Flex Approvals - What You Should Know About Flex Approvals

Introduction

This articles gives a quick overview of what Flex Approvals are, their benefits, approval levels, and known limitations. It's useful information for clients in global business units, interested in Flex Approvals.

Background

The goal of Flex Approvals is to make the process of setting up the nominations approval easier and less time-consuming. It also helps reduce the number of nominations that spend a lot of time in pending approval status. There are three new Flex models that can be set in Reward Manager, and they are:

• Line Manager Levels
• Segments
• Custom Fields

The Comparative Benefits of Flex Approvals

Compared to the Open, Open Nominee, and Closed Nomination methods, here are some of the main benefits of Flex Approvals:

• For clients struggling with complex approval structures - Flex makes setup easier, allowing them to streamline and save time.
• Too many columns in eligibility files? Flex can use and reuse existing member data, cutting down on data prep and processing time for eligibility files.
• Approvers always changing? Flex automatically updates nominations when approver data changes, keeping things up-to-date effortlessly. No more nominations lost to the ether.
• Problems when a user isn’t linked to an approver? Flex allows nominations even for unlinked users by routing to a super approver.
• Wish approvals could be client-managed? Flex empowers clients with self-serve tools for a more flexible, hands-on approach.
• Technical headaches slowing things down? Flex optimizes scalability and resilience, ensuring smoother, faster processing.

How You Can Start Using Flex Approvals

If you would like to use the Flex approvals for your Nomination program, please reach out to your implementation specialist (for new clients) or to our client support team.

Please review the information below so you can provide it to the specialist, who will set this up for you.

Make sure you know how many levels of approval you would like your program to have. After that, you can choose the type of approval levels. Further in this article, you can see an overview of each approval level type.

Different Types of Approval Levels

Line Manager Levels

Based on the provided Membership upload data for each member, the system calculates the following:

• Their Line Manager (Level 1)
• The manager of their direct manager (Level 2)
• The manager of the manager of the direct manager (Level 3). 

When selecting an approver type Line Manager levels, the user selects the manager level who would need to approve the nomination and the nomination side - Nominator or Nominee.

Example: If Level 2 is selected on the Nominator's side, then the nomination will go for approval to the Manager of the Nominator's Line Manager.

Additional Details:

• If the corresponding Line manager per nomination cannot be identified based on the Membership upload file data, then the nomination will go for approval to the user with the role of Super Approver
• The users can select up to 3 Line manager approver levels
• Users cannot self-approve nominations. If a user was nominated and at the same time is the approver for a nomination based on the company hierarchy, then the nomination will go to the Super Approver. 
• For Line Manager Nominator side nominations, where the Approver is also a Nominee - the clients have the option to configure the approvals to go to the approver’s line manager instead - however, this configuration is switched off by default

Example: if John nominates his manager Alex and the selected nomination method is Line manager levels, level 1 on the Nominator side → the nomination will go for approval not to Alex, but to the direct manager of Alex.

If the Nominator is also the Approver, they will still have to approve the Nomination. 

Segment

This approver type allows the user to assign a Segment to be the approver(s) for an approval level. 

Note: this could be a segment of just one person. 

A shortcut for creating a new segment is provided, and an option for the user to refresh the segments in case that there was a last-minute change. Once a segment is selected, any of the members in this segment will be able to approve the nominations.

Custom Field

Approver type Custom Field gives users the flexibility to choose as approvers users which are filled as custom profile fields/registration questions to the Membership file upload. Unlike the old nomination modes, the column in the membership eligibility file can be reused across multiple nomination programmes.

The user is able to choose between Nominator and Nominee side, so that the nomination will be sent for approval to the corresponding member.

Example: If John nominates Alex and the selected nomination method is Custom Field, Custom field Team lead on the Nominator side → the nomination will go for approval to the member whose Payroll ID is mentioned in the Team lead column in the Membership file upload for John → this will be John’s Team lead.

In the Custom field dropdown, you can select custom fields/registration questions, configured in the General settings for the client scheme - only fields which are of type Text, Number, or List and are marked as Required and collected at Upload.

Note: All custom profile fields/registration questions can be found in;

RM → Clients & Programmes → Browse programmes → Select scheme → Scheme admin page → General settings → Registration questions

If a new custom field is added, it currently takes up to 1 hour to appear in the dropdown.

Additional Details:

If the approver per nomination cannot be identified from the selected custom field in the Membership file upload, then the nomination will go for approval to the user with the role of Super Approver.

Known Issues and Limitations

• The maximum number of approval levels a scheme can have is 5
• Auto-approval for Nominations cannot be set on a scheme with Flex - he Open mode should be used
• Alternate Approvers cannot be set on Flex Approvals. We will look to add this functionality in the future.
• Most, but, not all use cases can be covered by Line Manager Levels, Segment, and Custom Field modes. Following the migration of clients, we will look to build the Rules option, which will provide even more flexibility and cover the current Open Selectable use cases.

Support Information

For additional information or questions regarding Flex Approvals, please reach out to your Client Success Manager or Client Support team.