Your duties as a manager

What this guide covers

Everything myWork expects you to decide or sign off as a line manager, in one list: what the duty is, where it lands, and which guide covers it in full. Use it as a checklist when you take on a team, or when you come back from leave and want to know what is waiting.

The screen that gathers most of this is described in Dashboard: the Management Portal tab; the queue itself is described in Pending Approvals.

The rule behind all of it

Your duties follow the management chain, not a job title. You act for the people in the departments you manage, including sub-departments — but the walk down the tree stops at any sub-department that has an active manager of its own, because those people are that manager's to decide for. That manager themselves stays yours.

You never decide your own records. Your leave, your hours and your own attendance alerts route to your manager, which is why they never appear in your own queue.

When you are on leave, a stand-in manager is assigned each morning so nothing stalls. Standing in is temporary and per-day; your own team stays visible to you throughout.

Approvals are addressed to one approver at a time. A card that sits with you for two working days (on your own schedule) escalates to your manager automatically and the escalation is recorded on the request. Your queue is therefore not something to leave for the end of the month.

Your rhythm

Every day

Open the Management Portal tab: who is in, who is absent, and the action tiles that only appear when something is pending.
Clear your approvals queue — leave, custom schedules and the rest of the list below.
Deal with attendance alerts for your people: Excuse the ones with a good reason, Create QIL (raise an Incident Log entry) for the ones that need a formal record.

Every week

Authorise your team's hours in Team Hours before the payroll cut-off: approve, approve part of, or decline time worked beyond schedule.
Act on the Monday weekly-close message. It only reaches you for weeks that actually need something.

Ongoing

Keep schedules current, rate the task reviews waiting on you, and close out any disciplinary escalation raised for your team.

A week you never authorise does not go away. It stays on HR's radar as unauthorised hours, and past the review deadline it is reported as an overdue item against your team.

What lands in your approvals queue

Each of these arrives as a card in Pending Approvals, with a chat notification:

Leave — a new request. Approve, or Reject with a reason. Acknowledge-only leave types (typically sick leave) arrive already recorded and carry a single Acknowledge button.
Leave Edit — the employee wants to move the dates of leave you already approved.
Leave Cancellation — the employee wants to cancel approved leave.
Custom Schedule — a request to work outside the normal pattern, including overtime that needs pre-approval. You can also counter-propose different times from the My Leave page's Pending Approvals tab.
OT Cancellation — a request to undo an approved custom schedule.
Attendance Warning — a late arrival, early departure, absence, long break or short day waiting for your decision. This card carries its own Excuse and Create QIL buttons; if it is your own warning it only offers Open in Attendance Warnings.
Incident Sanction — a disciplinary sanction waiting on you. The card is a pointer; the decision itself is made on the incident screen.

There is one card that travels the other way: Assigned Shift. When you assign a custom schedule, the employee has to accept it, so the approval sits with them and not with you.

Approving a leave cancellation gives the balance back and reverses the attendance already written for those days. Check the dates before you approve it, not after.

Hours and overtime

Team Hours is the cockpit: pick a person or a department, pick the period (including a Pay group cycle), select the rows and authorise in one action. Full detail in Manage hours: authorise and decline your team's time, and the arithmetic behind ordinary hours, overtime and authorised time is in How working time is calculated: ordinary hours, overtime & authorised time.

What you are actually deciding:

Excess time — worked beyond the schedule. Nobody is paid for it until you authorise it. You can approve all of it, approve part of it with a reason, or decline it — and a decline can be reverted with a reason if you got it wrong.
Short days — worked under the schedule. The shortfall shows as Missing and is deducted per the weekly rule; you do not need to acknowledge each one.
Discrepant days — a day the clocking data cannot fully explain. Overtime on such a day always comes to you, even when it would normally be auto-approved.
The weekly cap — overtime you approve beyond the weekly cap (10 hours by default) is not paid; it is moved back to unauthorised and flagged. Plan the week so it does not get there.

If a clocking terminal changed mid-day and produced a wrong "Late arrival", Fix a wrong 'Late arrival' (the clocking terminal changed mid-day) is the guide for that.

Schedules and custom schedules

Set and change your team's working pattern in Manage schedules — see Manage schedules: set your team's working pattern. Assigning a custom schedule is not the same as approving overtime, and the difference matters for pay: Custom schedules & assigned shifts (and why they're not overtime) explains it.

Remember the acceptance step: a custom schedule you assign only becomes real once the employee accepts it.

Leave

Beyond approving and rejecting, leave duties include:

Creating leave for someone who cannot do it themselves — see Create leave for an employee. Leave you create for your own team is recorded as manager-created and does not wait for a second approval.
Rejecting with a clear reason rather than silently, so the employee can refile with dates that work.
Recording leave that starts mid-shift (an injury on duty, for example) — see Recording leave during a shift (IOD & other manual-clock leave).
Keeping an eye on what the team has taken — Team Leave Report: a record of approved leave is the record of what has been granted.

Status badges and what each one means are in Leave request statuses field definitions. The full manager walkthrough is Manage your team's leave.

Attendance alerts and discipline

Attendance Alerts is where late arrivals, early departures, absences, long breaks and short days wait for a decision. Excuse, or Create QIL; you cannot action your own.
Strikes no longer exist. Since 4 September 2026 the Incident Log (QIL) is the single disciplinary record: an alert you do not excuse becomes an Incident Log entry, pre-filled from the warning.
A Disciplinary Escalation is raised automatically when someone in the Incident Log reaches the verbal-warning threshold (3 in 90 days by default). Escalations for your team sit in the Escalations inbox until they are resolved with a note saying what was done.
You may raise an incident against anyone in your managed chain — see Raising an incident (formal or verbal). The acknowledgement, Sanction Lock and sanction steps are in The formal process: acknowledgement, the Sanction Lock & imposing a sanction.
Before you act on any of it, Disciplinary Report — the whole picture before acting shows the person's history in one place.

Separation of duties is enforced, not merely encouraged: nobody excuses their own alert or authorises their own hours. Executives with no manager above them are the only exception, and it is granted explicitly.

Tasks and KPI

If your team uses tasks:

Create and assign work inside your part of the org chart — Creating and assigning tasks.
Review finished work within 48 hours. If you do not, it auto-approves at the middle grade, and that shows up on the review-compliance report. See Reviewing work: rate, request changes and the 48-hour window.
Grading rules and fairness safeguards are in Task KPI and grading: how it works and the fairness rules.
Going away? The Task Orchestrator: keep work moving while you are away.

Bonuses, if you hold the grant permission

Managers granted the bonus tier can award the bonus types flagged for managers to their own team, from the Bonuses page only. Every grant stays pending until Finance approves it, so telling someone it is done before that is premature.

What is not yours to decide

These look like approvals but never route to the management chain — they are permission-scoped or deliberately confidential, and you will not see them unless you hold the permission:

Advances and loans, bonus approval, and recurring-bonus approval (confidential, decided by Finance).
Bank-detail verification.
Place in Service and Equipment Replacement on the asset register.
Work-order step gates.
Credit-note entry in the ERP.

Tips and gotchas

The Management Portal tab is a launchpad, not the work. Each tile opens the screen that actually clears it.
Nothing you decide is silent: every approval, excuse and authorisation is written to the record with your name, and the person is notified.
If a decision you expected is not in your queue, you are probably not the current approver for that person. Check the organigram — a sub-department with its own manager takes those people out of your queue — and remember that a card may already have escalated past you.
Coverage on the portal is "right now". For history, use the attendance reports.