Assignments for compliance-related components in Workhub is done by Position. However, there is a setting available for the Onboarding and Compliance components (this includes Online Training, Certificates, Policies, Procedures, and Competencies) that allows an administrator to add an extra layer of assignment complexity: assignment by Position and Location, otherwise referred to as cross requirements.
This functionality can be very helpful, but opting to switch back and forth between using Cross Requirements and turning them off will affect your assignments through the entire component, so we recommend caution.
More at the end of this article!
Enabling Cross Requirements
In the Settings tab for each of those components, you will find this setting:
The Enable assignment of courses by location changes your assignment logic to include all the Positions in your organization in tandem with the Locations within your organization.
The assignment screen will change from this page with six columns for assignment requirement:
… to this screen with just three columns:
While looking simpler, the second image is our more complex assignment method.
To assign an item with cross requirements enabled, you'll need to click into a row for your desired Position. Doing so will open a pop-up for that particular Position. For this example, I've clicked into the Position of Dispatch:
In this pop-up, I can then choose which level of assignment I want that Dispatch Position to have for each location, rather than for the Position as a whole. You can choose to make a particular assignment level your Default for all the Locations by clicking the Make Default option at the top of each column. You can also manually choose the level of requirement at each Location if your assignment needs deviate depending on the Location.
For instance, if there are Dispatch workers at the Calgary Yard and the Calgary Shop who need the Commercial Vehicles course to be considered compliant, but the course is optional for the Dispatch workers at the Head Office, I can choose the Required column as the default and list Head Office as Optional:
This is especially useful if you have a diverse organization with many Locations with differing assignment needs.
On the Assignments screen, the Default will show in a blue-gray colour. Any required assignments that you make that differ from the Default will appear as a dark grey bubble listing the Location in column of their assigned requirement. In this example, the Commercial Vehicles course has been made Optional for the Dispatch Position at the Head Office Location:
Caution is advised!
If you've enabled cross requirements for your component but decide you want to go back to using just Positions for your Assignments, the assignments that you had in place before you switched to Cross Requirements will not have been retained. The assignments that will populate will reflect the most recent settings from the cross requirements assignment scheme.
The same is true if you switch from Position only assignment to Cross Requirements - the selections you made for just Positions will apply to the Position x Location assignment method.
If you have not made any changes to your assignments after switching from one method to the other, you can safely switch back and your original assignments will be retained. However, if you have made changes, the changes will be adopted in the new assignment method and you will lose any assignments you previously had in place.
This can be disastrous if you have many exceptions to your Default choices, as the system will generate the defaults only when switching to the other assignment scheme.
We don't retain a historical log of what Assignments were in place before enabling or disabling cross requirements, so we can't set it back to what it was for you.
Here's an example: the assignments for the Commercial Vehicles course has been set to just Positions, and they look like this:
After enabling Cross Requirements, the assignments mirror the assignments by Position alone:
If I opt to change these assignments to all being Optional,:
… and then turn the Cross Requirements off, this is what the assignments then look like:
The decisions made on one side affect the other, so caution is urged when making a change in assignment logic like this.
If you need more information on how this change can affect your assignments, please reach out to our Support Centre through the orange chat bubble on your dash or [email protected].