Creating your Organisation structure

Article summary: Every organization has a unique hierarchy. Speakap allows administrators to customize and align the platform's layout to match their real-world organizational structure with business units, departments etc. This guide covers how to design your organization structure, customize terminology, and build or manage Business Units and Departments.

1. Prerequisites and Structural Overview

To manage your organization's hierarchy and configure network settings, you must satisfy the following criteria:

• Account Tier: An Enterprise Speakap account.
• User Permission: A designated Network Administrator role.

By mapping your physical company layout to Speakap, you retain complete operational control over which communication channels your employees can access and which content is open to specific parts of your workforce.

2. Designing the Organization Structure & Customizing Terms

By default, Speakap categorizes structural divisions into Business Units and Departments. However, because retail stores call their structures different names than manufacturing plants or corporate offices, you can change these labels to match your company's everyday terminology.

Terminology Alternatives

How to Customize Your Labels:

1. Log into your network
2. Click on your profile picture in the top right corner and select Organization Settings.
3. Under the custom labeling fields, select your preferred names for your Business Units and Departments.

Note: The moment you update and save these labels, the change propagates globally across the platform. Your left-side navigation menu and the Example of your organization visualizer will update instantly to reflect your custom terms (e.g., changing Business Unit to Region and Department to Location).

3. Creating a Business Unit

A Business Unit is the primary top-level building block of your network structure (often representing a store, location, regional territory, or corporate division).

1. Go to Organization Settings via your top-right profile picture.
2. Click on Business Unit in the configuration panel.
3. Click the + Business Unit button in the top right corner.
4. Enter the Name of your new unit.
5. Optional - Assign to existing group: Use this field if you already have an independent user group running on your timeline and want to migrate that existing group's history and memberships directly into this new official Business Unit.
6. Optional - Disable posting on the Timeline: Check this box if you want this unit's feed to be top-down announcement-only (preventing standard employees from posting text updates).
7. Click Create to launch it.

4. Managing and Configuring Business Units

Once a Business Unit is established, you can fine-tune its details, manage its staff, and adjust features across five specialized management tabs.

To open the management view, navigate to Organization Settings - Business Units in the left menu, and click on the specific unit's name.

• General Tab: Update or change the unit's public name. This tab also houses the External Identification field. If your workforce is managed automatically via an automated HR User Sync, you can input the exact external identifier code here. Speakap uses this unique ID to automatically add or remove users from this unit. This code can also be used to reference the unit inside third-party application extensions.
• Users Tab: Click the Add button to manually provision network members into this unit. Type the individual's name, assign their unit-specific structural role, and determine which departments they belong to.
• Departments Tab: Add specialized localized subgroups under this specific unit. If you have already created your departments, simply select them here to instantly initialize a "local department" branch underneath the Business Unit you are in. (If you haven't made your departments yet, follow the setup instructions in Section 5 below first).
• Preferences Tab: Control feed posting rights. By default, all members of the network assigned to this unit are permitted to publish posts on the unit's timeline. You can toggle this behavior off here if needed. Admins are always allowed to post regardless of this setting.
• Widgets Tab: Control sidebar content. From here, you can add, remove, or rearrange the visual display order of active desktop widgets appearing next to this unit's timeline.

5. Creating a Master Department

Departments are secondary organizational components which you can nest underneath your Business Units (such as Cashiers, Managers, or specialized technical sub-teams).

1. Navigate to Organization Settings from your top-right profile icon.
2. Click on Departments in the left navigation panel.
3. Click the + Department button.
4. Enter the Name of the department.
5. Optional - Assign to existing group: Select this if you are migrating an older, pre-existing timeline group into this new official master department.
6. Click Create.

Once your master department is built, it becomes available to be assigned underneath a Business Unit. Open the Business Units in Organization Settings, click on Departments to add them there locally. You are making the department a local department branch underneath your Business Units. Repeat this process for other departments and do this for each Business Unit. Note: if your organization has hundreds or thousands of Business Units and Departments, we can also import them for you. Please contact support@speakap.com for help.