How Does Document Distribution Work for New Employees, and How Can I Customise or Stop It?

When managing HR documents within an organisation, understanding how document distribution operates—especially for new employees—is crucial for ensuring compliance, maintaining efficiency, and meeting specific organisational needs.

Overview of Document Distribution Mechanics

In Atlas, documents can be distributed to various organisational targets, such as "Site," "Department," "Team," or "Company." When distributing a document to these group targets, the system ensures that newly added users who belong to those groups automatically receive the assigned documents. This mechanism promotes seamless integration and document accessibility for new employees. However, this automatic assignment does not apply when a document is assigned to individual employees.

Default Rules for New Employee Assignments

The platform’s automatic document distribution functions by default as follows:

Groups and Cohorts: New users added to a site, department, team, or other group distribution targets will automatically get the assigned documents.
Entire Company: When a document is assigned to "All employees in the company," this includes future employees as they join.

New employees' visibility of these documents depends on their inclusion in the assigned cohort.

Email Notifications vs. Dashboard Visibility

It is important to distinguish between notifications and document visibility:

Documents will appear in new employees' assigned document dashboard if they are correctly added to the group(s) or entity targeted by the document.
Email notifications, however, function separately. If documents appear on dashboards but an email isn’t sent, additional troubleshooting may be necessary.

Troubleshooting Email Notifications

If you encounter email notification issues, consider the following steps:

Verify Email Configuration:
- Ensure the user's email address is entered correctly.
- Confirm the sender's domain is whitelisted in the organisation's email system.
- Check for any email forwarding rules that might redirect emails incorrectly.
Examine Spam or Junk Folders:
- Notifications might be filtered as spam; check these folders and adjust spam filters if necessary.

Customising Document Assignments

Customisation options allow managers to tailor the distribution process for their organisational needs:

Group Configuration: Ensure that new employees are added to document distribution groups or cohorts to which a document was previously assigned. This step is critical if the distribution target is scoped to a subset of the organisation (e.g., a specific site or team).
Future Distribution Stop: You can prevent future auto-assignment by setting a distribution end date. Follow these steps: - Open the specific document. - Navigate to Actions → Distribution & History / Recall → Edit. - Use the "Distribute until" option to set a specific date. After this date, the document will no longer be assigned to new users.

Preventing Automatic Assignments for New Employees

If automatic assignment is not desirable, it can be halted using the method above. The “Distribute until” setting ensures that only employees who join before the specified date see the document, providing precise control over distribution practices.

How does document distribution work for new employee's?