For HR Teams
Setting Up Your Organization
The structural decisions administrators and HR teams should make before people are in the system — roles, calendar, data sync and language.
Most of HABICUB can be changed after launch. A handful of things are awkward to change once people are in the system and journeys are running. This guide covers those, in the order you should decide them.
1. One organization, or several?
An organization is the tenant boundary. Data does not cross it: users, programs, content and reporting all live inside one, and there is no cross-organization view.
Use one organization unless you have a hard reason not to — a legally separate entity, a works-council agreement that forbids shared reporting, or an acquisition that has not been integrated. Regions, business units and brands are better modelled as programs inside one organization, because that keeps a single view of adoption across the company.
Splitting later means re-importing people and losing their history. Merging later is worse.
2. The working calendar
Set the time zone and working days before anything else. The calendar decides which days an MDA can land on, so it shapes every journey compiled after it.
Two things to get right:
- Time zone. If your population spans several, pick the one most participants work in. Delivery timing matters more to the majority than to the exceptions.
- Holidays. Load your public holidays and company closure days. An action that lands on a day nobody is working is an action that gets missed, and a missed action is noise in your adoption data rather than signal.
Changing the calendar later affects future scheduling, not journeys already delivered.
3. Roles
HABICUB has five roles, and the distinction that matters most is between the two that hold a caseload.
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Organization settings, users, integrations, billing. |
| Program manager | Designs programs, builds Development Plans, activates them, owns reporting. |
| Mentor | Holds a caseload. Reviews what participants submit and replies to it. |
| Line manager | Holds the same caseload, read-only. Sees progress, never the mentor’s private notes and never feedback before it is released. |
| Leader (participant) | Their own journey, plan and today’s action. |
A leader can have both a mentor and a line manager at the same time — they are separate assignments, not two names for one relationship.
Assign roles to the narrowest scope that works. A program manager who only runs one program does not need organization-wide reporting, and the fastest way to lose a works-council conversation is to have granted more visibility than the program needs.
4. How people get in
Three routes, in increasing order of setup effort:
Individually. Fine for administrators, program managers and mentors — usually a handful of people.
CSV import. The normal route for participants. Download the template, fill it, upload it. The browser shows you a preview and the server decides what is valid — so if the preview is ambiguous, the import is unavailable rather than optimistically offered. Errors quote the spreadsheet row you are looking at, not a physical line number, which matters the moment any cell contains a line break.
HR system sync. Best for ongoing operation: joiners and leavers are handled for you and roles stay current. Worth setting up once the first program has proven itself, rather than before. See Integrating with Your Tools.
5. Single sign-on
HABICUB authenticates through your identity provider over OIDC. Turn it on before you invite participants — migrating an existing population from passwords to SSO is more disruptive than starting there.
Two things to agree with your IT team up front: which claim carries the organization, and what happens to a person’s access the day they leave. The second one is the question auditors ask.
6. Language
The interface language is set per organization. Content — the goals, tasks and MDAs people actually read — is separate and multilingual: each item exists per language, and delivery prefers the participant’s own language, falling back according to your policy when a translation is not published.
If you operate in more than one language, decide the fallback policy before launch. The usual answer is “fall back to the organization language rather than skip the action”, because a person receiving nothing is worse than a person receiving something in their second language.
7. What you can safely leave until later
Everything else. Branding, notification channels, report templates, integrations beyond the first one, additional programs — all of it is easier to decide once you have watched one cohort for a month.
Next
- Quick Start Guide — get the first program live.
- Creating and Managing Development Programs — the design decisions inside a program.