Overview
The Neighborhood feature allows you to designate sections of your office, or office floors, to specific teams or groups, based on capacity. This feature allows you to seat teams or cohorts together while being mindful of the available space per team. Neighborhoods are location-specific, and groups of employees must be assigned at the location level. Neighborhoods are shown on the map by using color-coded overlays, making it easy to visualize the divisions of your space.
How Neighborhoods work
Neighborhoods are added to your floor map by including the neighborhood name in the proper column of the Desks CSV upload, corresponding to the desk number.
You can also manually create neighborhoods via the Neighborhoods page.
Once you've created your neighborhoods, you can assign employees to specific neighborhoods.
When employees sign in, they will receive a desk assignment in the neighborhood that an admin has assigned them to.
If the employee chooses to change their desk assignment, they will only be able to choose a desk in the neighborhood to which they're assigned or a neighborhood that is open for any employee to reserve.
✨Tip: Make sure there are enough desks in each neighborhood for the number of employees assigned. ✨
Creating Neighborhoods
via CSV
If you use a CSV to keep track of your seating, you can include neighborhoods on the same line as the desk you're adding.
By doing this, you can automatically create neighborhoods, floors, and assign desks to certain employees. These neighborhoods will appear on the Neighborhoods page, and the desks will appear on each floor.
Learn more about using a CSV to import desk data.
Manually via the Neighborhoods page
Navigate to Maps > Neighborhoods.
Click on Create Neighborhood.
NOTE: If you already have an existing neighborhood, it will be at the top right-hand corner of the page.
Give your neighborhood a name.
Click Create.
Editing Neighborhood names and assignees
Navigate to Maps > Neighborhoods.
Click Edit next to the Neighborhood you want to edit.
Change the name or specify who can sit in that neighborhood.
Click Save.
Deleting Neighborhoods
Navigate to Maps > Neighborhoods.
Click Edit next to the Neighborhood you want to delete.
Select Delete Neighborhood.
Confirm you want to delete the Neighborhood by clicking Delete.
Assigning a color to neighborhoods
By default, your neighborhoods are assigned colors at random. You can change the color displayed by editing the live map or a draft.
Open the map editor. Select the desk you wish to edit by clicking on it and opening the desk details panel.
Above the Neighborhood field, click View.
This brings up the Neighborhood details panel.
Here you can see:
The display color
The total number of desks in this neighborhood
Who can sit in this neighborhoods
Floors that have this neighborhood
To change the display color, click the color box above the neighborhood name to open a color picker.
✨Tip: You want your neighborhoods to be distinct colors. We suggest avoiding too many red-green colors to remain accessible.✨
Envoy will automatically assign colors at random. There are six potential colors.
Save your map after making changes.
Learn more about editing workplace maps.
FAQ
Neighborhoods cannot be nested within each other.
If an employee belongs to more than one neighborhood, auto-assigning will randomly pick from desks available in both neighborhoods without priority.
Choose neighborhood names that make sense for your team groupings. (i.e. Finance, Engineering, Sales; or Monday group, Tuesday group, Wednesday group; etc.)
Include the optional neighborhoods column in your Desks CSV according to these instructions, and upload your CSV.
Insert those neighborhood names in the same lines as the corresponding desk numbers in your Desks CSV and upload.
Manually assigning employees to neighborhoods
Once you have uploaded a CSV that includes neighborhoods, those neighborhoods names will populate as sections on the Neighborhoods tab, listed underneath Maps, on the dashboard.
To add employees to each neighborhood, click 'edit' next to the neighborhood name, and begin to enter employee names listed in your directory to assign them to their corresponding neighborhood.
Click Save after assigning all employees to their appropriate neighborhoods.
Using SCIM to assign employees to neighborhoods
If your company uses one of our SCIM Directory integrations (Okta, Microsoft Entra, or OneLogin), you can use your SCIM instance to assign your employees to neighborhoods. In order to assign employees to a neighborhood using SCIM, employees must be provisioned to sync into the Envoy directory. If you use SCIM profile fields to categorize your employees, you can use those fields to assign employees to neighborhoods.
You can assign neighborhoods according to SCIM Department, Organization, Division, or custom group.
Populating and finding the Neighborhoods tab on the dashboard follows the same process as manually assigning neighborhoods
Instead of manually assigning employees by name, you can include the name of a group that you have included in your SCIM profile fields.
To assign these groups using SCIM profile fields, start typing the name of the group you input into your Department, Division, or Organization user fields in your SCIM provider into the "Specify groups that can sit in this neighborhood" field in Envoy neighborhoods
Click 'save' after assigning all SCIM groups to their appropriate neighborhood
Important Notes
Only those assigned to a neighborhood, whether individuals or a SCIM group, will be assigned a desk in that neighborhood
If you do not assign any employees to a neighborhood, any employee can sit there. Employees who are not assigned to a neighborhood can sit in an open neighborhood, and employees assigned to a neighborhood can change their desk to an open neighborhood. However, if all neighborhoods have employees assigned, the employees not assigned to a neighborhood will not receive a desk upon sign-in
SCIM provisioning for neighborhoods is limited to Okta, Centrify, OneLogin or Microsoft Entra.
When using SCIM with neighborhoods, 1 department or group can be used in multiple neighborhoods. For example, your IT Department can belong to both Neighborhoods #1 and #2.
Using SCIM Profile Fields
The following SCIM profile fields are supported for neighborhoods: Department, Division, or Organization.
