> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ravenna.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# HR and People

> Set up a People desk that handles sensitive requests properly: private by default, HRIS-aware, and covering the full employee lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding.

An HR desk is not an IT desk with different forms. The default assumption inverts: most requests should not be visible to the rest of the company, and a mistake here costs more than a slow ticket.

## What HR owns in Ravenna

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="People desk" icon="users" href="/guides/playbooks/hr/people-desk" horizontal>
    A private-by-default desk for benefits, policy, leave, and pay questions.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Employee lifecycle" icon="workflow" href="/guides/playbooks/hr/employee-lifecycle" horizontal>
    How joiner and leaver events get in, and how work reaches each team.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Employee onboarding" icon="user-plus" href="/guides/playbooks/hr/employee-onboarding" horizontal>
    One intake event that produces every provisioning task before day one.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Employee offboarding" icon="user-minus" href="/guides/playbooks/hr/employee-offboarding" horizontal>
    Access revoked, devices returned, and nothing left behind.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

Start with the People desk. Then read the employee lifecycle page before building either of the other two, because it settles the intake and cross-team handoff that both depend on. Onboarding is the highest-value process to automate in most organizations, and it is the one that makes IT and HR cooperate.

## 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.

<Callout icon="link" color="#6B7280">Read [Portal and privacy](/guides/best-practices/portal-and-privacy) before you turn either on. Privacy and visibility are independent axes and the interaction surprises people.</Callout>

## Connect your HRIS first

This is the one integration that changes how everything else behaves. [Gusto](/integrations/gusto/overview), [HiBob](/integrations/hibob/overview), [BambooHR](/integrations/bamboohr/overview), [Rippling](/integrations/rippling/overview), and [Workday](/integrations/workday/overview) 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.

HiBob, BambooHR, and Workday go further: workflows can check time-off balances and create time-off requests, which turns "how many days do I have left" from a ticket into an answer.

## Where HR desks stall

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="A knowledge base of PDFs">
    If the answer to a leave question lives in a scanned handbook, the agent cannot read it.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="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.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="No Portal">
    The people with the most urgent HR questions are often the ones least likely to be in Slack.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="People desk" icon="users" href="/guides/playbooks/hr/people-desk" horizontal>
    The private-by-default setup.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Employee lifecycle" icon="workflow" href="/guides/playbooks/hr/employee-lifecycle" horizontal>
    Settle intake and the team handoff before you build.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>


## Related topics

- [HR and People desk](/guides/playbooks/hr/people-desk.md)
- [Sage HR](/integrations/sage-hr/overview.md)
- [Portal and privacy](/guides/best-practices/portal-and-privacy.md)
- [Playbooks](/guides/playbooks/overview.md)
- [Guides](/guides/overview.md)