HR and People desk

An HR desk is an IT desk with the privacy assumptions inverted. On the IT desk, a public thread is a feature: colleagues see the answer and stop asking. On the People desk, a public thread is a liability. This playbook sets up a workspace where the default is private and going public is a deliberate act.

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Give People Ops its own workspace

Do not add an HR channel to the IT workspace. A separate workspace gives you separate members, separate knowledge, its own agent, and its own reporting, and it means an IT responder cannot stumble into a grievance ticket.

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Understand what makes a ticket private

Two things make a ticket private, and neither of them is the channel being private:

• A DM to Ravenna. Tickets created from a Slack direct message are always private, whatever else is configured.
• A form marked private. Every ticket from that form is private, even when someone opens the form in a public channel. Ravenna posts a short confirmation in the thread with a deep link to the requester’s DM, then moves the whole conversation there.

A private ticket is visible only to the requester, workspace admins and members, the assignee, followers, and approvers. Followers and approvers lose access when removed from the role.

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Mark the sensitive forms private

Start with these, all private:

• Leave request
• Payroll or pay query
• Benefits change
• Report a concern
• Personal detail change

Two consequences of marking a form private, both wanted:

• The agent will not fill it conversationally. Private forms always show the real form UI, so sensitive values are typed into fields rather than into a channel.
• Auto-submit is disabled regardless of your agent settings, so the requester always reviews before it is created.

Keep a small number of forms public: policy questions, how-do-I requests, anything where a visible answer helps the next person.

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Use private notes for the internal conversation

Everything your team says to each other about a case belongs in a private note, not a reply. Use the dropdown next to Send and choose Send private. Notes carry a lock icon, only workspace members can send them, and guests never see them. Make it a habit on day one. Teams that start with public replies and try to retrofit discipline later leak something eventually.

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Scope knowledge to this workspace only

Your HR knowledge folder should be scoped, not global. In the folder’s Details panel, turn off Knowledge to all channels and select the People channels, then restrict it to the People agent. Both layers apply. An agent reaches a folder only when the channel and the agent are both permitted, which is exactly what you want for a compensation policy.

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Set up the agent differently

Same product, different instincts:

• Escalate earlier. Write escalation instructions that hand off rather than persist. A wrong answer about parental leave costs more than a slow one.
• Answer policy, not cases. Rules should cover documented policy questions. Anything about an individual’s situation goes to a human.
• Keep tools read-only, or approval-gated. There is rarely a good reason for an agent to write to an HRIS unprompted.

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Reach the people who are not in Slack

Frontline, retail, warehouse, and factory staff often have no Slack account, and they are frequently the people with the most urgent HR questions. The Portal is the answer, but read Portal and privacy before you turn it on. Enabling the Portal for a workspace makes that workspace visible to every organization member, even if the workspace itself is private. Ticket visibility does not change, but presence does, and that surprises people.

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Where teams get this wrong

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