Noticeboard & celebrations

A notice is a short piece of writing with a title, a category, an audience and, optionally, a picture, a date and an expiry. When it goes up, everyone in its audience who has a login gets one notification. That is the whole mechanism.

The board is not a substitute for a company document. There is no signature, no acknowledgement and no evidence trail here, deliberately. If people must be shown to have read something — a policy, an SOP, a change to terms — publish it in Company docs, where the acknowledgement is captured and kept, and then announce it here with the document linked. The board draws attention; the document holds the proof.

Write a notice opens one form. The title is what people see in their notifications, so it should say the thing rather than tease it. The body is plain text — line breaks are kept, and there is no formatting to fight with.

For a new starter there is a shortcut: Announce this joiner on the employee's page writes a Welcome draft with the name, role and start date filled in. It is a draft on purpose — the sentence about the person should be written by a person.

Everyone is the default and the common case. Otherwise you pick any mix of departments, work sites and designations, and the notice reaches anyone matching any one of them — it is a union, not a narrowing. Ticking Housekeeping and Site B reaches all of Housekeeping and everyone at Site B, not just the housekeepers there.

The audience is resolved live against the current roster — staff who are active or on leave. Someone who joins the department tomorrow sees the notice tomorrow; someone who leaves drops out of it. Nobody is ever notified twice about the same notice.

A notice is in one of four states, and all four are worked out from its dates rather than stored: Draft (no publish time — only managers can see it), Scheduled (a time in the future), Live, and Expired (past its come-down date).

A scheduled notice appears on the board by itself at its time — nothing has to run for that to be true. The notifications for it go out at the next morning's pass, which is the same nightly scan that sends expiry alerts. If you need people told at a precise moment, post it at that moment rather than scheduling it.

Pin holds a notice at the top. Nothing stops you pinning several, but the form will say so past three — a board where everything is pinned has nothing pinned. Take down returns a live notice to a draft; notifications already sent stay in people's bells, because they are a record of what was said, not a copy of the board.

A published notice shows reached (how many people were notified) and opened (how many of those notifications have been opened). Both come from the notification rows themselves; there is no separate read-receipt.

Treat "opened" as a floor, not a measurement. Somebody who walks past the board, reads it and gets on with their day is never counted. It is a rough sense of whether a notice landed — never evidence that anyone read anything. When you need that, the answer is a company document, every time.

Beside the board is the next seven days: birthdays, work anniversaries, new joiners, public holidays from the leave calendar, and any notice with an event date. None of it is entered anywhere — it is read from the staff records and the holiday calendar you already keep, so it is right the moment those are.

Anniversaries show the number of years of service, and one and every fifth year are marked as milestones so a manager has a few days' warning. Birthdays show no age and no year — see below. A birthday on 29 February is marked on the 28th in years that do not have one.

Not everyone wants their birthday announced, so every employee can turn it off for themselves from their profile in the staff portal. It removes them from the celebrations strip, the digest and the wall screen immediately, and nothing else about them changes.

Dates of birth are personal data and stay masked as they are everywhere else in HumanR — the board never prints an age or a year of birth, only the day. Work anniversaries are not opt-out: length of service is a company milestone rather than a personal one.

Wall screen opens a stripped-down full-page version for a monitor in a staff room or a corridor. It refreshes itself, so it can be left alone.

It shows all-staff notices only, on purpose: a screen in a corridor has no idea who is standing in front of it, so a notice aimed at one department never appears on it. It is still a signed-in page — leave it logged in on the machine that drives the screen; there is no public link to it, and there should not be one.

Staff with a portal login get the same notices in My portal ▸ Noticeboard and a short summary on their portal home, plus a notification when something goes up. They only ever see live notices their audience reaches — never a draft, never a scheduled one, and never the reach counts.

• Reading the board needs no permission. Every signed-in person sees it; the audience rules on each notice are the only scope there is.
• Noticeboard · Manage — write, schedule, pin, take down and delete notices, and see drafts and reach counts.
• The wall screen needs no permission either — only a login. It shows strictly less than the board does, and the button that opens it sits on the board for whoever sets the screen up.
• The whole module is behind the EnableNoticeboard setting. With it off, the pages are simply not there.

Worth remembering

• Notices are not acknowledged. If it has to be signed for, it belongs in Company docs with the notice pointing at it.
• Notifications for a scheduled notice go out at the next morning's pass, not at the scheduled minute.
• Announcement notifications are in-app only — they are never emailed. A company that emails every notice trains people to ignore notices.
• Taking a notice down does not un-send what was already said.
• The wall screen carries all-staff notices only, and is never anonymous.