Introduction - Departments

How the organisation is divided, what a sub-department adds, and everything the grouping drives.

A tour of Departments: the grouping, the heads who run it, and the teams inside it.

A department is not a label. It scopes reports, filters attendance, groups the roster and, in most setups, decides who approves whose leave. Getting the structure right early saves rebuilding it once people are in it.

The Departments screen, headed Departments above the line Manage organizational departments, with a Central Warehouse location picker and a blue Add Department button. Filter chips read All Departments and All Sizes. The table has columns Department, Code, Department Head, Employees and Sub-departments, and lists eight departments including Engineering and Maintenance with code ENG and seven employees, and Warehouse and Logistics with code WHS and six. — Eight departments. The Sub-departments column is where the teams inside each one show as chips.

What a row tells you

Rows of the Departments table. Engineering and Maintenance, code ENG, headed by Graham Whitfield with seven employees and two sub-department chips reading Field Service and Workshop. Finance, code FIN, headed by Ruth Alderman with two employees and a dash. Health and Safety, IT and Systems, Operations with a Quality chip, People and HR, Procurement, and Warehouse and Logistics with Despatch, Goods In and Transport chips. — Five of the eight are flat. A dash in the last column is a department with no teams inside it.

Columns on the Departments list
Field	What it does
Department	The name, as a link. Selecting it opens the department with its members.
Code	A short reference such as ENG or WHS, used where the full name will not fit.
Department Head	Who runs it. This is the field leave approvals route through in most setups.
Employees	How many people call this their primary department.
Sub-departments	The teams inside it, as chips. A dash means the department is flat.

Two levels, and only two

Worklink gives you departments and sub-departments beneath them. There is no third level, which is deliberate: a structure deep enough to need one is usually better expressed as more departments.

A department page for Engineering and Maintenance, marked Active, described as Workshop overhaul, field service and on-site plant maintenance, with its code, mail alias and department head on one line. Seven employees is shown beside Assign, Edit and Delete buttons. Sub-department pills read All 7, Field Service 2 and Workshop 5, above a member table listing seven people with their employee IDs, sub-departments, designations, locations and statuses. — Opening a department shows its people, its teams and the three things you can do to it.

A row of sub-department filter pills on a department page: All with a count of 7 highlighted in blue, FI Field Service with 2, and WO Workshop with 5. — Inside a department, the sub-teams become filters with their own counts.

What the grouping drives

Where	How the department is used
Leave approvals	The department head is who a request routes to.
Attendance records	The department filter narrows the list to one team.
Reports	Most reports can be grouped or scoped by department.
The employee roster	The Department column and its filter.
Presence	Filtering who is in today by team rather than by depot.