Creating your Organisation Structure

Summary: Every organization has its own hierarchy. Speakap lets you mirror your real-world organization structure with Business Units and Departments, so employees see relevant communication and have access to the right resources. This guide covers designing your structure, customizing terminology, and building and managing Business Units and Departments.

1. Prerequisites and structural overview

To manage your organization's hierarchy and configure these settings, you need:

• Account tier: An Enterprise Speakap account.
• User permission: A Network Administrator role.

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

2. Designing the structure and customizing terms

By default, Speakap categorizes structural divisions into Business Units and Departments. 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.

To customize your labels:

1. Log into your network.
2. Click your avatar 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 applies across the whole platform. Your left-side navigation menu and the Example of your organization visualizer 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 avatar.
2. Click 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 in your network and want to migrate that existing group's history and memberships directly into this new official Business Unit. Keep these migration rules in mind:

• Data retention: The migration moves the existing group and its data into the new structure.
• One-way only: You can only migrate from a group to a structural unit, not the other way around.
• One-time action: Migration can only be done once for a specific Business Unit, Department, or Local Department underneath a Business Unit.

6. Optional, disable posting on the Timeline: Check this box if you want this unit's Feed to be top-down and announcement-only, preventing standard employees from posting text updates.
7. Click Create.

4. Managing and configuring Business Units

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

To open the management view, go to Organization Settings > Business Units in the left menu and click the 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, enter the exact external identifier code here. Speakap uses this unique ID to automatically add or remove users from this unit. The code can also be used to reference the unit inside third-party application extensions.
• Users tab: Click the Add button to manually add network members to this unit. Type the individual's name, assign their unit-specific role, and pick which departments they belong to.
• Departments tab: Add localized subgroups under this specific unit. If you have already created your departments, simply select them here to instantly create a "local department" branch underneath the Business Unit you are in. (If you have not 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 can publish posts on the unit's Feed. You can toggle this 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 display order of active desktop widgets next to this unit's Feed.

5. Creating a master Department

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

1. Go to Organization Settings from your top-right avatar.
2. Click 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 group into this new official master department. The same migration rules apply as for Business Units: the group's data moves into the new structure, migration only works from a group to a structural unit (not the other way around), and it can only be done once per Department.
6. Click Create.

Once your master department is built, it becomes available to assign underneath a Business Unit. Open the Business Units in Organization Settings and click Departments to add them there locally. This makes the department a local department branch underneath your Business Unit. 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. Email us at support@speakap.com for help.

Still stuck?

Email us at support@speakap.com with your network name and a short description of the structure you want to build, and we'll help you out.