Staff Desk: messaging your manager

basic

A private, brokered inbox where staff message their manager and managers reply — without either side seeing the other's personal phone or email.

Staff Desk is a private channel between your team and their managers. Any staff member can send their manager a message — to ask a question, flag a problem, or request to swap a shift — and a manager can reply or start a thread of their own. The key idea is that the system sits in the middle: the employee never sees the manager's personal phone or email, and the manager never sees the employee's. Apolaris AI delivers the message for both sides, so people can talk without handing out private contact details.

This replaces the usual tangle of personal WhatsApp numbers, group chats, and "text me when you get a chance." Conversations stay in one place, tied to the right person, and a manager can pick them up wherever they left off.

Messaging your manager (any staff member)

Any signed-in staff member can reach their manager — no special privilege is needed. You can start a message a few ways:

From the AI Assistant — ask the copilot to pass something to your manager (for example, "tell my manager I can't make my Friday shift"). The assistant opens a Staff Desk thread to the right manager for you.
From WhatsApp — if your organization has WhatsApp enabled and you've connected your number, you can message the copilot on WhatsApp and ask it to reach your manager the same way.
By email — when your organization has set up a staff mailbox, an email you send to it lands in Staff Desk as a message to your manager.

However you start it, your message goes to the manager(s) responsible for you, and they reply through Staff Desk. Their reply comes back to you as a normal notification — in the app, by email, and on your own WhatsApp where those are turned on — without ever revealing their personal contact details.

Your message routes to your manager automatically based on where you work. You do not pick a recipient or look up anyone's number — that is the whole point of the brokered channel.

Your inbox: My Messages

Every staff member also has a personal inbox for this channel: My Messages, in the CRM sidebar for all staff, and in the employee portal under the More (Más) menu. It lists your conversations with management and opens each one as a chat-style thread, where you read replies and answer back without leaving the app.

The other side always appears as Management — you never see which specific manager replied, just as they never see your personal contact details. The brokering works in both directions.
Replying to a closed thread reopens it automatically and notifies management, so you can follow up on an old matter without starting over.

The manager Staff Desk inbox

Managers (and leave approvers) work the conversations in a dedicated inbox. Open Staff Desk from the sidebar to see every thread, who it's from, its status, and whether it's waiting on you.

Who can use it

Action	Who can do it
Message a manager (start or reply in your own thread)	Any signed-in staff member
Open the Staff Desk inbox, read and reply to threads	Managers (`is_manager`) or leave approvers (`can_approve_vacation`)
Assign, close, reopen a thread; start a new thread to an employee	Same manager / approver gate

A leave approver who is not a full manager sees only the threads from employees who work at one of their visible sites. A full manager sees every thread in the organization. See HR: team, leave & documents for how site visibility works.

Find and open a thread

Open Staff Desk from the sidebar.
Filter the list to focus: Open, Needs attention, Assigned to me, or Closed — or use the search box to find a person or topic.
Click a thread to open it. Opening a thread marks it as read, so the unread badge reflects what genuinely still needs your eyes.

Reply to an employee

Type your reply and send it. The employee is notified that their manager responded — without your personal phone or email being exposed. Replying also assigns the thread to you automatically, so the rest of the team can see it's being handled and two managers don't answer the same message twice.

Assign, close, and reopen

Assign to me — claim a thread so it's clear who owns the follow-up.
Close — mark a conversation done once it's resolved. It moves out of the active list into Closed.
Reopen — bring a closed thread back if the matter comes up again.

Start a new thread to an employee

Managers can also reach out first — for example, to ask someone to cover a shift. Click New message, pick the staff member, write your message, and send. The employee receives it through the same brokered channel and can reply right back in Staff Desk.

Use Assigned to me plus Needs attention as your daily Staff Desk view, so you only see the conversations actually waiting on you.

Delivery you can rely on

If you message an employee who has no app account, the composer says so plainly — "Message saved, but they have no app account to receive it" — instead of implying the message was delivered.
A message from an employee who isn't assigned to any site reaches every active manager and approver, so it can't end up with no one.
Deactivated or offboarded managers no longer receive staff messages.
Managers and approvers whose accounts are portal-only can open the Staff Desk too, so they can answer their staff from the portal.

How messages are delivered

Every Staff Desk message is delivered in the app as a notification — that's always available and is the source of truth. On top of that, the system also delivers by:

Email — to the recipient's account email, when your organization has email set up.
WhatsApp — to the recipient's own connected WhatsApp number, when your organization has WhatsApp enabled and the recipient has connected their number and turned WhatsApp notifications on.

In every channel, the message is delivered without embedding anyone's raw phone number or email — the brokering holds for email and WhatsApp just as it does in the app.

Tapping a notification takes you to the exact thread it refers to, on the surface you actually use — portal users land in the portal's My Messages, CRM users in the CRM view. And a direct message from management is never muted by the General announcements notification preference: it is always delivered.

Email and WhatsApp delivery are available when your organization has those channels enabled. If they aren't, Staff Desk still works fully — messages are delivered in the app, which is always on.

Connect your WhatsApp

To receive Staff Desk messages (and other notifications) on WhatsApp, connect your number on your profile. See "Connect your WhatsApp" on the Profile page for the step-by-step: you enter your number, receive a one-time code on WhatsApp, and confirm it to link your account.

As soon as your number is verified, WhatsApp notifications switch on for you automatically — manager replies and leave decisions reach you on WhatsApp with no extra toggle to find. Two safeguards apply: an offboarded employee can no longer enrol a number, and the same phone can't be enrolled twice under different number formats.

A manager can connect it for you. Most staff never open the app, so a manager (or anyone allowed to edit employees) can do it from the employee's page: the WhatsApp assistant block there shows which of the organization's numbers the employee writes to, sends the one-time code to the employee's phone, and then either the employee replies to that WhatsApp message with the code or the manager types in the code the employee reads out. If the employee has no app account yet, the same block creates one in a click — no password and no privileges, just the account the assistant acts as (creating it needs a manager or a privilege administrator).

Your site's number. Codes and Staff Desk notifications are sent from the WhatsApp number of the site you work at, so they land in the thread you already have; when your site has no number of its own, the organization's main number is used. You can write to any of your organization's numbers — the assistant recognizes you on all of them.

When the assistant hands off to a person

The AI Assistant tries to resolve staff requests directly. When it can't — the request needs a human decision, or the staffer asks to talk to a person — the assistant escalates the request into a Staff Desk thread for a manager. The thread is flagged so it stands out in the inbox (it shows under Needs attention), with a short note explaining why it was escalated, and the responsible managers are notified.

This means nothing falls through the cracks: if the assistant hits the limit of what it can do for an employee, a real person picks it up in Staff Desk instead of the request being dropped.

An escalated thread is a normal Staff Desk thread once it lands — you reply, assign, and close it the same way. The flag just tells you the assistant couldn't finish it on its own.

Why this helps

Staff and managers communicate directly, but no one swaps personal phone numbers or emails — the platform brokers every message.
Conversations live in one place, tied to the right person, with clear status so nothing gets lost in group chats.
Messages reach people wherever they are — in the app, by email, and on their own WhatsApp — when those channels are enabled.
The assistant escalates what it can't resolve straight to a human, so requests don't disappear.