How to structure groups in Motimate?

Deciding upon, and setting up the optimal group structure for your organization is probably one of the most important steps when you configure your Motimate account❗️🧩

Group Structure in Motimate

When you create or import users into Motimate, your users must be placed in groups. The groups can be organized in a hierarchical structure. In many cases our customers will choose to implement a simple version of their org chart. Before you decide what structure you think will work best for your organization, there are a few things to think about, which we will cover in this article.

A few important things to understand about groups in Motimate:

General

• Users can be added to multiple groups, and each user will have a Group Role for each group they are in.
  
  
  Read more about Group Roles here.
  
  
• When you assign training, you will assign to groups. All users in the same group normally receive and have access to the same training material in Motimate, but you can also assign training only to users with specific Positions within a group if you want to be more granular (more on this further down in this article).
  
  
  Read more about Positions here.
  
  
• In a hierarchical group structure with several levels of parent groups and child groups, all users should always be members of all their parent groups.
  
  
• If these features are enabled, all users in the same group will be able to compare each other in the leaderboard, see each other's contact details, and communicate between each other on the same Pulse wall.

Reporting

• Reporting is based on groups, so groups are important to ensure you are able to aggregate reports on the levels you wish, as well as compare between groups as needed.
  
  
• A group can have one or several Group Admins in the group. A Group Admin will be able to retrieve reports on all users in their group, as well as all groups and users in child groups below them in the hierarchy. Typically department directors and team managers will be Group Admins in their groups.

Hierarchy

• Level 1 has only one group, which includes the whole organization. This level is locked and can't be changed.
  
  
• While Motimate can support a double digit number of group levels (ie. groups on level 2 will be child groups of the level 1 group, groups on level 3 will be child groups of their parent level 2 group etc), we highly encourage our customers to implement a simple group structure to ensure that it's easy and straightforward to navigate groups when assigning training.
  
  
• Level 0 groups, also called Custom Groups, are groups that can be used when there's a need for groups outside the typical group hierarchy. It could for instance be for cross-functional teams, project groups, external contractors, or maybe a group just for managers.
  
  

Group Structure Examples

While you are free to structure your account exactly how you want, the majority of our customers will implement a functional or location-based structure, simply also because that is how they are organized.

A functional group structure could look like this:

In this structure, if you assign training to the entire Organization, all users will receive it. However, if you assign it only to the HR Department, only users in the HR Department, the L&D Team and the Payroll Team will receive the training.

It is also possible for instance to assign a Moti only the HR Department and the Pricing Team for example.

The Head of Marketing can be made Group Admin of the Marketing Department group, and will then be able to retrieve completion reports on all users in the Marketing Department group, as well as all the users in child groups below it.

The two project teams shown in the custom Level 0 in our example are cross-functional teams that doesn't fit into the hierarchy, and therefore have been placed in custom Level 0 groups to make it possible to assign relevant training to all members of these projects specifically, without any other groups in the general hierarchy also getting access to it.

A location-based group structure could look like this:

Restaurant chains are one example of organizations who prefer a location-based group structure. In the structure above you can assign training only to employees in selected restaurants, an entire region, or even the entire company. They've also set up groups for their Headquarter in order to create and assign training which is relevant for employees in the HQ.

In this example, the organization has chosen to use Custom Groups in order to group all Regional Managers and all Restaurants Managers. This could be done in order to ensure all such managers have a shared Pulse wall, but also in order to assign training only to such managers.

Assignment based on Positions and Groups

In addition to assigning Motis based on groups, you can also assign it based on users' Positions. A user can be registered with one or more Positions.

If you assign training based on both Groups and Positions, the training will only be assigned to users who match both criteria, and not to users who only match one of the criteria. A user must be in at least one of the assigned groups AND hold at least one of the assigned Positions.

In the example above, if the Digital Marketing team has users with Positions such as Ad Specialist and Creative Specialist, you can assign training only to Ad Specialists in the Digital Marketing Team.

Similarly in the Restaurant example, if some users are registered with for example with the Position Sous-chef, you can assign training to all Sous-chefs in the entire organization, or for instance to all Sous-chef in California.