When your business is scaling new heights, your employees are increasing at an equal pace. You may be opening offices at different locations in your country or having offices all over the globe. With more offices, complexities increase too. You have dedicated HR partners for different regions, you need to keep tabs on the open roles in each location, ensure that the time-off policies are correctly assigned to all the employees, and so on. How do you manage all of these tasks effectively? Enter Location Hierarchy by Freshteam.



What is Location Hierarchy?


As the name suggests, Location Hierarchy lets you organize your locations hierarchically. 


They consist of Smart levels. These are hierarchical levels for grouping your locations. Currently, Freshteam lets you add your locations in 3 hierarchical groups. These can be the Smart levels in Freshteam, such as Country, State/Province, and City. Else, you can create custom levels that work in your company. 


Using the smart levels, we’ll automatically map the locations based on the Country, State, or City details mentioned while adding the location. 


If you are using the custom levels, you can associate each location to the levels that you add.



If you need to reorganize the values among different levels, please get in touch with [email protected]


How to enable Location Hierarchy?

  • Move to Settings > General > Locations. 
  • On the top right, click Setup Location Hierarchy.
  • Select the smart levels in which you want to organize your locations or create custom levels.
  • Confirm the selection and Save your choices.


Below GIF demonstrates the above steps


Once you enable Location Hierarchy, the location filter in all search results will be hierarchical and will look like as shown in the GIF below:



How to create a new branch location:

  • Click + Add location on the top right. 
  • Enter the Branch name and the Smart level details (Country and State). Freshteam works with Google Maps API and maps the locations automatically.


  • If the country or the State is new and does not exist in Freshteam already, you can include them here. 
  • Enter the time zone and the Date format. 
  • Hit Save.


Use Cases 1: Using Location hierarchy for setting employee time off policy


While mapping employees to a time-off policy
Instead of individually adding the location groups to a time-off policy, you can now add them collectively. For example, if you have 7 different office locations in the US, you no longer need to assign each location group individually. Add the entire US country/region, and all the employees from the US offices will be automatically mapped to the said time off policy.


Below steps demonstrate the use of location hierarchy for setting up employee time-off policy:

  • Go to Settings--> Time off setup--> Policy
  • Go to New policy and select from default range of policies or select "Create custom policy" 
  • Configure the policy holidays as per requirement, set holiday calendar & workweek for the same
  • Click on save & map employees to map the set of employees for the policy 
  • Now select the conditions for which this policy will be based, policy employee mapping can be done basis Location, Business Unit, Sub-function & Team 
  • Select and click on employees to map for the specific location and press save 
  • your new policy will be mapped for the corresponding set of employees selected 


Below GIF demonstrates the above steps: 


Use Cases 2: Using Location hierarchy to assign your HR business partner 


You are the HR partner for all the offices in Europe. Instead of assigning individual locations under your name, one can assign the entire Europe region to you. As a result, the next time a new office opens up in Europe or an employee gets added in Europe or a country in Europe, employee is automatically assigned to you.


  • Go to Settings--> HR Workflows --> Auto assign HR Partner
  • Under HR partner section click on Create rules & a  tab will slide out
  • Select the condition how your organization assigns HR partner: For this use case we have used Location hierarchy & set office location as the criteria for assigning HR partner
  • Once the criteria is selected, click on Save 
  • Click on the enable toggle on the top right, to enable the rule, new added employees and old employees will go through the change created with the rule  

Below GIF demonstrates the same


Other Use cases:


1. While searching for an employee. 
For example; You are looking for the number of contract employees working from 10 different locations in India. Instead of entering those individual locations, you can now directly look for India as a country. This will list out the contract employees belonging to all the 10 locations. 


2. While checking active roles and requisitions
You want to look for the number of open roles in a particular region or the number of active job requisitions in a specific city. 


3. While adding Employee ID sequence
Each region might have an employee ID sequence of its own. With Location hierarchy, you can add ID sequences unique to that region.



Things to keep in mind:
1. Once you have enabled location hierarchy, you will not be able to make changes to the smart levels. You will only be able to add new branch locations but cannot rearrange the values. If is it necessary to do so, contact Freshteam support.
2. Once disabled, all the original setup will be lost. On doing so, if you have made changes to employee ID sequence, or the time-off policy based on location hierarchy, it will be reverted to the default values.