Glossary of Terms

Glossary of Terms

An Activity is anything that is entered into an HR record.  This could be a Police check, a performance review, sick leave, a vacation request, etc. Think of an Activity as a virtual piece of paper.

Activity Workflows determine how Activities need to move from person to person.  If you think of an Activity as a piece of paper, the Activity Workflows describe how that piece of paper moves from person to person and what each person does with it.

Templates structure how the virtual piece of paper is completed and what is on it.  For example, you will likely need templates for a vacation request, sick leave, a police check, CPR training, performance reviews, etc. 

Policies can be set for templates to control how that template functions. For example, you probably have a vacation policy that states that for a specific length of service employees are entitled to a specific amount of vacation time.  By setting up a Policy on your vacation request template, PartnerHR applies your policy to the template. 

Person is an employee or volunteer - the person whose PartnerHR record should be updated with the Activity. Who’s record should the virtual piece of paper be filed on?

An Assignee is the person responsible for completing the task.

Supervisor is the supervisor of the employee.

Tags are labels you can apply to Employees to identify characteristics about them. These might be about the person or about their role. For example, you might Tag employees who can unlock the building. Or you might Tag employees with children so you can make arrangements at Christmas for their children to attend a party. 
Tags are visible to all employees who can access PartnerHR so should not be used for anything confidential.

Position is usually a general role within the company and usually not a specific job title. On an employee record, there is a field for both position and job title.  You might have the position of Finance and then specific job titles would be CFO, bookkeeper, etc.

Category is how to group Activities together. You might have a Category for Onboarding, Health & Safety, and Time-off requests.  To use the Onboarding Category as an example, it might group together Activities for Reference checks, Orientation, Training, and internal processes like assigning email addresses and phone extensions. 

HR Admin Documents provides a central location to store HR Admin-related documents.
Note that all PartnerHR Admin have access to HR Admin Documents so it might not be an appropriate location for storing confidential information.



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