How to add people and set roles

Settings › Members holds the roster and the pending invites. This is where people arrive, where they get their departments, and where their access ends.

Before you start

The whole Settings area is admin-only, and inviting, changing roles and assigning departments each have their own permission that starts at admin.

How do you invite somebody?

Invite member, then type their email. Choose whether they arrive as a Member or an Admin, tick which departments they join, and flip the Lead switch for any department they should lead.

Do the departments now rather than later. A person invited into the right teams can work the moment they sign in, and a person invited with none has to come back and ask.

Then send them the link yourself. Tideswell reserves the seat rather than emailing them, and the confirmation tells you to have them sign in at your workspace's address with the invited email. That step is easy to forget and is the usual reason a new starter is sitting waiting.

They have to sign in with exactly that email address. Signing in with a personal address instead does not pick up the invite, which is the second most common new-starter problem.

An invite lasts 14 days, and there can be one pending invite per email at a time.

What are the three ranks?

Member, lead and admin.

Member and Admin are what you pick from the dropdown. Admin unlocks the whole Settings area.

Lead is not in that dropdown. Somebody becomes a lead by having the Lead switch turned on for a department, and lead sits between member and admin for permissions.

The owner is whoever created the workspace. They always count as an admin and can never be deactivated.

How do you change somebody's role or departments?

Pick a role from their dropdown and press Apply. For departments, open their Departments dropdown, tick the ones they belong to, set the Lead switch per department, and press Apply for each.

One behaviour to watch: the department tick and the Lead switch always travel together. Submitting a department row with Lead switched off demotes an existing lead of that department. Check the switch before you press Apply on somebody who already leads a team.

How do you remove somebody's access?

Deactivate them. The confirmation warns that they lose access immediately, including live chat connections.

Read that confirmation properly. There is no reactivate button on this screen: a deactivated person shows greyed out with a status badge, and restoring them is not something the roster does.

Deactivating keeps their account and their history. It removes their access to this workspace.

Before you deactivate somebody, check two things. Whether they own any workflows, since every action a workflow takes uses its owner's access, per What are workflows?. And whether any wholesale accounts list them as rep, since those quietly belong to nobody afterwards.

The workspace owner cannot be deactivated, and the button is not shown for them.

What should most people be?

Members, in the departments they work in, with a lead per team.

Admin should be a small number of people, because admin is what opens Settings. Most of the things people ask to be made admin for are actually permission rows that can be set to lead instead. See How to set who can do what.

How do you read the roster?

Everyone with their photo, name, handle and email, sortable by name, email or role, fifty at a time.

Somebody with no name set shows their handle or email rather than a blank, so a row is never anonymous.