Employee satisfaction that protects sales
Resolve weighted demands before unhappy staff reduce service or resign.
Decision first
Fix critical schedule and insurance demands before low-priority furniture requests.
Employee satisfaction is a weighted response to fulfilled and unfulfilled demands over time. It is not customer satisfaction, skill, salary, or a one-click morale bonus.
Open the individual employee detail.
Complete operating playbook
- ARTICLE LENGTH
- 5,250 words
- DEEP-DIVE SECTIONS
- 18
- RESEARCH LEDGER
- 10
What satisfaction measures
Employee satisfaction is a weighted response to fulfilled and unfulfilled demands over time. It is not customer satisfaction, skill, salary, or a one-click morale bonus.
Each employee displays demands in MyEmployees. The interface classifies them as Critical, Important or Nice to Have and shows whether the current organization satisfies each condition. The status is dynamic: scheduling, workplace assignments, insurance ownership, player happiness and later skill development can change it. Satisfaction trends toward the balance created by those conditions rather than jumping permanently to a value when furniture is purchased.
Customer-facing employee skill can influence customer service and therefore store performance, but the worker's own satisfaction is a separate variable. A perfectly skilled employee can be unhappy, and a content low-skill employee can still limit service. Diagnose the correct layer: when the employee panel is falling, inspect demands; when business customer service is weak, inspect staffing, employee skill and employee satisfaction together; when sales are weak despite both, inspect price, stock, marketing, traffic and capacity.
The practical objective is stable retention and adequate operational performance at the lowest sensible accommodation cost. One hundred percent is useful but not mandatory for every worker. A developer explains that meeting the critical employment demand can outweigh an unmet Important insurance demand, although another severe demand may reverse the net trend. Manage the weighted balance deliberately rather than making every icon green regardless of cost.
Action checklist
- Open the individual employee detail.
- Separate employee from customer satisfaction.
- Read priority and tooltip for every demand.
- Watch trend over complete days.
- Optimize stable retention, not visual perfection.
Current priority model
Critical, Important and Nice to Have replaced the old High, Medium and Low labels. Their effects are unequal and cumulative.
The full-time or part-time employment demand is normally Critical and should be repaired first. Developer examples define full-time as 30–50 remembered weekly hours. Current references use 10–30 for part-time. A wrong status condition can push satisfaction down even when furniture and insurance are supplied. Hours completed earlier in the week remain counted until Monday, so the demand may stay red after a future schedule is corrected.
Important demands exert meaningful pressure but are not always individually fatal. Current 2026 developer discussion explicitly treats health insurance as Important and says a correctly met employment status can still produce net-positive satisfaction without it. Two ignored Important demands can overcome that balance. Nice-to-have demands are lower-cost candidates for intentional deferral, but an employee with few positive conditions may still need them.
Use a priority ledger: demand, level, exact tooltip rule, current status, marginal accommodation cost, affected employees and next review. Repair red Critical rows immediately. Rank Important rows by satisfaction exposure and shared-cost leverage. Address cheap shared Nice-to-have conditions when they improve many workers. Expensive individual requests should face a retain-versus-replace calculation rather than an automatic purchase.
Action checklist
- Repair employment status first.
- Count combined unmet Important demands.
- Use shared accommodations for leverage.
- Record intentionally deferred demands.
- Recheck after Monday reset.
Schedule demands
Many apparent morale bugs are remembered-hour or time-placement problems. The weekly total alone does not prove compliance.
For full-time, calculate hours already worked plus hours still scheduled. Keep the total between thirty and fifty. For part-time, use the live tooltip around the ten-to-thirty range. Midweek edits cannot erase completed hours; a worker can show a forty-hour future template while the current-week total is fifty-six. Install permanent changes Monday or create a temporary transition pattern.
No Weekends means no Saturday or Sunday hours. Four Days and Five Days refer to distinct scheduled days; one short block counts as a day. No Morning or No Evening applies to each assigned block and its tooltip boundary. Shared schedule can copy an otherwise valid weekday pattern into a forbidden weekend. Disable it and inspect all seven days before assuming the employee is unreasonable.
Treat every red schedule demand as a coverage problem and a satisfaction problem. Remove an invalid hour only after ensuring the workstation remains covered by a compatible employee or after deciding to close the unprofitable hour. Randomly moving the worker until the icon turns green can create unseen gaps. A compatibility matrix solves both objectives: constrained workers receive feasible blocks first, flexible workers fill the residual.
Action checklist
- Add completed and future hours.
- Count distinct days, not long shifts.
- Inspect all seven day tabs.
- Respect tooltip time boundaries.
- Preserve workstation coverage while repairing.
Workplace and equipment demands
Furniture demands are satisfied by the employee's actual environment and workstation, not merely by owning the named object somewhere.
Shared amenities such as a refrigerator or sofa can satisfy multiple workers when placed in the correct business. Workstation demands require assignment to the compatible desk, chair or equipment. A large office can contain both compliant and noncompliant stations; assigning the employee to the wrong one leaves the demand red. Rename stations by equipment class and room so the schedule exposes the assignment.
Cost an equipment demand by marginal change. If an existing unused compliant desk can be assigned, cost is near zero. If one chair upgrade satisfies a high-value specialist, compare purchase cost with replacement cost. If a demand forces a larger HQ, blueprint rebuild or lost workstation, include rent, moving disruption and capacity opportunity cost. The visible furniture price alone understates the decision.
When an equipment demand appears after training, do not immediately fire or rebuild. Confirm the employee is scheduled at the intended station, advance a day, and inspect the tooltip. If the object is present but no check appears, move only the employee or station in a reproducible test. Capture Build 3674, object name, attachment state and screenshot for F2; old threads about similarly named desks may concern layouts fixed years earlier.
Action checklist
- Place amenities in the correct business.
- Assign employees to compliant stations.
- Rename desk classes for audits.
- Calculate layout opportunity cost.
- Reproduce persistent mismatches before F2.
Health-insurance demand
Insurance belongs to an HR manager's plan. Coverage follows HR assignment, and a higher tier satisfies an equal or lower tier demand.
Bronze, Silver and Gold were introduced officially in EA 0.2. To establish coverage, schedule an HR manager in a Headquarters, create the HR plan, visit the hospital insurance manager, choose that HR manager, wait for the offer and accept or negotiate it. Employees assigned to that HR group receive its plan. Gold can satisfy Gold, Silver and Bronze demands; Silver can satisfy Silver and Bronze, but not Gold.
Insurance has a ten-employee billing minimum. An early patch changed behavior from refusing to activate below ten to activating while charging for ten. Therefore a single insured employee can carry the effective cost of ten until the group fills. The exact Build 3674 quote depends on tier, negotiation, HR skill and settings; use the plan and EconoView rather than old claims such as eighteen dollars with an unspecified billing period.
Insurance is currently described by the developer as Important rather than Critical. An early company can defer it when the critical schedule is met and no other severe demand pushes the balance negative. At scale, group workers by tier or use Gold broadly to reduce assignment complexity. Compare savings from tier segmentation with extra HR wages, ten-person minima and audit risk.
Action checklist
- Assign worker and plan to the same HR manager.
- Use equal or higher insurance tier.
- Account for ten-person minimum billing.
- Read the live negotiated quote.
- Defer only while the net trend is safe.
Owner happiness and environment conditions
Some demands reference the owner's state or a peaceful workplace. These are organization conditions, not ordinary weekly-hour arithmetic.
A peaceful-work-environment tooltip has historically referenced conditions such as the player's happiness or workplace features. Because wording and implementation have changed, the Build 3674 tooltip is the authority. Record the exact condition, current player happiness and environment objects. Do not remove radios, redecorate every office or assume noise mechanics from an old complaint without reading the current rule.
If owner happiness is required, maintain the threshold with durable activities near home or work and note the buff duration. The economic question is whether periodic owner time costs less than replacing all workers who share the demand. A condition affecting many high-value HQ specialists can justify routine maintenance; an isolated low-value worker may be cheaper to replace through a mature headhunter search that excludes the demand.
For environment diagnostics, change one variable. Hold schedule, insurance and player state stable, remove or add the suspected object, advance a full day and observe the check plus satisfaction trend. A green checkbox without immediate percentage recovery may be normal because satisfaction adjusts over time. Separate condition recognition from recovery rate in the test log.
Action checklist
- Read the current tooltip verbatim in-game.
- Record owner state and buff duration.
- Compare shared burden with replacement.
- Change one environment variable.
- Separate checkbox change from trend recovery.
Skill milestones and new demands
Developing employees can reveal additional demands. A clean candidate at low skill is not guaranteed to remain demand-free at maturity.
Official EA 0.2 notes make demands skill-based, and later developer replies explain that headhunters can filter only demands visible at recruitment. A low-skill candidate may acquire insurance, equipment or schedule preferences as skill rises. A near-100-percent candidate normally exposes the mature set, making high-skill headhunting useful when demand certainty matters more than recruitment cost.
Training also raises wages under the current economy. Before sending a large cohort toward 100 percent, reserve for wage growth, insurance and layout changes. Record demands at the start and at regular skill milestones. Do not depend on an unversioned claim that a specific demand always appears at exactly fifty or seventy-five percent; public evidence shows the broad skill relationship but not a guaranteed universal breakpoint.
Use staged development. Train customer-service or factory employees to the level that clears the current bottleneck, observe contribution and demands, then continue only when payback remains positive. Train HR and purchasing specialists more aggressively when their skill expands management capacity or savings across many workers and units. The correct target is the point where marginal output or scale benefit no longer justifies marginal wage and demand cost.
Action checklist
- Expect later demands from low-skill hires.
- Log demands at skill milestones.
- Reserve for wage and benefit growth.
- Reject exact unverified demand breakpoints.
- Train to an economic target.
Satisfaction trend and quitting risk
A demand checkbox is an input; the satisfaction percentage and its direction show the accumulated employee state.
After repairing a demand, allow the system to advance normally and observe consecutive daily values. Satisfaction generally changes gradually. A worker at low satisfaction may remain at risk while recovering, so preserve schedule stability and ensure replacement coverage. A newly red condition can be more urgent for a worker already near departure than for one at 100 percent even when the demand priority is identical.
Build a risk score from current satisfaction, daily change, number and priority of unmet demands, role criticality, replacement lead time and unique schedule fit. The score is a management heuristic, not a hidden quit formula. Sort intervention by expected contribution at risk. A sole driver supplying multiple stores or one purchasing agent before an order deadline deserves attention before an interchangeable surplus cashier.
If a worker quits despite every visible demand being green, verify that the demands were green for a complete day, check rival-poaching messages, weekly-hour history and Build 3674 state. The launch hotfix fixed employees stuck trying to quit, which had disrupted training and logistics. Advance through the next day after updating. If the behavior persists in a clean save, capture the timeline and submit F2.
Action checklist
- Record daily percentage and direction.
- Prioritize low values with negative trend.
- Weight operational criticality.
- Check poaching and remembered hours.
- Advance a day after Build 3674 update.
Retain, accommodate or replace
Every costly demand is a choice among accommodation, redesigned work, or replacement. Compare total forward cost.
Accommodation cost includes item purchase, insurance, extra wages, reduced opening flexibility, lost workstation capacity and owner time. Replacement cost includes recruitment or headhunter expense, vacancy contribution, temporary coverage, training, schedule repair and uncertainty in the next candidate's future demands. Retention after a rival offer adds the raise over expected tenure. Use the lowest expected cost that preserves required output.
Calculate break-even weeks: one-time accommodation cost divided by weekly replacement-cost saving, or replacement cost divided by weekly accommodation saving. A five-thousand-dollar desk redesign to retain a specialist may repay quickly if vacancy loses two thousand per day. The same redesign for an excess cleaner may never repay. Include sunk training only as information about replacement output; money already spent should not force an uneconomic future decision.
At scale, standardization reduces mistakes. One Gold-insurance HR group may cost more per person than tiered groups but eliminate misassignment and additional HR managers. Standard desk blueprints may satisfy common demands despite slightly higher furniture cost. Apply standardization where audit savings exceed price differences. Keep exceptions visible so a later reassignment does not place a demanding employee on a noncompliant workstation.
Action checklist
- Price accommodation and replacement forward.
- Calculate break-even weeks.
- Ignore sunk cost in the final choice.
- Standardize high-frequency demands.
- Keep exceptions visible.
Worked satisfaction diagnosis
Consider a 78-percent-skill full-time cashier whose satisfaction falls from 54 to 46 despite a refrigerator and Silver insurance.
First inspect the Critical status. The repeating schedule shows forty hours, but on Thursday Hours Worked is thirty-six and twenty future hours remain after a midweek opening-hour change. Projected total is fifty-six, so full-time is currently unmet. Silver insurance and refrigerator cannot offset the severe schedule problem. Remove enough future hours to stop additional excess, preserve register coverage with another employee, and plan the permanent forty-hour template for Monday.
Second inspect remaining demands. Suppose No Weekends is Important and one Sunday shift remains because shared schedule copied the weekday pattern. Remove or reassign it. Suppose Gold insurance is requested; Silver is below demand and therefore not valid. Decide whether moving the worker to a Gold HR group triggers an otherwise unused ten-person billing minimum. If the critical schedule and weekend condition produce positive recovery, insurance may be deferred until the group fills.
Third measure recovery. Record Friday through Monday satisfaction, checkboxes, worked hours and any rival messages. If the full-time box turns green only after Monday, weekly memory—not a broken refrigerator—caused the delay. If it remains red with thirty-one to forty future hours and zero completed, reproduce without mods. This example shows why the diagnostic order is priority, arithmetic, time placement, benefits, environment, then bug report.
Action checklist
- Project current-week total.
- Repair Critical before benefits.
- Inspect shared weekend assignments.
- Check insurance tier and minimum cost.
- Observe through Monday reset.
Satisfaction and business performance
Employee satisfaction matters economically through retention, service and continuity, but its contribution must be separated from other store constraints.
For customer-facing roles, compare customer-service insight, customers served, queues and contribution per staffed hour before and after a satisfaction repair while holding skill, price, stock and marketing stable. An improvement in the employee percentage does not guarantee more sales when traffic or demand is already exhausted. Conversely, a small service improvement can be valuable in a high-margin crowded store.
For factories and support roles, use different outcomes. Track finished units at the bottleneck, failed deliveries, stockouts, purchase price, training throughput and sick-cover incidents. Satisfaction primarily protects continuity and turnover when the role's direct output formula is not exposed. Estimate avoided vacancy loss rather than forcing every manager into a retail-customer model.
Set a service threshold from economics. If accommodating a demand costs one hundred per week and raises expected contribution by three hundred while reducing replacement risk, it is worthwhile. If satisfaction rises from ninety-five to one hundred with no output or retention difference and requires another HQ, defer it. The game rewards functioning systems, not ceremonial perfection.
Action checklist
- Choose role-specific outcome metrics.
- Control price, stock and marketing.
- Measure avoided vacancy for support roles.
- Compare marginal benefit with cost.
- Do not buy cosmetic perfection.
HR management of satisfaction
HR reduces satisfaction risk through passive training, sick coverage and insurance ownership, but does not automatically satisfy every employee demand.
Assign each worker to an HR manager with enough capacity. At full skill the current planning cap is fifty, not the obsolete twenty-five. Set the training target intentionally; the old default commonly stopped below full skill. Choose temporary sick coverage according to continuity value. Attach insurance to the HR manager whose group contains the employee. A plan on another manager does not satisfy the demand.
Capacity should include buffer. An HR group at fifty of fifty cannot absorb a new launch, replacement or reassignment without moving someone. Use an operating threshold around forty-two to forty-five and add the next manager before the hard limit. Grouping by insurance can leave one manager full while another has unused capacity; track both headcount and plan tier rather than balancing totals blindly.
HR does not permanently replace resignations, retirements or poached workers. Link a headhunter to the relevant HR groups. A departing worker can be highly satisfied before retirement or can leave because of a rival event, so satisfaction management alone is not succession planning. Audit the replacement's demands and schedule after arrival.
Action checklist
- Assign every retained worker to HR.
- Use current fifty-person cap.
- Keep capacity buffer.
- Match insurance to the correct manager.
- Link headhunter for permanent turnover.
Diagnostics and false positives
When satisfaction behaves unexpectedly, eliminate stale state and hidden schedule context before changing the workforce.
Check build, mods and in-game weekday. Read every demand tooltip and checkbox. Add completed plus future hours, inspect all seven days, confirm business and workstation assignment, then inspect HR owner and insurance tier. Verify player or environment conditions. Advance a normal day after correction. This fixed sequence prevents random changes from destroying the evidence.
Training can leave an employee unassigned when direct training ends; passive HR training should not. A business-type change can invalidate role assignment. An HQ employee can be seated but lack a plan. An insurance offer may still be pending. A headhunter exclusion may have selected a mature replacement with a different demand. Each symptom looks like arbitrary morale until the chain is inspected.
If all conditions pass, reproduce in a clean Build 3674 save or copied state. Record employee skill, wage, demands, satisfaction before and after, exact weekly schedule, Hours Worked, HR manager, insurance quote, object names and midnight transition. Submit F2 with the shortest reproduction. Do not cite a years-old complaint as proof that a current defect is intentional.
Action checklist
- Check build, mods and weekday.
- Follow one diagnostic sequence.
- Advance one full day after correction.
- Preserve before-and-after evidence.
- Use F2 for clean reproduction.
Satisfaction audit register
A compact register makes weighted demands manageable across hundreds of employees and supports controlled policy changes.
Track employee, role, business, skill, wage, satisfaction value, seven-day trend, employment band, completed and future hours, distinct days, time restrictions, equipment station, insurance demand and tier, HR manager, headhunter coverage, next demand review and decision note. Store the tooltip interpretation for unusual conditions. This is enough to diagnose most problems without copying every UI field.
Track aggregate metrics: employees with red Critical demands, employees with two or more unmet Important demands, negative-trend count, average satisfaction by business and role, quits, poaching events, accommodation spend, insurance minimum waste, temporary-cover cost and vacancy days. Normalize turnover by workforce size. A large empire can have more quits but a lower rate than a small unstable store.
Run Monday audits after hour reset, post-training audits when demands can change, launch audits after new schedules, and event audits after poaching or HQ moves. Change one policy at a time—insurance grouping, hiring skill, standardized desks or status mix—and compare two equivalent periods. Preserve exceptions; a broad average can hide the sole driver whose departure stops ten stores.
Action checklist
- Maintain employee-level trend fields.
- Count priority-weighted exceptions.
- Normalize turnover by headcount.
- Audit after resets and structural changes.
- Compare one policy change at a time.
Build 3674 reproducible tests
Satisfaction mechanics should be tested with one controlled demand at a time and conclusions limited to the observed version and settings.
For priority balance, start Monday with a worker whose employment demand is met and one Important condition unmet. Keep schedule and environment unchanged, record daily values, then satisfy the Important condition and repeat. Add a second unmet Important demand only in a copied test. This measures direction without claiming the internal weight. Do not compare different workers because hidden mature demands and starting values differ.
For insurance, assign identical-role workers to HR managers with different tiers while holding schedules and workplace constant. Confirm equal-or-higher acceptance from checkboxes. Record plan quote, billed minimum, EconoView transaction and satisfaction. For equipment, move the same employee between named compliant and noncompliant workstations. For weekly hours, begin with zero Monday hours and test nonboundary totals before the shared thirty boundary.
Publish build, difficulty, mods, employee skill, exact demands, starting satisfaction, schedule, HR capacity, insurance state and each midnight result. Repeat after any update mentioning employees, scheduler, training, benefits or quits. A test proves that the observed setup behaved a certain way; it does not reveal a universal hidden formula. This standard is stricter than an SEO guide and makes later corrections possible.
Action checklist
- Start tests after Monday reset.
- Use the same employee across conditions.
- Change one demand input.
- Record billing and midnight transitions.
- Limit conclusions to observed controls.
Demand-change control as employees develop
A developing employee is not a fixed requirements list. Skill growth can reveal additional demands, so HR training and low-skill hiring create a future accommodation risk that must be reviewed deliberately.
Create demand checkpoints at acceptance, after material skill changes, after manual or passive training, and before a critical reassignment. Record the complete demand list, priorities, current status and satisfaction trend. A headhunter filter screens demands that exist when the candidate is found; developer guidance warns that a lower-skill worker can develop more later. Therefore a clean low-skill profile is not evidence that the employee will remain easy to schedule or insure at maturity.
Price this uncertainty during hiring. Expected future-demand cost = probability of a newly incompatible demand × cost to accommodate or replace. Suppose a developing specialist has an estimated twenty-five percent chance, based on the company's own version-labelled cohort, of revealing a demand that costs $4,000 in schedule changes or benefits. Add $1,000 expected cost to that hiring path. Do not publish the twenty-five percent as a game-wide rate; it is a local decision input requiring cohort size, role, build and settings.
When a new demand appears, do not immediately undo training or fire the worker. Recalculate weighted trend, identify whether the condition is Critical, Important or Nice to Have, and test shared accommodations. A newly requested refrigerator that several colleagues also need can be cheap per employee. A unique day restriction for the sole weekend specialist may be structurally impossible. Give each exception a decision owner and review date, preserving the old and new demand snapshots so later analysis can distinguish development from an accidental reassignment.
Action checklist
- Capture demands at acceptance and skill checkpoints.
- Treat low-skill profiles as incomplete information.
- Price expected future-demand cost locally.
- Recalculate weighted trend before acting.
- Seek shared accommodations before replacement.
- Preserve before-and-after demand evidence.
| Checkpoint | Fields | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| Acceptance | Skill, wage, demands, priorities, intended roster | Accept, reject or price contingency |
| Skill milestone | New demands and daily trend | Accommodate, defer or redesign |
| Training completion | Assignment, hours, HR plan, benefits | Restore and verify service |
| Critical reassignment | New station and schedule compatibility | Approve only after demand audit |
Satisfaction economics and decision thresholds
Accommodation should be compared with expected turnover and disruption cost over the same horizon. Visual perfection is not the objective; stable profitable retention is.
Calculate accommodation cost as benefit premium change + furniture or layout cost amortization + added wages or idle hours + management overhead. Calculate expected departure loss as departure probability during the horizon × recruiting, vacancy, temporary cover, training, ramp and schedule-repair cost. The game does not publish a universal probability curve, so use satisfaction level and direction as risk bands rather than pretending to know a hidden formula. Update estimates from the company's own Build 3674 incidents.
Worked example: Gold coverage would add $900 during the review horizon because it opens a separate ten-person minimum. The employee is a key purchasing agent; a departure is estimated to cost $14,000 in recruitment and interrupted import economics. If the upgrade reduces estimated departure risk from ten percent to three percent, expected avoided loss is 0.07×$14,000=$980. Net expected value is $80 before secondary benefits, so the decision is marginal and depends on cash reserve and other Gold candidates. If three compatible employees share the floor, the upgrade is easier to justify.
Adopt explicit thresholds. Repair every red Critical demand unless the worker is already in an approved replacement transition. Escalate an Important miss when daily trend is negative, a second Important miss appears, or expected departure loss exceeds accommodation cost by the policy margin. Defer a Nice-to-have condition only with a positive trend and review date. Protect cash for payroll, inventory and existing benefits; a theoretically positive accommodation that causes an immediate liquidity failure is not safe.
Action checklist
- Compare costs over one defined horizon.
- Use risk bands instead of invented quit probabilities.
- Repair Critical violations by default.
- Escalate combined Important misses.
- Require positive trend and review date for deferral.
- Apply a cash-reserve gate.
| Input | Worked value |
|---|---|
| Incremental Gold cost | $900 |
| Replacement/disruption loss | $14,000 |
| Risk before | 10% |
| Risk after | 3% |
| Expected avoided loss | $980 |
| Net expected value | +$80 before shared benefits |
Portfolio triage and weekly satisfaction control
At scale, the right unit of work is an exception queue. Prioritize by weighted decline and operational consequence, then close each case with observed recovery.
Create a triage score from satisfaction band, daily change, highest unmet priority, count of unmet Important demands, role consequence, replacement lead time and unique schedule fit. Keep the score explicitly managerial rather than claiming it mirrors the game's hidden quit logic. A sole logistics manager at sixty satisfaction and falling can outrank a cashier at forty and stable because the manager's departure may interrupt many stores. Record the reason for the rank.
On Monday after weekly hours reset, recompute FT/PT status before interpreting schedule-related decline. Reconcile assignments, workstations, HR plans and insurance tiers. Midweek, review newly revealed demands, workers returning from training, sickness cover and permanent replacements. On Friday, compare accommodation spending, negative-trend count, quits, poaching, vacancy days and insurance floor waste with the prior comparable week. Change one policy at a time so causality remains visible.
Close an exception only after the demand status and daily trend respond through a complete update cycle. Buying furniture, accepting insurance or editing a schedule is an action, not a result. If the expected response does not appear, follow the diagnostic chain and preserve screenshots. For a clean Build 3674 anomaly, record build, difficulty, mods, weekday, exact hours, employee skill, all demands and before/after values. This evidence can support F2 reporting and protects the guide from stale forum generalization.
Action checklist
- Rank weighted decline and role consequence together.
- Recompute schedule status after Monday reset.
- Audit training, sickness and replacement transitions.
- Compare equivalent weekly metrics.
- Close cases only after observed recovery.
- Preserve a complete Build 3674 reproduction.
| Cadence | Required output |
|---|---|
| Monday | Clean hour bands, assignments, plans and tiers |
| Daily exceptions | Negative trend, new demand, transition or failed accommodation |
| Friday | Spend, turnover, vacancy and floor-waste comparison |
| Post-update | Version-labelled regression result for affected mechanic |
Research ledger
These links establish mechanics or provide a reproducible lead. Any balance-sensitive number still has to be checked in the current save.
Questions answered
Do all demands need to be green?
No. Demands have unequal weights. Meeting the Critical employment-status demand can outweigh one unmet Important insurance demand, but multiple Important omissions or another severe demand can create a negative trend. Watch the actual direction across complete daily updates. Record intentionally unmet demands with accommodation cost, operational consequence, positive conditions that offset them and a review date; otherwise a deliberate tradeoff is indistinguishable from neglect.
Why is full-time red at forty scheduled hours?
Hours already worked earlier in the week still count. Add completed and future hours and inspect all days. The counter resets Monday morning; a midweek edit changes the future but not history. Build a temporary remaining-week roster that keeps the projected total inside the employee's band, then install the intended repeating pattern after reset. Also inspect distinct-day and time restrictions: a valid weekly total can still leave an Important schedule demand unmet. If the status remains red after a clean Monday with valid tooltips, reproduce without mods and record consecutive daily results before reporting a defect.
Is health insurance Critical?
A May 2026 developer reply describes it as Important. It can sometimes be deferred if employment status is satisfied and no other demand reverses the balance. The employee's live priority label remains authoritative. Recheck after skill development because another Important demand can appear, and include the ten-person billing floor when deciding whether immediate coverage is economical.
Does Gold cover Silver and Bronze requests?
Yes. Developer documentation says employees accept their requested tier or higher. Coverage follows the HR manager's group; Gold on a different HR manager does not cover the employee. Compare consolidation against separate ten-person billing floors, manager capacity and incremental premium. Do not assume stronger coverage creates an extra satisfaction bonus beyond satisfying the stated demand unless a Build 3674 test shows it.
Why did a new demand appear after hiring?
Demands are skill-based. A headhunter can filter only demands visible at recruitment, so low-skill workers may reveal more while developing. Near-mature hires offer greater demand certainty. Audit demand snapshots at acceptance, skill milestones and training completion. Price low-skill hiring with a local contingency for later schedule, furniture or insurance obligations instead of assuming the initial profile is permanent.
Will HR keep employees satisfied automatically?
No. HR provides passive training, sick cover and an insurance-plan owner, but schedules, day restrictions, equipment, environment and employment status still require valid configuration. Treat the HR plan as an administrative link, not a universal morale source. Reconcile every managed employee to a compatible workstation, legal weekly band and adequate tier, and verify the satisfaction direction after a complete update cycle.
When should I replace rather than accommodate?
Compare forward accommodation cost with recruitment, vacancy, training, schedule repair and uncertainty. Replace when expected ongoing accommodation exceeds replacement loss and the successor can preserve required output. Use one horizon and include insurance billing floors, temporary cover and ramp loss. Ignore sunk training in the final choice, but use current skill to estimate the output a replacement must restore.
How should I prove a satisfaction bug?
Use Build 3674 without mods, start after Monday reset, record tooltips, worked and future hours, workstation, HR and insurance, change one condition and capture consecutive midnight results before submitting F2. Include the employee's skill, every demand and priority, starting satisfaction, exact game time and expected versus actual outcome. A cropped red icon or an observation from an imported Early Access save is not enough to establish current mechanics.