Grouping people into teams
Every person on a portal can carry one short label: the team they are on, the site they report to, the shift they work, the department they belong to. It shows as a large badge at the top of their own portal page, so the first thing they see when they open their link is where they have been put. WorkZerk calls it Team by default, and you can call it whatever you like.
Setting it
Open a portal and find the panel listing its people. Each row has a small box on the right-hand end, and the column is headed with whatever word you are using. Click in, type, click away. It saves when you click out: no Save button, no confirmation.
The box sits in the same place on every row, so reading down the column tells you how everyone is grouped without opening anything.
The dropdown
Click into the box and you get every value already in use on this portal, each with a count beside it ("3 set", "7 set"). Pick one instead of retyping it.
The count is the point. If you are splitting forty people into groups of eight, it tells you when a group is full without you tallying anything. Values sort naturally, so 2 comes before 10.
Start typing to filter. Arrow keys move through the list, Enter takes the highlighted one, Escape closes it without picking. If what you typed matches nothing, Tab saves it as a new value, and it appears in the dropdown on every other row from then on.
If someone else changed the same person's value in another window since you loaded the page, your save is refused with a message saying so. Reload to see the current value.
What to put in it
Anything up to 100 characters. There is no format and nothing is validated, so use whatever your organization already says:
- A team name. "Fitout B", "Team 3", "Night shift".
- A site or location. "Northgate", "Warehouse 2", "Level 4".
- A shift. "Early", "Back half", "Weekend".
- A department or trade. "Electrical", "Kitchen", "Traffic".
The dropdown ignores capitals, so "Night shift" and "night shift" count as one group there. Each person's badge still shows exactly what is in their box, so pick one spelling and stay with it.
Renaming it, and turning it off
Both live in the portal's settings (Portal Settings, beside the portal's name), on the Options tab, in the section headed Team.
The first control is the word itself. It defaults to Team, it is free text up to 50 characters, and whatever you type becomes the word above the value on each person's badge. Set it to Site, Shift, Department, Cohort, whatever fits. Words you have used on other portals are offered as suggestions.
The checkbox beside it, Show followed by your word, decides whether the badge appears at all. It is on when a portal is created. Turn it off while you are still working the grouping out: people move between groups right up to the start, and a badge that is out of date is worse than no badge. Keep filling the values in with it off, then switch it on when the plan is settled. Everyone sees the badge the next time they open or reload their link, and nothing needs re-sending.
The badge only shows for people who have a value. Turning the setting on does not put an empty badge on everybody.
It belongs to the portal, not the person
The value is stored against this person on this portal. Add the same person to a different portal and the box starts empty, because the grouping comes from how you have organized that particular intake, not from anything permanent about the person.
To change a value, type over it. To clear it, empty the box and click away; the badge disappears from their page and the count on their old group drops by one. No history of changes is kept, so what is in the box is what is current.
Getting help
If a badge is not showing when you expect it, check both halves: the setting is on for that portal, and the person has a value. If it still looks wrong, email [email protected] with the portal name.