This article explains the two types of employee roles in Personio, and how to add and remove employees to both custom and preset employee roles. For each employee role, you need to also configure general access rights, calendar access rights and other security settings. 

Types of employee roles

Your Personio account comes with two types of employee roles by default:

Preset employee roles

These roles are linked to other functionalities in Personio, and therefore can only be partially edited.

• • • • • ▶︎ All Employees role: This role includes all your active employees. Every new employee gets automatically added to this role, so you cannot manually add or remove any employees from this role. This role cannot be neither renamed nor deleted.
          
          ▶︎ Administrator role (or any role with Administrator rights): This role is the counterpart to the All employees' role, and no employee gets automatically assigned to it. Therefore, you can manually add and remove employees from this role. This role can be renamed, but cannot be deleted (as one employee will always need to remain added). 
          
          

Custom employee roles

These roles are not linked to other functionalities in Personio, and therefore can be freely edited.

You can also create as many additional custom employee roles as you need. Some examples of custom employee roles include the HR managers role, the Management role and the Intern role. 

Note
Custom employee roles in Personio do not need to match all the job positions present in your company.

Personio employee roles are simply a way of granting view and access rights to the different areas of Personio, so you can create a single employee role (e.g., Upper management) that will include different job positions within your company.

Add employees to an employee role

To add employees to a custom employee role (or to the Administrator preset role), follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > People > Employee roles.
2. Either click on an existing employee role under Employee Roles, or click Create new role to create a new custom employee role (in that case, also enter a name for the new custom employee role and click Create role).
3. The column Added employees will show all the employees who are currently added to the role. If you create a new custom employee role, this column will show 0 employees, as no employee has been added yet. 
4. Click on an employee under Available employees to add them to the employee role. The employee will change columns and will now appear under Added employees with a blue outline. 
5. If needed, click on the pencil icon next to the name of the employee role to rename it.
6. If needed, click on the three dots icon under Create new role to either copy (create a duplicate) or delete the employee role (only applicable to custom employee roles). To delete a custom employee role, you must first remove all employees from the role.
7. Click Save to implement the changes. 

Note
If you set an employee’s status to Inactive, the employee will no longer appear neither as Added employee nor as Available employee in the employee role.

Remove employees from an employee role

You can remove employees from employee roles either in the settings or directly from their profile. Follow these steps:

Remove an employee from the settings

1. Go to Settings > People > Employee roles.
2. Click on an existing employee role under Employee Roles.
3. The column Added employees will show all employees who are currently added to the role. Click on an employee under Added employees to remove them from the role. The employee will now appear under Available employees with a red outline.

Remove an employee from their employee profile

1. Go to My Profile > Roles.
2. The column Assigned will show all roles the employee is currently assigned to.
3. Click on the role you wish to remove and click Save changes.

Next steps for employee roles

Set up access rights

Once you have assigned all the employees to their corresponding roles, you can configure specific access rights for each employee role. 

Set up calendar rights

You can also configure specific access to the Company Calendar for each employee role.

Enable 2-factor authentication

Optionally, you can also enable 2-factor authentication for each employee role to further increase the security of the data stored in Personio. This way, employees who are assigned to that role will need both a token generated on their mobile device and their email address and password to log in to Personio.

Set up reminders

Additionally, you can also configure separate reminders for each role to simplify your employees' daily work. For example, you can set a reminder about the end of employees' probationary periods. 

For detailed instructions on how to create reminders, read the Create reminders article.

For examples of role-specific reminders, read the Best Practice: Reminders in Employee Management article.