Group Admin Guide

The ultimate guide to setting up and managing your Workplace groups.

If you've ever created a group in Workplace you're officially a group admin. As a group admin, you can control that group's settings, including posting permissions, privacy, how members are added and more. You also have some new responsibilities when it comes to managing communications in your group and monitoring its metrics.
This guide will walk you through how to set your group up for success early on, and how to manage it effectively for all group members.
Setting up your group
1. Setting up your group
When creating your Workplace group, you have a few important things to consider:
  • Group purpose: what will you be using the group for?
  • Privacy settings: who should be able to see the group and its posts?
  • Posting permissions: who should be able to post in the group?
Group purpose:
Groups are typically created for:
  • Company, regional and office-specific announcements
  • Common and repetitive workflows, such as:
    • HR Q&A group or IT Helpdesk group: To help people find answers to their questions.
    • Facilities group: To quickly and efficiently report equipment and facilities issues.
    • Shift cover group: To allow frontline employees to request coverage or pick up available shifts. Learn more about Shift Cover in the Help Center.
  • Social communication, to help you connect with your coworkers over shared interests and experiences
  • Department, team and project collaboration
  • Departmental announcements like new launches, marketing campaigns, sales wins, etc.
  • One-on-one communication between a manager and a direct report
Privacy settings:
There are 3 different privacy settings for Workplace groups:
  • Open: Anyone can find the group using search and see posts. Content from open groups can appear on anyone's News Feed.
  • Closed: Anyone can find the group through Workplace search, see its description and request to join. Only members can see posts.
  • Secret: You have to be invited to join a secret group. Only members of the group can find the group through search and see posts.
Note: System administrators will be able to see all Workplace groups, including secret groups.
This table can give you an idea of what privacy settings work best for each group type:
Table with groups listed by purpose, privacy setting and examples of group names
Posting permissions:
Depending on what your group will be used for, you may want to restrict who can post in the group, or require admin approval of all posts. Company announcement groups, for example, are typically managed by internal comms teams. To reduce noise and ensure only the most important messages are posted, group admins can limit posting to admins only. You can choose from the following permission settings for your group:
  • Anyone: Everyone sees the post composer box and their post automatically goes into the group
  • Admins only: Only admins can post to the group. Others won't see the composer box
  • Posting approval: Everyone sees the composer box and can submit posts however they will only be visible in the group if approved by an Admin/Moderator
Learn how to modify posting permissions in your group in the Workplace Help Center.
Other important steps to setting up your group:
With the most important considerations out of the way, you can now ensure that group purpose and guidelines are clearly communicated to members and anyone else in the organization who has access.
  1. Give your group an intuitive name that clearly explains what it will be used for. An effective name will make your group easier to find through search. Examples include: “Marketing Team”, “Company Announcements”, “Help Center Feedback”, “Website Redesign Project”, “IT Q&A”.
  2. Add a description that provides group members with a clear understanding of what the group should be used for and who should be a member.
  3. Add a cover photo. Cover photos can set the tone for the group. Adding a photo of staff is great for team, announcement, and social groups. See this guide for cover photo image dimensions.
2. Managing membership
2. Managing membership
Adding group members:
There are a few ways group admins can add members to their groups:
  1. Individual invite: Invite colleagues one by one. This option is best for small team groups,
  2. Automatic group membership: This allows you to invite members to your group based on profile criteria. We’ll get into automatic group membership in more detail below.
If you happen to also be a system administrator, you can control group membership from the Admin Panel in two ways:
  1. Default group: Admins can make a group a default group so that everyone in your organization is automatically added. This setting works best for groups that are relevant to everyone, such as company-wide announcements. Learn how to make a group a default group in the Help Center.
  2. People Sets: System admins can create People Sets to organize members of the organization based on critreia like location, department, division and more. Anyone who meets the criteria set will be added to that People Set automatically. System admins can then assign People Sets to groups to automate group membership based on profile critria. Learn how to create a People Set in the Help Center.
Automatic group membership:
Want to share this video in a Workplace post? You can download it here.
Managing a large group can be time consuming, especially if it requires you to add members one-by-one as they join your organization, change roles or move to a new location.To make managing members easier, you can use automatic group membership.
Auto group membership allows group admins to set rules to automatically add relevant people to their group based on profile information like location, department, role and more. Once rules are created and applied, auto group membership works in two ways:
  1. Anyone who matches the criteria defined will be added to the group
  2. Group members whose profile information changes and no longer matches the criteria set by group membership rules will be automatically removed from the group. Note that people will be notified when they’re removed from a group.
We know that there are always exceptions to every rule. To allow you to add group members who don’t match the profile criteria you defined in your auto membership rules, you can manually add people one by one.
For step-by-step instructions on how to set automatic membership rules for your group, visit the Help Center.

Automatic group membership needs to be enabled for your Workplace by a system admin. Before enabling automatic group membership, system admins should make sure profile fields are filled out for Workplace community members. Automatic group membership relies on profile information (profile fields) like location, department, division and more. Learn more about profile fields in the System Admin Guide. To find out how to enable automatic group membership in your Workplace, visit the Workplace Help Center.

Membership requests:
Open groups will be automatically set so anyone in your organization can join without needing to request access. You can change those settings to restrict membership approval to group members only or to group admins and moderators only.
Closed and secret groups will be automatically set so all members can approve or invite new users. You can adjust those settings so only admins and moderators can approve new people.
Membership preapprovals:
Save time by automatically approving member requests by people from your other groups. For example, if you're the admin of a project group, pre-approve the team group so all members can easily join.
Member request notification:
If your group is closed or secret, you'll receive a notification when someone requests to join it. Use these notifications to approve member requests.
You can turn off notifications for member requests but we don't recommend this. Turning off these notifications means you might miss member requests, and people will have to wait longer to join the group. If you do turn off these notifications, you'll still be able to handle requests from your group's Admin Options.
Adding group admins:
We recommend having at least two admins per group. For larger groups, like company announcements, you may want to have even more admins to help manage communications, requests and more. To make someone a group admin:
  1. From the group, click Members below the group's name. You may need to click More first.
  2. Click ... next to the coworker you'd like to make an admin.
  3. Click Invite to be admin and confirm your selection.
3. Managing content
3. Managing content
Reported content:
As a group admin, it's your responsibility to manage member-reported content. When members report posts and comments, they'll appear in the Member-Reported Content section of your Admin Options. You can keep or delete posts and comments, as well as mute, remove or block the member who made them.
Setting post order:
You can select how posts are ordered in your group feed so that the most important content is easy to find. To do this, go to Settings in your Admin Options and scroll down to Default Post Order. You have two options to choose from:
  1. New Activity: This will show posts with recent comments first in your group feed.
  2. Recent Posts: This will ensure that the newest posts are always at the top of the group feed.
Post approval:
If you set your group's posting permissions to require admin approval, you will receive a notification every time a member of the group tries to share a post. You can then go to Pending Posts in your Admin Options to review and approve or decline that post.
Learning guides
Every group has a Learning tab, where you can create guides to organize essential training and educational content that's shared in your group. You can even add quizzes to your learning guides and track guide completion.
This tab starts out invisible to everyone who isn't a group admin, but as soon as a group admin starts adding content to it, it appears for everyone.
See how learning guides work in this self-paced course on the Work Academy.
4. Setting up integrations
4. Setting up integrations
As a group admin, you also have the ability to add integrations for your group members to use. File sharing integrations are great for any group, but they're especially important for your team, project, and cross-functional feedback groups. File sharing integrations make it easy to showcase what you're working on, and they're great for gathering feedback from others. Group members will only be able to view content they've been given access to.
Media integrations are great for discussion groups. They allow people to easily share interesting news and engage with one another. Try creating an open "Industry News" group and encourage people to share articles there to keep each other up to date.
5. Monitoring engagement
5. Monitoring engagement
Group Insights offer three interactive dashboards you can use to monitor engagement. Each report is also downloadable so you can take a deeper look into how members are using the group.
Your group insights allow you to track:
  • Growth Details: Membership growth and group membership requests.
  • Engagement Details: Posts, comments and reactions in a given period of time and see the most popular days and times that members engage. Also review the group's top posts.
  • Member Details: See your top contributors.
  • Learning: Track guide and learning post completion.
Use this data to easily identify and connect with top contributors or schedule important executive posts for peak days and times. Since reporting is available for up to 60 days, you'll be able to track the impact of your actions and find out what works.
6. Archiving group
6. Archiving groups
It's important to archive your group when it is no longer relevant or no longer being used. This ensures search isn't cluttered and employees can easily find the active groups they're looking for. All content on the group page will still be accessible to group members after the group has been archived.
To archive a group:
  1. Go to the group you want to archive and click on the ... below the cover photo, then click Admin Options.
  2. Scroll down to Archive Group, and click Archive next to it.
  3. Click Confirm.
Other helpful resources
Other helpful resources