Available for the following plans: Employment Unlimited, Employment Plus
Available for the following HR plan: Platinum
Available for the following User Access levels: Admin
By default, only full administrators can access and manage workflows in your organization. However, you can now delegate workflow management responsibilities to non-admin employees through Permission settings, allowing the people who actually own and understand your processes to build and maintain their own workflows.
Important
When non-admin employees create or edit workflows, they have access to all organizational data needed for workflow conditions, including all active employees, groups, and departments. Only grant workflow permissions to trusted employees.
Understanding workflow permissions
Previously, HR Business Partners, Department Heads, and IT leads had to submit requests to administrators every time they needed to create or modify a workflow. This created bottlenecks and often resulted in workflows that didn't perfectly match group-specific needs.
With workflow permissions in Permission settings, you can:
- Empower process owners to manage their own workflows
- Reduce administrative burden on your IT team
- Improve workflow quality by letting subject matter experts build what they need
- Maintain security and oversight through granular permission controls
Non-admin employees with View permission can:
- See "Workflows" in the side navigation
- Access the workflows page
- View all workflow templates in your organization
- View existing workflows in read-only mode (all fields disabled)
- Browse workflow structure and understand triggers and conditions
Use case: Perfect for employees who need to understand existing workflows for compliance, training, or reference purposes.
Includes all View permissions, plus the ability to:
- Create new workflows from scratch or using templates
- Edit any existing workflow in your organization
- Publish and unpublish workflows
- Delete workflows they created themselves
Use case: Ideal for process owners who need to actively manage and maintain workflows for their departments.
Includes all View permissions, plus the ability to:
- Delete any workflow in the organization (not just their own)
Use case: Best suited for senior team leads or department heads who need full workflow management authority.
Setting up workflow permissions
To grant workflow permissions to your employees, you'll use Security Settings. For detailed instructions on creating security groups and assigning permissions, see: Grant feature access to employees through security groups.
Once permissions are granted, employees will immediately see the Workflows option in their side navigation.
Helpful Hint
Start by granting View permissions to a broader group and Modify permissions to a select few trusted process owners. You can always expand access as your team becomes more comfortable with distributed workflow management.
Important considerations
When non-admin employees create or edit workflows, they have access to all organizational data needed for workflow conditions, including:
- All active employees (regardless of their normal viewing permissions)
- All teams and departments
- All available workflow triggers and actions
This ensures workflows can be properly configured, but means you should only grant workflow permissions to trusted employees.
All workflow actions performed by non-admin users are tracked in your audit trail, including:
- Workflow creation and deletion
- Publishing and unpublishing activities
- Workflow modifications
- Who performed each action and when
This maintains full transparency and allows you to track all workflow-related changes.
- If you revoke workflow permissions from an employee, they lose access immediately.
- Attempting to access workflow pages without permission redirects users to the dashboard.
- Direct URL access is blocked for unauthorized users.
Example use cases
Grant Modify permissions to HR Business Partners so they can create and manage workflows for their specific regions or departments. See our workflow configuration guides for examples of onboarding workflows, offboarding workflows, and performance review processes.
Allow IT leads to manage workflows for account provisioning, software requests, and equipment provisioning without requiring full admin access to your HR platform.
Provide Modify permissions to department heads so they can create team-specific workflows for expense management or other departmental processes.