Our boards and dashboards are loaded with all of the information we need in our account. Sometimes the volume of information can be difficult for managers and executives to navigate and keep track of. Great news - we've compiled a guide to help managers and executives get to know the features and filters that can help narrow down all of that information in your account to show you only what you need to see! Keep reading to check out some of the examples we use to manage our teams and get a great overview of important projects and processes!

Organize your account with Permissions & Workspaces

Permissions are an excellent way to regulate sensitive material and declutter your account! Managers can use permissions to restrict certain information or use them to narrow down the amount of information in each team's accounts. Workspaces are a great tool to organize and categorize related boards! Keep reading to learn how to apply permissions and workspaces in your account!

Account Permissions

An account admin can change access levels to different members of their account. This type of permission allows you to manage easily who can use certain features and allows you to have more control over your account.

To do so, click on your profile picture and select 'Admin' to launch your Admin settings.

Click 'Permissions' to display all of the different permission options across your account.

Here, you can decide which features anyone can edit or add, which features only admins can edit, and which features no one can edit. For example, in our account, anyone can create Private, Shareable, and Main boards, but only admins can create Main Dashboards and add or remove members from teams.

Workspace Permissions

Workspaces are an excellent way to separate the work of different departments or teams. It's sort of like a big folder, holding related boards. Let's say our monday.com account is shared by the whole company. We can divide our account into Workspaces for each department, such as Finance, Marketing, IT, and Sales! Within each Workspace, different teams can work within their own boards and folders, while still having access to their department's boards!

As you can see, our company has several different Workspaces listed in the left panel of my screen.

I've selected "Human Resources" as an example. When you click the Workspace, you launch the Workspace's profile, showing a quick description and the number of members. To the right of each member, there's a little crown icon that when blue, indicates that that member is an owner of the Workspace! Check out this article to learn more about what an owner can do!

From the 3 dot icon at the top right corner of the Workspace's profile, you can launch the Workspace's settings. From here, you can rename the workspace or change the access to a Closed Workspace. Switching from an Open to Closed workspace will make its content accessible only to Workspace members and board collaborators. Team members can join this workspace by request or invite only.

Board Permissions

Board owners can restrict board subscribers from editing the content or structure of the Board! To edit these preferences, click the 3 dot menu, and select 'Board permissions' as shown here below:

From the Board Permissions window, you can select whether account members can edit everything on the board or edit only content. You can set the board to 'View only' so that only board owners can edit the board structure and content.

Column Permissions

The permission to edit a board can be customized by columns. You can set each column with a different permission setting. Just click the right arrow of the column you wish to restrict, click 'Column Permissions' and you can restrict editing of the column or even viewing the column! This way, the managers can view certain sensitive columns that other team members won't be able to see.

Stay on top of your team's progress with high-level boards

High-level boards are just one of the many ways to create an overview of a project or team. Instead of seeing all of the details of a project, managers can use high-level boards to keep an eye on the stats and highlights. We're going to briefly introduce a few boards we want to show you as examples of how managers and executives can use high-level boards to save time and increase efficiency!

HR High-level

The board below is called 'Recruiting' and it's a high-level board showing all of the prospective employees for our company!

The groups are each an interview stage, starting from new resumes received, and moving to the HR interview stage, Department Head interview, etc!

The first column shows the name of the candidate, and the Email and Phone Columns contain his or her contact information! The "Interviewer" column is a People Column, allowing us to assign the teammate who will be interviewing the candidate. The Date Column shows when the Interview is scheduled to take place and the Numbers Column, labelled "Interview Length" shows the duration of the interview in hours. The Status Column to the left shows the status of the decision to move forward with the interviewee, while the second Status Column named "Department" indicates to which department the candidate is applying!

Finally, we have a Dropdown Column named "Languages" to record which languages the candidate speaks, and a Files Column called "Resume" to upload the resume for easy reference!

Event Managing Low-level

The next two example boards work together. The low-level "Breakdown" board shown below is a very detailed map of the different events that this company is planning! Each group divides the events (items) into categories including company parties, launch events, meetups, and conferences. A People Column is used to assign a team member as the "Organizer" of each event, and the next four Status Columns show where each component of the event stands. The last Status Column shows the overall status of the event. The next two columns are Numbers Columns showing each event's budget, and how much was spent for contrast. Next we have a Date Column showing the date of the event, and a Numbers Column showing the number of people who will be attending.

As you can see, this board is very detailed and is used as a tracking tool for the organizers working on these events daily. Which leads us to our high-level board!

Event Managing High-level

This high-level board shows us an overview of all of the information we saw in the previous board! Instead of seeing all of the details, a manager or executive can quickly glance at this board and get visual progress updates, stats, and simplified information. On this board, specific events are not shown, but rather are grouped by type of event (each type of event is a group in the low-level board) and are divided into quarters rather than marked by specific dates. The Event Planner is identified by a People Column so that it's clear who to communicate with regarding each item. The next column is a Link to Item Column which links all of the events in each event category.

When you hover over the Link to Item Column, you can see a list of all of the events that are linked (shown in black in the image below). When you click on the cell, a window pops up allowing you to click each linked item. If you click the 'expand' icon to the right of each link, you can open up the item card, where you can see all of the item's details and even edit them! Or you can click the board's link at the top of the item card to head right to the item in its board!

The next column shown is a Mirror Column of the "Progress" of the group of events which displays a battery-style chart of the "Event Status" Column from each event. When you hover over each color, you can see what status that color represents (as shown in black below). If you click the color, you'll see which items show that status and can even click on them to open up the item's card!

The next two columns are Mirror Columns which mirror the "Budget" and "Spent" Columns from our low-level board. The final Column in this board is a Formula Column which uses a simple calculation to show whether we stayed "Within Budget" or went a little "Over Budget on this group of events. The formula we used is an "IF" formula, stating that if the budget spent subtracted from the budget is greater than zero, the cell should display "Within Budget", and in any other case, the cell should display "Over Budget" as shown below:

If you're a little confused about the Formula Column - it's okay! We were too. Check out this great article or watch this detailed Webinar to learn more about the Formula Column.

Managing your team's workload

Resource management is an extremely important process to ensure that your company is operating effectively, and includes the efficient allocation of employees, equipment, and even your brand assets. Whatever your resources may be, monday.com is here to help you keep your business on track!

Add the Workload View to your board to get a clear overview of how your team's work is divided by following the easy steps in this article!

Now you can see an overview of the workload of each of your teammates each week! You can adjust this view to show Days or Months, and set which Columns are considered in the calculation!

You can decide how you want to measure effort by selecting either 'Count items' or Add Effort', which will take into account that optional Numbers Column you may have added.

With the Workload View, you can see in one glance who is over capacity and assign upcoming tasks accordingly. A red circle indicates that a teammate has exceeded his or her weekly capacity, while a checkmark indicates a perfect assignment and a dark blue circle within a light blue circle shows how much more that teammate can handle. If needed, you can always reassign or change due dates to make sure everyone stays on target with the amount of tasks they can complete within that timeframe.

In this case, Jess is overworked, putting in 3.5 hours when her capacity is 2! If I hover over her red bubble, I can see a list of all the items she's been assigned. I can click one of these to reassign the item to someone else!

Now that I've clicked on Luther Cheese's item card, I can remove Jess as the 'Interviewer' and replace her with someone who can handle a little more on their plate this week!

Visualize your team's data

Our board is doing a really great job of keeping track of new recruits, but we have so many entries that it can be difficult to get a good impression of what's going on just by looking at it. To solve this, we can add a Chart View!

To add the Chart View, click the arrow beside "Main Table" to open the Views menu. Here we can see a list of our Views, including the Workload View we just added so we can jump back to it easily whenever we want! Click '+Add View' and then click 'Chart' to launch the chart!

Our chart is generated automatically, but we can play with the Settings to change what information is displayed! We can choose the type of Chart we want from the drop-down menu. We chose Bar for this chart, but other options include Pie, Line, and Stacked Bar! Next, we chose the Status Column from all of our Columns as the X Axis of our Bar Chart and 'Count items' as the Y Axis.

Now, our chart gives us a really quick survey of how many of our candidates have advanced to the next stage of interviews, and how many did not! We can gauge a few useful conclusions from this information. For example, I can see that quite a lot of candidates have not advanced in the recruiting process, which might indicate that I need to narrow my application requirements. That way, I will receive more relevant resumes and allot my interviewers' time to the more promising candidates!

Monitor performance and trends

Instead of checking up on each phase of your team's projects and reaching out to each individual for updates on their tasks use a high-level board to give you the big picture of what's going on within your team! Set up a Timeline View to see what's scheduled for when! Check out these super helpful features for tips on how to check the status of your team in a glance!

The Timeline View

Our high-level board is definitely a great overview of all of our team's projects, but it's loaded will all of our team's detailed updates and we need to really scroll all the way through the board to get a good idea of what the status is overall. Let's create a Timeline View to visually translate all of this information into one snapshot update for what is happening when!

Add the Timeline View by clicking the arrow next to 'Main View', '+Add View', and selecting 'Timeline' as we did here:

You can play with the time span displayed by selecting between the "Days", "Weeks", "Months", "Quarters", or "Years" tabs! Below, we chose the "Months" tab for now, so that we can see what our month looks like in a glance!

Launch the settings menu on the right of your screen by clicking the cogwheel on the top right corner of your screen. From here, we can play with which columns we wish to see displayed in our view, by which column we want to see them separated, and more! Here, we've chosen to display our timeline in 'Gantt Mode' so that we can see everything clearly and chronologically.

Under 'Display Settings', select "Split View" to view your Timeline right above your Main Board View in the same window! We love this feature because it gives us both the visual overview and the details in the items themselves right in one screen! No more flipping back and forth between Views! You can always click "Fullscreen View" to switch it back to one View per page.

Communicate with your team

Good communication is key to a successful and cohesive team, especially when collaborating from afar! Whether your teammates are working from home or from an international office, keep the conversation going about your projects, meetings, ideas, and internal knowledge!

The Updates section

While checking over our board, we noticed that the Kickoff Phase for our project is "Stuck" in the brainstorming phase. Instead of pulling everyone off of their tasks for today to join us in a meeting, we can communicate with everyone in the Updates section! All we have to do is click on the item to launch the Updates section and type our message in the text box. Now, we can @mention any team, such as IT to notify everyone on that team, or we can @mention 'Everyone on this board' like we've done here below! It's an option under 'Teams' that appears when you type the '@' symbol. This way, everyone subscribed to this board will get a notification to pay attention to this item so that we can quickly solve our issue!

Read more about the Updates Section in this article!

Automations

The Updates Section is an excellent tool to communicate with your team about anything on your board that needs a little attention, but what if you haven't had time to review everything? We've got you covered! Automations were designed to perform certain actions for you or notify you when something needs your attention!

For example, you can use the following Automation to notify you when a status changes to "Stuck" so that you can keep track of everyone's progress and help them advance without checking in on everyone daily:

Choose this Automation to let you know when a task has not been completed by the deadline:

Check out this article to become an Automation pro!

The Zoom Integration

With the new Zoom Integration, you can easily gain insights and gather all the information you need from the online meetings you have right in your monday.com account!

Follow the simple steps in this article to add the Integration and to learn more about what you can do with it!

Manage your meetings' attendance by setting up an Automation that will notify all your invitees about when a meeting is about to start or has already started! You can also set an Automation that will create a new item when your meeting starts, and an update will post with the text "Meeting Started" like we did here:

Use this Automation to make sure everyone is notified in their Bell Alerts when the meeting has started so they won't miss it:

When they click the Bell Notification, they'll be redirected to the relevant board, where they can click on the Zoom meeting ID to join the meeting right from their board!

And your designated note-taker can use the updates section to record all of your meeting notes:

Collect data from teammates and colleagues

Now, we're going to check out a really cool way to collect data from members of your account and external parties. The Form View allows you to create a shareable link with fields to fill out that translate directly into the columns on your board! Let's check out this example below!

Our example board

Our board is a collection of all of the answers received from HR's End of Year Employee Satisfaction Survey. And we got them all using the Form View! Each item is a different form entry, which was completed by an employee in our company. They fill out the Status Column 'Team' by indicating what team they're apart of, the Date Column by filling out the date they completed the survey, and all of the Rating Columns by selecting their rating from 1 to 5. To determine what the general sentiment of each individual is, we've used a Formula Column called "Rating" to calculate the average rating among all questions answered by one person. Keep reading to see how we did this!

Then, after the results are received, we manually update the 'General Statement' Column based on the "Rating" scored.

The Formula Column

Save your time and energy by using a Formula Column instead of calculating sums and averages in your head! Just click on any cell in the column to set your formula. Here, we chose the 'Average' function to calculate the average of each Rating Column, and then clicked 'Set'! Now, each cell in this column is automatically generated!

Click here to read all about the Formula Column, or watch this Webinar for a really in-depth guide!

The Forms View

Our HR Department wanted to create an end of year employee satisfaction survey for all of the employees of the company but wanted everyone's answers to stay anonymous and honest! Since we couldn't have everyone filling out answers in the board itself and seeing everyone else's answers, we created a form instead!

We can select the background color of our form, change the title, add a logo and description, and select which fields are required or optional. We chose to make every question required except for our "General Sentiment" Column because we want to fill this one in manually based on the results of the survey! We chose to hide this question so that nobody would fill it out by clicking the eye icon beside the question.

In the image below, you can see that we did not make the "Comments" mandatory so that we can leave the option for employees to elaborate on their answers if they want. Whatever they type in this text box will appear in the Updates section of the new item that will be created when they fill out this form!

When we're finished creating our form, a link (or embedded link) leading to the survey will be automatically generated. We can send this link to anyone we want, even if they're not part of our account!

If you need help to add or edit the Forms View, check out this article to learn all about it!

Automate your workflow

Automations allow us to set up actions to be automatically triggered by events in our board! They can take your hands off so many technical actions so that you can stick to the things that are really important! Let's look into some examples that can help managers automate some of the actions on their boards!

Let's use the survey board from the previous section as example and add some Automations to make things a little easy for us.

When a Status changes...

For this board, we have a group for each general sentiment: Happy, Room for Improvement, and Unsatisfied. All new items generated from our Forms View are automatically placed in our first group, "Pending Review". In this first group, we review the item's overall rating (generated automatically in a Formula Column), and we manually update the Status Column "General Sentiment" based on its rating! We want to create one automation per option in this column that when selected, the item will be moved automatically to the corresponding group! Let's add them together!

Click on the little robot icon at the top right side of your screen to launch the Automations Center.

We've chosen to add the following Automation recipe to our board:

Now, we just have to fill in all of the underlined fields with which columns we want to be affected by our Automation! We've done this three times - each Automation sends a different General Sentiment to its respective group.

Let's add a different Automation Recipe! This time, we want to notify the employee's manager every time his team member's General Sentiment is "Unsatisfied". All I have to do is fill in the recipe below and type in the message you want to send to the manager!

There's so much that you can do with Integrations! Check out this article to find out more about all of the amazing recipes, and how you can customize your own!

Get insightful data with Dashboards

Dashboards are a great way to display the most important highlights across several boards in just one place. Instead of checking progress and achievements across all of the team's boards, managers and executives can quickly glance at a Dashboard to get a good overview of everything they want to see! There are currently over 40 available Widgets and Apps to help users understand project progress, track budgets, estimate teammates' workloads and much more! Mix and match any combination of Widgets and Apps to keep your team motivated and focused on high-level goals and boost productivity!

Below is an example of a Sales Dashboard showing an overview of several Sales boards. It includes:

Numbers Widgets to display different stats such as amount of leads, amount of deals won, and amount closed in dollars
Chart Widget to display a visual breakdown of the deals that were closed in the past month and who closed them, and a chart showing added ARR organized per month for the past few months
Board to Globe Widget to provide an interactive visual display of the locations of some of our recent deals
Calendar Widget to track upcoming dates and deadlines across all of our Sales boards

To learn more about Dashboards, check out this article!

If you have any further questions about any of the incredible and versatile features mentioned in this article, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Customer Success Team 24/7 at support@monday.com!