Workflow Automation | Administrator Guide | Zoho People 5.0 help

Workflow Automation - Zoho People

What is a Workflow in Zoho People?

Automate your HR process and operation through Zoho People Workflow. Creating workflows for a services helps you to eliminate most of the manual HR tasks, boost efficiency, and save your time.

Benefits of Workflow Automation

  1. Enhance efficiency across your organization.
  2. Reduce errors and avoid delays in critical tasks.
  3. Free up your team to focus on strategic and creative initiatives.
  4. Simplify tasks, making them faster, easier, and more consistent.
  5. Minimize the manual effort by automating repetitive processes.
Watch our video on workflow actions:



Zoho People Workflow Set Up

Workflows in Zoho People  are initiated by triggers events and executes the actions such as Email Alerts, Form Field Updates, Checklists, Webhooks, Custom Functions and E-Sign flow if the condition defined in the criteria are satisfied.

Trigger Events

The trigger events can be any of the following
  1. Action based events
    Workflows executed when actions are performed on form record such as create, edit, delete, update, approve, reject etc.
  2. Date based events
    Workflow executed based on the specific date in the form such as Date of Relieving, Date of Birth, Date of Confirmation, Date of Joining etc.

Criteria

Additionally, criteria are used to control the workflow process. You can define one or more conditions that must be met during workflow trigger events to activate the corresponding workflow actions. 

Actions

Actions are the process that are automatically triggered when a Trigger Event occurs and the criteria is met. You can automate the following actions in Zoho People.
  1. Email Alerts
  2. Field Updates
  3. Checklists
  4. Webhooks
  5. Custom Functions
  6. E-Sign Flow

Create a Workflow for a form in a Service

To create a Workflow for a form:
  1. From your home page, navigate to Settings > Select a Service > Automation > Workflows.


  2. Click Add Workflow.
  3. In the basic details section:
    1. Select the form for which you would like to automate workflow.
    2. Enter the workflow name and description.

    3. The workflow status is set to Enabled by default, indicating that the workflow is active upon creation.

  4. In the Trigger events section, select Action based events or Date based event that will trigger the workflow actions.
    The trigger events here represent the actions performed on the above selected form records. For date-based events, they represent the date fields in the form.



    IdeaDid you know? You can configure recurring date-based events to automatically skip, reschedule, or shift execution when they fall on weekends, or other selected non-working days.

    When using the “Date-based events” trigger type, setting the execution occurrence to “Occurring every year” reveals additional options that let you skip event execution on selected days, or automatically move the execution to the previous day, next day, or skip it altogether. This is useful for scenarios such as avoiding executions on non-working days or weekends when employee or administrative availability may be limited.



    To read about a a real-time use case of this feature, click here. 
     

  5. In the Criteria section, define the criteria to control the workflow process. You can set one or more criteria to meet the required conditions for triggering a workflow. You can leave the criteria blank to exclude criteria from the workflow.



  6. In the Actions section, create or select one or more actions to be automatically triggered when the actions specified in the trigger event are performed. For more information on creating workflow actions for a form, refer to the following:
    1. Email Alerts
    2. Field Updates
    3. Checklists
    4. Webhooks
    5. Custom Functions


    6. To schedule the workflow trigger for a specific time, click Add Time-Based Action and define the execution time and workflow actions.
  7. Click Add.
    The workflow actions will be automatically triggered when the trigger event occurs.
InfoTo view the success and failure status of the automated workflow actions, refer to the Workflow Logs.
Learn more:
Automation - Overview & Use Cases
Templates