Employee Groups & Targeted Distribution

Not every policy applies to every employee. Your engineering team needs access to your change management policy but probably not your sales commission policy. Your finance team needs the anti-bribery policy but not the software development lifecycle policy. Employee groups let you organise your workforce into logical groupings so you can distribute the right policies to the right people — efficiently and consistently.

1. What employee groups are

An employee group is a named collection of employees that you can use as a target when distributing policies, assigning training modules, or creating attestations. Instead of selecting 40 individuals one by one, you select the group and everyone in it receives the distribution automatically.

Groups are flexible and can represent any logical division within your organisation:

• Department-based — Engineering, Finance, HR, Sales, Legal
• Role-based — All Managers, All Contractors, All New Starters
• Location-based — London Office, Remote Workers, EU Staff
• Custom criteria — SOC 2 In-Scope Personnel, GDPR Data Processors, Board Members

An employee can belong to multiple groups simultaneously. For example, a senior developer in the London office might be in "Engineering", "London Office", and "SOC 2 In-Scope Personnel" groups at the same time.

2. Creating a group

To create a new group, navigate to Employee Groups from the main sidebar and click Create Group. Enter a descriptive name for the group and optionally add a description explaining its purpose (e.g. "All staff who handle customer personal data and are in scope for GDPR compliance").

After creating the group, add members by searching for employees by name or email. You can add employees individually or select multiple employees at once. The group is immediately available for use in distributions once at least one member has been added.

3. Using groups in distributions

When you create a policy distribution, you can select one or more employee groups as the target audience instead of (or in addition to) individual employees. Here is how it works:

• Go to Distributions and click Create Distribution
• Select the policy or policies you want to distribute
• In the recipients section, switch to the Groups tab
• Select one or more groups — all current members of those groups will be included
• The distribution is sent to every unique employee across all selected groups (duplicates are automatically removed if an employee appears in multiple groups)

This approach is particularly valuable when you regularly distribute updated policies. Rather than rebuilding your recipient list each time, select the same group and the distribution reaches the current membership — including any new joiners who have been added since the last distribution.

4. Managing group membership

Groups are living entities that should reflect your current organisational structure. To manage membership:

• Adding employees — open the group, click Add Members, and search for the employees you want to include
• Removing employees — within the group member list, click the remove button next to the employee you want to take out of the group

Changes to group membership take effect immediately. However, membership changes do not retroactively affect distributions that have already been sent. If you add a new employee to a group after a distribution was sent, they will not automatically receive the previously distributed policy — you would need to create a new distribution or add them individually.

5. Benefits of using groups

Adopting employee groups as part of your policy management workflow delivers several practical benefits:

• Efficient bulk distribution — distribute to dozens or hundreds of employees with a single selection instead of picking individuals one by one
• Consistent policy coverage — when a group is well-maintained, you can be confident that every relevant employee receives the policies they need. No one falls through the cracks
• Faster onboarding — when a new employee joins, add them to the appropriate groups and they are immediately included in future distributions for those groups
• Cleaner audit evidence — auditors can see that your policy distribution is systematic and role-based, not ad hoc. Group-based distribution demonstrates a mature, repeatable compliance process
• Reduced administrative overhead — update group membership once and every future distribution automatically picks up the changes

Related Articles

• Distributing Policies with Magic Links
• Tracking Acknowledgements & Chasing Non-Completers
• Roles & Permissions