For HR & people ops
You signed up — or were invited — to handle the people side. Welcome. This page is the practical map of what thola does for HR, what it doesn't, and what to set up in your first week.
The honest premise
Most HR pain in a small-to-mid business is not "people don't like working here." It's operational — attendance is gameable, leave balances are wrong, payroll runs miss things, onboarding is a long email thread. thola fixes the operational layer so the actual HR work (1:1s, performance, culture) gets your attention.
We do not replace a culture or a performance review process. We give you a clean substrate to run those on.
The first week
Day 1 — Set up the basics (2 hours)
Under Settings → HR:
- Employee list — upload your current employees as a CSV (name, role, department, start date, manager, salary structure). Preview, confirm.
- Working week — set working days, hours, official start/end. Default is Mon–Sat 9–6 in IST.
- Leave policy — annual quota per leave type (casual, sick, earned), carry-over rules, encashment rules.
- Attendance mode — self-marked / geo-tagged / required-radius. Set per role (e.g. office staff = self-marked, field sales = geo-tagged).
- Approval chains — who approves leave for whom. Defaults to direct manager.
→ See: HRM setup checklist
Day 2 — Pilot with one team (1 hour)
Pick one team — usually the most receptive — and have them check in via thola mobile starting tomorrow. Use the morning to walk them through:
- Install thola mobile (Play Store / App Store)
- Log in with their company email
- Grant location permission (if geo-tagged)
- Show the Check In / Check Out button
Day 2 is where you discover the actual fricitons — phones too old to install the app, supervisors who don't speak English well, employees worried about location tracking. We've written about all three:
→ Mobile rollout pitfalls, Language settings
Day 3 — Roll out wider (1 hour, mostly waiting)
Add the rest of your teams. Walk through the same flow per team. Most teams pick it up in a single morning.
Day 4–5 — Watch attendance flow in (passive)
You don't have to do anything. Attendance is being captured. The Team dashboard starts populating.
By end of week 1, you'll have:
- A clean employee list
- A working leave policy
- Real attendance data
- The first weekly Team score on Home
What you'll do daily / weekly / monthly
Daily (5 minutes)
- Approve any leave requests waiting (one tap each, optional comment)
- Glance at the burnout signal — anyone above 70?
- Triage any regularisation requests (employee forgot to check in, asks for a manual fix)
Weekly (~30 minutes)
- Review the Team dashboard: attrition trend, hiring velocity, burnout signals
- Have one-on-ones with anyone with a sustained burnout signal
- Review the previous week's attendance anomalies
Monthly (~3 hours)
- Run payroll (Prepare → Preview → Pay)
- Send out payslips
- Update salary structures (raises, role changes, promotions)
- Close the month for HR
→ See: Run payroll
The four flows you'll use most
1. Onboarding (per new hire)
The Onboarding Playbook is a 14-day multi-step flow. When you mark a new employee as "starting Monday," thola:
- Creates their account
- Sends a welcome message in their language
- Provisions HRM access
- Schedules a 1:1 with their manager on day 1, day 7, day 30
- Adds them to payroll
- Walks them through Quickstart
You confirm each step. Most of it just runs.
2. Leave management (continuous)
Employees apply for leave in chat ("apply 2 days casual for Friday and next Monday") or via the Leave screen. The HR agent enforces the policy, routes to manager, notifies on approval/rejection.
You see all pending under HR → Leave → Pending.
3. Payroll run (monthly)
Three steps:
- Prepare — thola calculates based on salary structures + attendance + adjustments
- Preview — see every payslip side-by-side; adjust if needed
- Pay — mark as paid (if you pay externally) or initiate via integrated payouts
Every payslip is stored. Employees can self-serve from their Profile → Payslips.
4. Burnout intervention (when triggered)
When any employee's burnout signal crosses 70, the HR agent surfaces it as a Medium Red Flag with a soft recommendation:
"Karthik's burnout signal hit 73 this week — sustained overtime, no leave taken in 90 days. Suggest a 1:1 + workload review."
You decide what to do. The 1:1 is in your court. thola can draft the message inviting the 1:1, or draft a workload-redistribution proposal for the team lead.
What HR people ask us about most
"Can I see exactly when someone clocked in?" Yes. Attendance log → click any employee, see every check-in/out with timestamp, location, and the device used. Buddy punching is structurally hard — first check-in wins, immutable.
"Can employees see their own burnout score?" No. We deliberately don't show it to them. Showing it changes the data — people game it. Managers see it as a tool for action.
"Can I run separate payroll for contractors and full-timers?" Yes. Set the employee type per record; payroll runs separately by type. Statutory deductions only apply to employees.
"Can I customise the leave policy per location / per role?" Yes — under Settings → HR → Leave policy → Add policy. Apply to specific roles or branches.
"What about statutory compliance (PF, ESI, TDS)?" PF and ESI deductions are built in. TDS slabs are auto-applied. We export the data your filing portal expects. We do not file on your behalf.
What we don't do (yet)
- Performance review cycles — we ship a Review Cycle template, but the form is basic. Many customers run reviews on a separate tool and just record outcomes in thola.
- OKRs at team level — we track founder goals well; team OKRs are planned.
- Compensation benchmarking — public benchmarks are not integrated. You set salary; we don't compare to peer roles.
- Recruitment funnel / ATS — we have requisition + offer; we don't track an external applicant pipeline. Pair with a real ATS.
A note on privacy
HR data is, in our view, the most sensitive data in the workspace. We treat it accordingly:
- Burnout signals are visible only to HR role and the employee's direct manager. Not workspace-wide.
- Salary structures are visible only to roles with
hr:salary:readpermission. - Attendance data is visible to the employee themselves, their manager, and HR.
- The free-text answers in the weekly founder check-in are never part of HR data — they live in the Founder dashboard and never travel.
Audit log is on by default. Any role change, salary edit, or leave approval is timestamped and signed.
Where to go next
- People recipes — every HR flow in detail
- HRM mobile guide — what employees see on the phone
- Reference → Team scoring — how the Team score is calculated
If you've run HR somewhere else, you'll find thola a bit opinionated. We did this deliberately — most "flexible" HR tools end up as configuration mazes nobody understands. thola is more opinionated and less customisable, and most HR leads we work with prefer it that way after a week.