHR Settings page.
Turning off the Employee Community will reactivate the basic Announcements tool The Settings page will then revert back to the previous settings page and clicking Let’s Get Started will then reactivate the Employee Community.