Employees, schedules and HR

What an employee represents in version 1.0

An employee is a paid production unit, a schedule constraint, a skill modifier, and a retention risk. Managing all four dimensions together is more useful than chasing a perfect percentage in only one screen.

Every worker has a role that determines which workstation or business can use that person. Customer-service workers operate retail counters, lawyers occupy legal workstations, drivers belong to warehouses, factory workers run compatible machines, and headquarters specialists execute plans rather than serving customers directly. Recruitment is therefore business-sensitive: the selected business controls which roles an agency can offer, while a headhunter inside an established headquarters can search much more broadly. A candidate who looks cheap but cannot fill the required workstation is not spare capacity; that person is an idle recurring liability until reassigned, trained, or dismissed.

Skill affects output differently by role. Customer-facing skill contributes to customer service and therefore to the customer ceiling. A logistics manager's skill changes destination capacity, a purchasing agent's skill affects negotiated import prices, and an HR manager's skill governs management capacity and access to stronger insurance administration. Factory skill became more economically important during the factory revisions. Do not translate these examples into one universal percentage-to-profit formula: the game exposes role-specific effects in F1 and plan screens, and patches have changed individual roles without changing every employee system.

Employee economics should be measured at the staffed workstation. A useful hourly contribution estimate is incremental gross contribution created while that workstation is covered minus wage, insurance allocation, temporary-cover cost, and associated overhead. For a cashier, compare sales served rather than people merely entering. For a lawyer, compare billable clients. For a driver or manager, compare avoided stockouts or price savings. This prevents the common error of calling every fully trained employee valuable even when demand, equipment, stock, or building capacity leaves the workstation underused.

Version boundaries and rejected legacy numbers

Employee advice is unusually vulnerable to version drift because demands, wages, management capacity, negotiation, scheduling memory, auto-fill, insurance and rivals arrived in separate updates.

Build 3674 is the reference point for this guide. The first post-release hotfix fixed an employee quit-state problem that could block training, imports and deliveries, and added schedule tooltips. A save that has not advanced to the next day after updating may still display symptoms produced by the launch build. When training or plans appear frozen, first verify the build, advance one normal day, then inspect assignments before rebuilding the organization. Recreating every plan immediately can conceal a fixed transient state and create new scheduling gaps.

The most dangerous obsolete cap is twenty-five employees per fully trained HR manager. That value was developer-confirmed in 2023, but later builds doubled the practical full-skill cap to fifty. Threads from 2025 and 2026 explicitly discuss ten as the baseline after a reset and fifty at full skill. Likewise, early claims that insurance simply refuses to activate below ten employees are stale: the corrected behavior activates coverage but bills the ten-employee minimum. Old claims that schedules forget changes immediately are also wrong; employees remember hours already worked until the Monday reset.

Version-labelled evidence is better than an undated table. For any claimed cap, create a disposable plan in a Build 3674 save, note the manager's exact skill, add workers until the interface refuses another, and record the displayed numerator and denominator. For a demand, capture the tooltip rather than inferring its meaning from the label. For a scheduling rule, test across Monday because midweek edits include remembered hours. These tests are reproducible and avoid importing custom difficulty, mods, or an Early Access save defect into a general rule.

The employee lifecycle

A reliable workforce pipeline has six states: forecast, recruit, screen, place, develop and replace. Most expensive failures occur when a player skips the transition between two states.

Forecast from the schedule rather than from intuition. Count workstation-hours required during profitable opening hours, then divide those hours by feasible employee hours after respecting full-time or part-time status and individual restrictions. Add role-specific redundancy only where an uncovered hour is costly. One cashier missing from a low-traffic hour may be harmless; one absent driver that prevents a warehouse route or one unstaffed factory bottleneck can disrupt many downstream businesses. The forecast should name role, business, earliest start date, weekly hours and acceptable demand profile.

Screen candidates before paying for training. The minimum record is primary skill, hourly wage, full-time or part-time status, visible demands, age if succession matters, and intended shift. A low-skill candidate can acquire additional demands while developing, whereas a near-100-percent headhunted candidate reveals the mature demand set and is easier to filter predictably. That does not make high-skill hiring universally cheaper: compare recruitment cost and negotiated wage with training expense, wage growth during training, time without output, and the chance that later demands force reassignment.

Placement is not complete until four links exist: employee to business, employee to workstation and hours, employee to HR manager, and—where replacement automation is desired—the HR manager to a headhunter. Training can temporarily unassign workers, changing both schedule and management state. After any manual training batch, use a return-to-service checklist rather than trusting memory. Mature organizations should also record a successor route for headquarters specialists because a circular arrangement can leave the very headhunter responsible for replacement without anyone able to replace that headhunter.

Roles, workstations and real capacity

Furniture count, employee count, building traffic and customer demand are different capacities. Staffing the wrong one creates payroll without throughput.

For a retail business, required service labor is driven by customers that can reach and use a staffed selling station. Interior capacity, traffic index, marketing, neighborhood demand, price satisfaction, stock and employee service skill can each cap realized sales. If the insight panel shows unused customer capacity while queues form, add a workstation or overlap. If no queue forms and demand is exhausted, another cashier only divides the same work. Cleaners and security should be scheduled from dirt and theft evidence rather than copied from a generic maximum-size blueprint.

Office businesses often tempt players to fill every desk immediately. Instead, distinguish desks available from clients available. Open enough workstations to serve observed hourly demand, retain a small trained reserve if expansion is imminent, and add the next block only when existing stations approach utilization. The same principle applies to factories: count machine-hours by recipe stage. Adding workers to a non-bottleneck stage builds work-in-process while the slow stage still limits finished output. A role audit should map every employee to the capacity variable that person is meant to expand.

Headquarters employees require an active plan as well as a desk and schedule. A seated HR manager with no HR plan may not be recognized by the hospital workflow. A logistics manager without a valid warehouse and vehicle chain cannot deliver. A headhunter with filters that exclude both employment types can search forever without candidates. Diagnose HQ labor in the order desk, schedule, plan, linked entities and filter feasibility. This order is faster than firing a specialist whose skill was never the problem.

Full-time and part-time employment bands

Employment status is the first and usually critical demand. In the current help model, full-time means 30–50 remembered hours per week and part-time means 10–30.

Treat the boundary at thirty carefully. Although both labels are commonly described with thirty as an endpoint, the employee's own tooltip is the final authority for that save and build. For robust rosters, avoid balancing exactly on an ambiguous boundary when one additional or missing hour would change satisfaction. A full-time target of forty to forty-eight hours and a part-time target of eighteen to twenty-eight hours leaves editing room. Never assume that paying hourly means status is irrelevant; the critical demand affects satisfaction even when total payroll is mathematically similar.

Hours are remembered through the current week. If a worker completed twenty hours on Monday and Tuesday and you redesign the visible future schedule on Wednesday, those completed hours still count. The counter resets Monday morning. This explains the frequent case where a future forty-hour pattern looks valid but the full-time box remains red: the employee may already have exceeded fifty during the transition. The Build 3674 employee detail shows hours worked, so inspect that value before declaring the schedule corrupt.

Part-time staff are useful for weekend, evening and edge coverage because their band matches residual hours that cannot form another full-time block. They can be less efficient for insurance, because a plan is priced per covered person and has a ten-person minimum rather than being priced per labor-hour. Compare cost per staffed hour: hourly wage plus plan charge divided by scheduled hours. A full-time worker may be cheaper per covered hour, while part-time workers may still win by eliminating paid idle hours and satisfying time-of-day restrictions.

Employee demands and priority

Demands are weighted signals, not a flat list. Critical, Important and Nice to Have have different satisfaction effects, and meeting the critical employment-status demand can offset lower-priority omissions.

Start with the critical line. Developer explanations consistently use full-time or part-time as the demand that must be protected. If that condition is wrong, decorative furniture and insurance rarely rescue the trend. Important conditions include stronger benefits or meaningful schedule preferences. Nice-to-have conditions can often remain unmet while satisfaction still rises, provided the critical condition and enough positive demands are satisfied. The exact combination matters: two ignored Important demands can overcome the positive balance that one met Critical demand would otherwise produce.

Translate each label into an auditable condition. No weekends means zero scheduled Saturday and Sunday hours, not merely a weekday majority. Four- or five-day demands concern distinct days, not total hours. Time-of-day demands require every assigned block to stay outside the prohibited interval. Equipment demands require the correct object and, for workstation demands, the employee must actually use the compliant station. Peaceful-environment and owner-happiness demands should be checked through their live tooltip because wording and thresholds have changed across versions.

Prioritize by operational cost. First repair a wrong employment band or impossible shift because it drives both dissatisfaction and coverage risk. Next handle inexpensive shared amenities that satisfy many employees. Then group insurance by HR plan. Last, decide whether a costly individual workstation preference is cheaper than replacing the employee. Record rejected demands deliberately; an amber item that is safely offset is a management choice, while an unnoticed red critical item is a failure. Recheck after training because higher skill can expose later demands.

Skill, wages and training choices

Higher skill can increase revenue or management reach, but training also raises wages and can reveal new demands. Train against a measured bottleneck rather than treating 100 percent as a universal prerequisite.

Manual training removes or interrupts a worker's normal assignment and historically advances the primary skill in discrete daily steps, commonly observed as ten percentage points ending around 17:00. HR-managed development is slower but allows the employee to remain operational. Build 3674 retains HR passive training; a 2025 developer reply explicitly says assigned employees train without being unassigned. Because timings and costs can vary by settings and patches, record starting skill, target, expense, wage before and after, and exact completion day for a reproducible comparison.

The economic training test is incremental value. For customer service, estimate additional customers served or retained as satisfaction rises. For factory staff, measure finished units per machine-hour before and after. For HR, value the extra management slots and cheaper development. For purchasing agents, value the lower unit purchase price across expected volume. Use payback days: total training cost plus lost contribution divided by expected daily contribution gain. A long payback employee should work and train passively; a role blocking an entire launch may justify direct training.

Do not rely on the old statement that self-trained workers are always cheaper than hiring experts. A March 2026 version-labelled player test reported trained lawyers and HR managers ending above the wage quoted for new 100-percent candidates, contrary to an older patch intention. That result needs broader reproduction, but it is enough to reject the universal claim. Before a large hiring wave, test one recruit through each path under the same difficulty and role, including negotiation, later wage changes, training charges and mature demands.

Worked roster: one long retail counter

A worked roster turns opening hours into employee requirements and exposes where part-time labor is useful. This example covers one continuously required retail station from 08:00 to 22:00 every day.

The station requires fourteen hours per day times seven days, or ninety-eight workstation-hours. Two full-time workers cannot cover it because their combined maximum is one hundred hours only in theory, leaving no room for incompatible day demands, schedule edits or absence; a valid pattern would also place both almost at fifty. A resilient design uses two full-time employees at forty-two hours each plus one part-time employee at fourteen hours. Worker A covers 08:00–14:00 Monday through Sunday for forty-two hours. Worker B covers 14:00–20:00 daily for forty-two. Worker C covers 20:00–22:00 daily for fourteen.

That simple pattern is valid only if none of the full-time workers objects to seven workdays or the part-timer objects to evenings. A demand-aware alternative gives Worker A 08:00–15:00 Monday through Saturday for forty-two, Worker B 15:00–22:00 Monday through Saturday for forty-two, and Worker C both seven-hour Sunday blocks for fourteen. This leaves Sunday to one part-time employee, which is impossible because one person cannot occupy both blocks simultaneously only if the workstation needs continuous presence; sequential blocks are permitted, but confirm daily-shift constraints and fatigue behavior in F1. Safer is two seven-hour part-time Sunday/edge blocks split between two people if demands require it.

Cost the schedule rather than worshiping symmetry. If demand after 20:00 contributes less than the evening wages and insurance allocation, close at 20:00 and remove fourteen hours. If hourly demand peaks around lunch, move the part-time hours to overlap 11:00–13:00 instead of covering an unprofitable edge. Staffing calculations start with required station-hours, but the final roster should maximize contribution by hour. Recheck the Insights graph after one full comparable week.

Worked roster: two-station peak service

A second example shows why opening hours and labor hours are not interchangeable. A store may need one station all day and a second only during peak demand.

Assume opening hours of 09:00–21:00 daily. Station One requires eighty-four weekly hours. Insights shows a second station is useful from 12:00–18:00 on weekdays and 11:00–20:00 on weekends, adding forty-eight hours. Total demand is 132 workstation-hours. Three forty-four-hour full-time employees can cover the arithmetic, but only if their day and time demands permit a compact split. One pattern is A covering 09:00–15:00 daily for forty-two, B covering 15:00–21:00 daily for forty-two, and C covering the forty-eight peak hours.

Worker C's pattern is six hours on five weekdays plus nine hours on Saturday and Sunday, totaling forty-eight across seven days. If C wants five days or no weekends, that pattern fails despite the correct total. Replace C with a twenty-four-hour weekday part-timer covering four peak days and a twenty-four-hour mixed part-timer covering the remaining weekday plus weekends. The two extra employees may increase insurance expense, but their demand-compatible shifts prevent satisfaction decay and allow targeted coverage. Alternatively, hire a full-timer without day restrictions through a headhunter.

Calculate the second station's break-even customers per hour. If wage plus allocated insurance and overhead is thirty dollars per hour and average contribution per served customer is fifteen, the station needs two otherwise-lost customers each hour. Queue observations matter: customers served by Station Two who would merely have waited for Station One are not necessarily incremental. Compare sales and lost-customer indicators with the second station staffed and unstaffed during matching days, while keeping price, marketing, inventory and service skill stable.

Sickness, temporary cover and continuity

HR temporary coverage protects scheduled shifts when managed workers are sick. It does not permanently replace resignations, retirements or poached employees.

The assignment chain is decisive. The sick employee must be assigned to an HR manager whose plan is active. A developer explanation states that HR supplies a temporary worker for the affected shift, and a separate reply distinguishes this from permanent replacement by a headhunter. If a sick icon appears while the business continues normally, the system may be working exactly as intended; inspect the schedule and EconoView cost before assuming no substitute exists.

Temporary cover has a cost and should be tracked. Older evidence quotes a surcharge, but that percentage should not be treated as a current Build 3674 constant without an in-game measurement. Record date, absent employee, scheduled hours, normal wage, temporary-staff transaction and whether the workstation remained covered. Three to five cases give a better estimate than one midnight total contaminated by wages, purchasing and training. If repeated illness appears, audit remembered hours and status compliance before blaming insurance; release-week players continue to associate overwork and bad schedules with frequent absence.

Continuity design ranks positions by downstream effect. A missing cleaner for two hours is different from an absent purchasing agent before an import deadline, a warehouse driver supplying ten stores, or the sole HR manager attached to insurance and training. HR temporary cover is operational insurance, but it does not fix circular management. Maintain spare management capacity, avoid assigning a headhunter into a chain that only they can replace, and review alerts after any HQ employee becomes sick or resigns.

Rival poaching and retention decisions

Rivals can approach employees with new offers. The player can meet the resulting demand or accept turnover, while a linked headhunter can automate permanent replacement.

EA 0.5 introduced employee poaching as both an attack and a player counterattack. A targeted employee normally provides a chance to retain them, often through a raise or changed demand. The correct response is economic, not sentimental. Compare the present value of the added wage and benefit cost with recruitment cost, vacancy loss, training cost and any customer-satisfaction loss from a lower-skill replacement. A highly skilled purchasing agent or bottleneck factory worker deserves a larger retention budget than excess low-traffic cashier capacity.

Use a break-even retention calculation. Added weekly retention cost equals wage increase times scheduled hours plus incremental insurance or demand expense. Replacement cost equals recruitment fee, temporary vacancy contribution lost, training expense, and higher defect or service cost during ramp-up. Retain when expected remaining employment weeks multiplied by added weekly cost is below replacement cost, adjusted for the probability of another demand. If a headhunter can supply a close replacement quickly, the vacancy term shrinks and replacement becomes more attractive.

Do not respond to a poaching wave by accepting every offer before checking the business. Rival attacks can expose an already overstaffed location. Sort targeted employees by role criticality, current skill, wage, schedule uniqueness and successor readiness. Preserve workers whose departure would break a route or leave an uncovered specialist workstation. Let interchangeable excess capacity leave. After decisions, verify that replacement automation has the correct HR links; accepting turnover without that audit can leave invisible schedule holes several days later.

Workforce cost and productivity controls

Payroll analysis should combine wages, benefits, recruiting, training and coverage costs, then relate the result to output that labor can influence.

Track direct labor by employee and shared labor by owner. Direct cost is hourly wage times hours actually worked. Add the employee's insurance-plan allocation, recruitment and negotiation cost amortized over expected tenure, training cost amortized over the remaining period, and temporary-cover charges. Headquarters managers should be allocated across the employees, routes or purchase volume they support. This produces a loaded labor cost that can be compared across full-time and part-time designs without pretending benefits are free.

Use role-specific productivity. Retail customer-service productivity can be contribution per staffed register-hour. Office productivity can be contribution per professional-hour. Cleaning productivity can be cleanliness maintained per scheduled hour, while security productivity is avoided theft relative to cost. Logistics productivity is delivered units or protected store contribution per route-hour. HR productivity is managed employees, training gain and avoided outage per manager-hour. No single score should rank all roles, but every role should have an observable reason to exist.

Set review triggers instead of constant micromanagement. Review when labor cost exceeds a chosen share of gross contribution, when an employee remains unassigned for more than a day, when satisfaction falls on two consecutive daily checks, when a workstation's utilization remains low for a full week, or when HR/headhunter capacity exceeds eighty-five percent. The eighty-five-percent management threshold is a planning buffer, not a game rule; it leaves room for a launch, temporary reassignment or sudden rival event without exceeding a hard cap.

Diagnostics: symptom to root cause

Employee problems often present in the wrong screen. A disciplined diagnostic order avoids replacing workers when the real fault is a schedule, plan, workstation or version state.

For falling satisfaction, open the employee detail and read every demand tooltip. Check the critical employment band against hours already worked plus future scheduled hours. Inspect prohibited days and times, then equipment assignment, insurance level and HR ownership. If all items are green but satisfaction still falls after a full day, note build, mods, employee, business, screenshots and submit F2. Do not infer a hidden demand from an unversioned forum claim.

For an unstaffed business, compare opening hours with every required workstation row. Confirm the day selector and whether shared schedule is enabled. Search for employees who were unassigned by training, business-type changes or reassignment. If auto-fill left gaps, verify that enough demand-compatible labor exists; Build 3014 improved auto-fill but cannot schedule an impossible pool. Check that the employee has not already exhausted the weekly band because of a midweek redesign.

For a stalled HQ function, verify in sequence: correct headquarters business, compatible desk and attachments, employee assignment, HQ schedule, role-specific BizMan plan, linked warehouse or HR manager, and feasible plan settings. For missing insurance, also check whether an offer is already pending. For missing permanent replacement, inspect circular headhunter coverage. For frozen training, update to Build 3674 and advance a day because the hotfix specifically addressed quit-state failures that disrupted training and logistics.

Employee register and recurring audit

A compact external or handwritten register turns hundreds of workers into an auditable system. It should record decisions, not duplicate every decorative field in MyEmployees.

Recommended employee fields are employee name or ID, role, primary skill, wage, employment status, current business, workstation, weekly scheduled hours, hours already worked, day/time restrictions, insurance demand, equipment demand, HR manager, headhunter coverage, training target, age or retirement warning, satisfaction trend, and last review date. Add a notes field for an intentionally unmet demand and the positive conditions that offset it. Without that note, a later manager cannot distinguish a deliberate tradeoff from neglect.

Recommended business-level fields are required workstation-hours by day, scheduled workstation-hours, uncovered hours, peak overlap hours, total loaded labor cost, sales or production contribution, lost-customer signal, sickness incidents, temporary-cover cost and open vacancies. Headquarters fields should include HR used/capacity, training queue, insurance tier and billed headcount, headhunter-to-HR links, candidate searches and pending insurance offers. These fields support the calculations in this guide without relying on unstable SEO tables.

Run a short Monday audit after counters reset: inspect employees near status limits, unresolved red Critical demands, unassigned workers, expiring candidates, newly revealed demands, HR groups above forty-two of fifty, and headhunters with impossible filters. Run a deeper audit before opening a business: recompute station-hours, verify every accepted candidate has a compatible roster, reserve management capacity, and test the first week against actual demand. Run an event audit after a rival poaching attack, manual training batch, HQ move or business-type change.

Preserve a small evidence log whenever a mechanic behaves unexpectedly. Record the game build, save difficulty, mods, in-game date and weekday, employee skill and status, plan owner, exact schedule before the change, exact schedule after it, and the next midnight result. Capture the employee tooltip and relevant EconoView lines. A result observed only during an old imported save is a diagnostic clue, not a universal mechanic. Repeat the same action in an unmodified Build 3674 test save when possible. This discipline is especially valuable for boundary hours, insurance billing, training wages and replacement delays, where old forum posts often describe behavior that was later patched. Keep the conclusion narrow: report what the test demonstrates, list uncontrolled variables, and retest after any public update before using it as a staffing rule across a large empire.

Add an exception-age field and a named owner for every unresolved problem. An unassigned hire, negative satisfaction trend or uncovered station that survives two audits should trigger a specific decision date rather than remain a permanent warning. Close each exception with the observed result: reassigned, schedule corrected, benefit purchased, search opened, or risk accepted until a stated review. This converts the register from a static census into a control loop and exposes recurring causes such as hiring candidates whose mature demands cannot fit the same weekend roster.