Examples of Maintaining Groups

Groups allow you to organize employees who reside in different areas of the organization but may have certain characteristics in common as well as organizational units that share a specific purpose. An employee can be in more than one group.

Note: Groups are not a part of an organization's hierarchy. You can not place a group in the company's hierarchy on the Organization Directory screen. For this reason, groups display in a separate folder than the hierarchy. Only users with appropriate permissions (for example, System Administrator) have access to the Groups folder in the organizational hierarchy.

Note: You can also place employees into groups through imports. See the Import Data into the PureSafety topic for more information.

Below are several examples of how you can use groups at your organization.

Example of a group containing various employees:

Company A has several subsidiaries across the country. All subsidiaries require similar training for OSHA record keeping. In this case:
  1. Bill, Company A’s Training Administrator, creates two groups: Full-Time employees and Part-Time employees.
  2. After he adds all applicable employees into each group, Bill can assign training to each group without having to assign the training to each employee.

Example of groups containing entire organizational units:

Company A sets up its hierarchy based on geographic locations. Bill, the system administrator, has created three organizational units: Chicago, Boston, and New York. Now, Company A requires that every employee should be CPR-certified. As a result:
  1. John, the Training Administrator, creates a group called Uncertified to capture all employees who do not have their CPR certifications.
  2. John uses the Uncertified group to assign offline CPR training sessions to all employees at each location and thus doesn't have to assign training to each employee individually.

Example of an employee in multiple groups:

Frank is the Site Manager for the Southeast Division of Company A and is the Sales Manager for his region. John, the system administrator for Company A, requires the site managers to have safety training, and he requires the sales managers to have some sales-related training. In this case:
  1. John decides to create two groups: Site Managers and Sales Managers.
  2. He adds Frank to both groups.
  3. John can use these groups to assign safety or sales-related training to these employees without having to assign the training to each employee individually.

Example of groups that serve for an anticipated (or planned) purpose:

Company A is planning to open a new office in Seattle. As a result:
  1. Bill, the Training Administrator for Company A, creates a New Employee Orientation course for future new hires.
  2. He also creates a group called New Hires to manage all employees who are new hires regardless of the organizational unit to which they belong.

Example of groups that serve an ad hoc (or one-time) purpose:

Scott, the Department Manager for Company A, requested that five of his crew members get training on Hearing Protection by the end of the day. In this case:
  1. Bill, Company A’s Training Administrator, can quickly (and easily) create an ad hoc group called Hearing Protection Group to satisfy Scott’s request.
  2. After each employee completes the training, Bill deletes the Hearing Protection Group.
Note:

If there are inactive employees in an organization unit or group when you assign training to the unit or group, this training is not assigned to the inactive trainees.

When you reactivate these trainees, you have the option to give them these assignments as long as the assignments are still active and you selected the Assign to new entrants check box when you created the assignment.