Employees

The Employees section is where you manage your entire workforce within Shinepoint. Every person you employ is represented here, and every compliance action - adopting policies, assigning training, conducting risk assessments, uploading documents - flows through their employee record. Whether you're adding your first team member or managing a growing workforce, this is your starting point.

#The Employee Directory

Your employee directory gives you a clear, searchable view of everyone in your business. Each entry shows the employee's name, email address, job title, department, status, group memberships, and start date - enough to find the right person quickly without opening their full profile.

Across the top of the directory, you'll find filters that help you narrow things down. You can search by name, email, or job title, filter by status or department, and even filter by employee group. When filters are active, a clear indicator shows you're viewing a subset of your team, and you can reset everything with a single click.

Employees can have one of five statuses:

• Active - currently employed and working
• Probation - serving a probationary period
• Inactive - not currently active in the business
• Leave of Absence - temporarily away from work
• Terminated - employment has ended

These statuses affect more than just a label. Changing an employee's status to anything other than Active will immediately revoke their access to the Employee Portal. If you terminate an employee, Shinepoint automatically cancels any pending training assignments and logs a timeline event recording what was cleaned up - keeping your audit trail intact.

You can also export your employee list as a CSV file, with your current filters applied, which is handy for reporting or sharing data with external advisors.

#Adding Employees

To add a new employee, select the Add Employee button from the directory. You'll be asked for their basic details, starting with the essentials: first name, last name, start date, and employment type. Everything else is optional but worth filling in where you can.

The form is divided into clear sections:

Personal details include first name, last name, email address, phone number, date of birth, National Insurance number, and address. The National Insurance number is stored securely and excluded from audit logs for data protection purposes.

Employment details cover job title, department, employee number, employment type (full-time, part-time, contract, seasonal, or temporary), start date, and status. The employment type defaults to full-time and the status defaults to active, but you can adjust both as needed.

Emergency contact details are optional but recommended - you can record a contact name and phone number for each employee.

Groups let you assign the employee to one or more employee groups straight away, if you've already set them up. Groups are covered in more detail further down this page.

Once you save the new employee, several things happen behind the scenes. Any policies you've marked as required for all employees are automatically assigned to them, their leave entitlements for the current year are generated, and if the Employee Portal is enabled, they'll receive an invitation. You'll then be taken to the onboarding wizard to finish setting them up.

#Employee Onboarding

Immediately after adding a new employee, Shinepoint takes you through an onboarding wizard designed to get their compliance assignments right from the start.

The first step asks you to select the employee's roles - these are work context tags that describe what the person actually does. The roles available to you are tailored to your business sector and might include:

• Office Worker
• Home Worker
• Lone Worker
• Driver
• Manual Handler
• Site Worker
• Scaffolder
• Food Handler
• Carer/Support Worker
• Customer-Facing
• Property Viewer

Roles matter because Shinepoint uses them to recommend the right compliance content. Once you've selected the relevant roles, the wizard refreshes to show you recommended policies, risk assessments, and training checklists based on those selections.

Each recommendation is clearly labelled with its category, and mandatory items are marked with a lock icon - these can't be unchecked because they're required for compliance. Optional items are pre-selected but you can toggle them off if they're not relevant to this particular employee.

If you select any training checklists, a due date field appears so you can set a deadline. This defaults to 30 days from today, but you can adjust it to suit your needs.

At the bottom of the wizard, a summary shows exactly how many policies, risk assessments, and training checklists will be assigned. When you're happy, select Apply and Continue to complete onboarding. If you'd prefer to handle compliance assignments later, you can skip onboarding entirely - the employee's roles will still be saved.

#Employee Profiles

Selecting any employee from the directory opens their full profile, which brings together everything Shinepoint knows about that person in one place.

At the top, you'll see their name, job title, department, status, and profile photo. Below that, a row of compliance statistics gives you an instant picture of where they stand: how many policies they've acknowledged, how much training they've completed, their document count, risk assessment count, and an overall compliance percentage.

#Details and Roles

The main details card shows all of the personal and employment information you entered when creating the employee, along with any notes. You can edit these at any time by selecting the Edit button.

Below the details, you'll find the employee's assigned roles. These can be updated at any time - just select Update Employee Roles to add or remove roles. Any changes are recorded in the employee's timeline so you can see exactly when and why roles were adjusted.

#Compliance Assignments

The profile brings together all of the employee's compliance assignments in dedicated sections:

• Policy Acknowledgements show each assigned policy along with its category and whether the employee has acknowledged it, including the date of acknowledgement
• Training Records list every assigned training checklist with its current status (not started, in progress, completed, or cancelled), assigned date, due date, and completion date
• Risk Assessments show the assessments linked to the employee

These sections give you a clear view of what's been assigned, what's been completed, and what still needs attention. For a deeper look at any of these areas, see the dedicated pages for policies, training, and risk assessments.

#Leave Information

If your business uses leave management, the employee profile also shows their current year's leave entitlements - broken down by leave type with total days, used days, pending days, and remaining days - along with their most recent leave requests. For full details on managing leave, see leave management.

#Timeline

Every employee has a timeline - a chronological record of significant events in their compliance journey. This includes when their record was created, status changes, role updates, compliance assignments, and any cleanup actions taken during termination. Each event records who made the change and when, giving you a reliable audit trail.

#Employee Documents

You can upload documents directly against an employee's record - right-to-work evidence, certificates, qualifications, or any other file that supports their compliance profile. Each document is stored with a title, category, and upload date.

Where documents have an expiry date, Shinepoint tracks this for you and will flag when renewals are due. This is particularly useful for things like first aid certificates, forklift licences, or right-to-work documents that need periodic renewal.

The documents section on an employee's profile also shows any documents that have been generated for them through Shinepoint's document templates, such as contracts or policy acknowledgement records. These are displayed alongside uploaded documents, giving you a complete picture in one place.

#Importing Employees

If you're setting up Shinepoint for the first time or need to add several employees at once, the bulk import feature saves you from entering each person individually.

The import follows a straightforward four-step process:

1. Upload your CSV file by dragging it onto the upload area or browsing to select it. You can download a sample template to see the expected format before you start. Files must be CSV format and under 5MB.

2. Map your columns to Shinepoint's employee fields. The importer will attempt to match your column headings automatically, but you can adjust the mapping manually. The required fields are first name and last name - everything else (email, phone, job title, department, employment type, start date, and group) is optional. A preview of your data shows the first few rows so you can verify the mapping looks right. A validation summary tells you how many rows are valid, how many are duplicates (which will be skipped), and how many have errors.

3. Processing happens automatically once you confirm. A progress bar shows how many rows have been imported.

4. Results give you a clear summary: how many employees were created, how many had errors, and the total rows processed. If any rows failed, you can download an error report showing exactly which rows had issues and why.

#Employee Groups

Groups let you organise your employees in whatever way makes sense for your business - by department, location, team, shift pattern, or anything else. They're flexible and designed to make bulk operations easier.

Groups support a hierarchical structure, so you can create parent groups with sub-groups beneath them. For example, you might have a "London Office" parent group with "Sales", "Operations", and "Support" groups nested inside it. Each group can have its own colour for easy visual identification.

Creating a group is simple: give it a name, an optional description, choose a colour, and if it should sit within an existing group, select a parent. You can reorder groups by dragging them into the position you want.

Groups are useful beyond just organisation. You can filter the employee directory by group, and they provide a natural way to think about bulk assignments when you need to roll out a new policy or training checklist to a specific team.

Deleting a group won't affect the employees within it - they'll simply no longer be members of that group. If the group had sub-groups, those sub-groups move up to the parent level automatically.

#Portal Invitations

Once an employee has been added and has an email address on file, you can invite them to the Employee Portal - a dedicated space where they can manage their own compliance tasks.

From an employee's profile, select the option to send a portal invitation. The employee will receive a secure magic link by email that gives them access to the Portal without needing a separate password.

Through the Portal, employees can acknowledge policies, work through training checklists, sign risk assessments, request leave, and view documents shared with them. This takes a significant workload off your shoulders and gives employees ownership of their compliance responsibilities.

Portal access is only available to employees with an Active status. If an employee's status changes, their Portal access is automatically revoked until they're made active again.

For a complete guide to what employees can do in the Portal, see the Employee Portal documentation.