Team Directory

At some point, every growing business hits the same wall.

Not a big dramatic moment. Just a Tuesday afternoon when someone asks you a perfectly reasonable question — "Who's covering client support while Ana is away?" — and you realise you don't know. Not because you're disorganised. Because you're running a company, and companies are made of people, and people are complicated.

The team directory in most businesses isn't software. It's a combination of three spreadsheets, someone's inbox, a Notion page that was last updated in March, and the memory of whoever has been around the longest. It works until it doesn't.

It's more than a contact list

Knowing who works at your company is the easy part. The harder part is everything that surrounds each person.

Who has the MacBook? Not "who does IT think has it" — who signed for it, and is responsible for returning it when they leave? When does the warranty run out on the monitor at their desk? Did the new hire's onboarding checklist get completed, or did it stop at step four because someone got pulled into something else? What did you agree with that contractor about renewal terms — was it six months or twelve? What sensitive documents are attached to this person's record, and who is permitted to see them?

These aren't edge cases. They're the background noise of running a team, and right now most of it lives in email threads, verbal agreements and the heads of people who might one day leave.

The gap between knowing and proving

There's a specific kind of stress that comes from not being able to answer a simple question directly. An auditor asks when a piece of equipment was transferred. A client asks who was responsible for a deliverable. A new manager asks what was agreed with a team member before they joined. The answer exists somewhere. Finding it takes time you don't have.

Workplace gives every person on your team a record that grows with them. Not a form to fill in and forget — a profile that connects to the rest of the business. Their equipment, their time off, their contracts, their role, the things only certain people should see and the things everyone should know. When something changes, the record changes.

When people leave and when people join

Onboarding is a checklist that never quite gets finished. Offboarding is a checklist nobody wrote in the first place.

Both matter more than most companies treat them. A good onboarding gets someone productive faster and makes them feel like they joined a real organisation, not a pile of disconnected tools. A good offboarding makes sure equipment comes back, access gets revoked, and nothing gets left in an ambiguous state between "last day" and "we should really sort that out."

Workplace manages both ends of the employment lifecycle — not with rigid process, but with a structure that runs in the background and flags when something needs attention.

Capacity is a planning problem

Knowing who is available and when is the difference between promising something you can deliver and promising something you can't. Holidays overlap. External team members have their own schedules. Someone is part-time, or on reduced hours, or coming back from leave next Wednesday.

When you're planning work, you need to plan against what's true, not what you assume. Workplace pulls that picture together — your own team, external collaborators, national holidays that apply to different people in different countries — so that gaps in coverage show up before they become problems.