How do I organise employees with groups?
A group is a membership. Unlike a department — which is a text field on the record — a group is something you can filter by, target a policy at, and grant a role within.
In this guide
Before you begin
You need Admin access to add someone to a group. Managers can see groups but not change membership. Groups themselves are created and maintained in Settings. See How do I use groups?.
Structural and everything else
Velory has nine group types, and they divide into two kinds:
| Kind | Types | Where they live |
|---|---|---|
| Structural | Company, Country, Division, Department, Location, Team | The org structure, on Settings → Organization |
| Other | Group, Role, Security | The groups list, on Settings → Groups |
The split matters when you go looking for one: the Groups page deliberately excludes structural types, and the Organization page holds only those. No single page lists all nine.
An employee can belong to any number of groups of either kind.
Add someone to a group
One person, from the list
- Go to Employees → Employees.
- Open the row menu on their name.
- Select Add to group and search for it.
Several employees
Select them with the checkboxes and choose Add to group from the bar that appears. One group, applied to the whole selection.
When creating them
Picking a department that exists as a department group in your org structure makes the new person a real member of it, not just a text label. See How do I add an employee manually?.
Which groups you can pick
The picker offers only groups you can assign to by hand. Virtual groups — whose membership is computed from criteria — and managed groups — whose membership comes from an integration — are left out, because adding somebody to one directly would be undone the next time it reconciled. Change the criteria, or the source, instead. See How do virtual groups work?.
See someone's groups
Open their detail page and go to the Groups tab. It has two parts:
- Organization — where they sit in the structure.
- Groups — the groups they belong to, each showing the role they hold there as a coloured badge.
Above both sits Company-wide role, the role that applies across the whole organisation rather than within one group.
Filter by group
The Groups filter on the employee list covers both kinds, so you can pull up a department or an ad-hoc group the same way.
Good to know
What is the difference between a department and a group?
A department is text on the employee record. A group is a membership. They line up when you pick a department that exists in your org structure — Velory then does both, setting the text and adding the membership — but a typed department name is only text.
What is a primary group?
A structural group the person is anchored to. It is set on the full edit form, reached from View / Edit on the list, rather than on the inline sections of the Details tab.
Can I remove someone from a group?
From the group's own member list in Settings, not from the employee's profile. The profile shows memberships; it does not manage them.
Do groups control what someone can see?
Indirectly. A role granted within a group scopes what that person can administer, and policies can target groups. The membership on its own grants nothing. See How do permissions work?.
Why is a group missing from the picker?
Because it is virtual or managed by an integration. Those maintain their own membership.
Was this article helpful?