Give global teams the right access
Multi-entity organizations have long faced a binary choice: over-provision HR access or centralize every request. Workable's new scoped roles end that tradeoff.
When your company operates across multiple legal entities, brands, or countries, HR responsibilities rarely sit with one central team. The HR manager in Athens handles Greek employees. The people ops lead in Boston handles the US entity. The UK payroll manager needs access to bank details and pay rates for the team in the London office. Until now, giving them admin access in Workable meant giving them access to everything: every employee, every document, every HR setting, across the whole account.
That left growing organizations with an uncomfortable choice. Either over-provision access and accept the privacy and compliance risk, or bottleneck all HR administration through a small central team. Neither approach is ideal. Over-provisioning means people see salary data, documents, and personal details they have no business seeing. Centralizing control means slower processes and an HR team drowning in requests that local teams could handle themselves.
Good news: We’ve come up with a solution!
What’s changing
You can now assign HRIS roles with a defined scope. When you invite a new account member, or edit an existing one, you choose their role and set exactly where it applies:
- Scope a person’s role by entity/location/site, and/or department.
- Assign specific HR access within that scope, giving full admin rights or delegated access limited to the right employee population.
- Control their level of access: Employees, documents, workflows, and HR settings outside the scope don’t appear for that chosen user.
For example, an HR admin scoped to your US entity manages US employees and the HR settings that relate to them. Nothing more.
How it works
Scoped roles build on the segmentation already in your Workable account. There are no complex permission sets to design or maintain. You set the scope in seconds, right where you manage account members.
Say you run three legal entities across three different countries. You give each local HR lead an HR Admin role scoped to their own entity. Each one can now run onboarding, manage employee profiles, handle documents, and adjust relevant settings for their own population, while your central team keeps the account-wide view. Employee data stays separated between entities, which matters when different countries bring different privacy and compliance requirements.
Why it matters
Access control isn’t just an IT or compliance checkbox. It’s how you delegate with confidence. When access matches responsibility, local HR teams move faster, HR stops being a bottleneck, and sensitive employee data is only visible to the people who actually need it. For organizations with country-specific regulations or strict data separation policies, this can prove to be a crucial component to their IT, admin, and compliance makeup.
Get started
Available to our Premier and Enterprise plans. To set up entity or department-scoped roles, head to your account members settings, or read the step-by-step guide in our help center.
