What HR owns in Ravenna
People desk
A private-by-default desk for benefits, policy, leave, and pay questions.
Employee lifecycle
How joiner and leaver events get in, and how work reaches each team.
Employee onboarding
One intake event that produces every provisioning task before day one.
Employee offboarding
Access revoked, devices returned, and nothing left behind.
Suggested shape
One workspace called People or HR, with Private workspace on. That keeps non-members from browsing the workspace and seeing other people’s tickets, while requesters can still file into it from the surfaces you turn on. Turn on the Portal alongside Slack. HR serves people who are not in Slack all day: hourly staff, field teams, and anyone on their last day.Read Portal and privacy before you turn either on. Privacy and visibility are independent axes and the interaction surprises people.
Connect your HRIS first
This is the one integration that changes how everything else behaves. Gusto, HiBob, BambooHR, Rippling, and Workday all sync employee profiles: name, email, job title, department, manager, and employment status, plus teams and departments as groups. Three things become possible once it is connected:- Dynamic approvers. “The requester’s manager” resolves from live data rather than a list you maintain.
- Group-based routing. Route a request differently for a contractor than for a full-time employee, or by region.
- Context on the ticket. The responder sees who the person is without opening the HRIS.
Where HR desks stall
Treating private tickets as the privacy model
Treating private tickets as the privacy model
Every workspace member can see every private ticket in their workspace. Private tickets hide a request from the wider company, not from the team.
A knowledge base of PDFs
A knowledge base of PDFs
If the answer to a leave question lives in a scanned handbook, the agent cannot read it.
Onboarding built as one giant workflow
Onboarding built as one giant workflow
One workflow doing HR’s, IT’s, and Facilities’ work is something only its author can change. Give each team a child ticket in their own workspace and let them own the workflow it triggers.
No Portal
No Portal
The people with the most urgent HR questions are often the ones least likely to be in Slack.
Next
People desk
The private-by-default setup.
Employee lifecycle
Settle intake and the team handoff before you build.