ArcSense · People & Culture
Your team is an asset. Keep a record of it.
A board asks whether you are staffed to plan. An insurer asks for the code of conduct. A new hire asks for the handbook. In most organizations under a hundred people, the answers live in one person’s head and a folder nobody has opened since the last time somebody asked.
Employment records, the role register, the headcount plan, onboarding completion, review cycles, and the people policies behind them — the governance record of the team, kept alongside every other record the organization is accountable for.
A headcount plan nobody compares
The target was set at the start of the fundraise or the budget cycle and never revisited. Hiring diverged from it within a quarter. Because nothing reads the two against each other, the plan quietly becomes a historical document that everyone still cites.
Onboarding that only one person knows happened
The person who ran it knows. Nobody else does, there is nothing to show an auditor, and that person may not be here in a year. The record of whether a joiner was actually onboarded is the first thing to disappear and the last thing anyone thinks to keep.
A handbook that looks current
Published three years ago, it is still there, still opens, still reads fine. Nothing about it announces that the parental leave section predates a legislative change. Only a review date does — and only if one was ever set.
What changes
The team becomes a record you can be asked about
People & Culture is not an HR system. It does not run payroll, track candidates, or store what anyone was told in a review. It holds the small set of facts about the team that a board, an auditor, an insurer or a grant funder actually asks for — and keeps them where the rest of the organization’s governance record already lives.
Built for the founder, HR lead or operations manager who is doing all three jobs at once in a 5–80 person organization, and who needs to answer are we staffed to plan, were this quarter’s hires onboarded, and are our people policies current without reconstructing the answer each time.
When it’s working
- You can say to a board, from the record, that you are staffed to plan and the critical roles are filled
- Every joiner this quarter has an onboarding completion date, or is visibly missing one
- The Code of Conduct a client, insurer or funder asks for by name is published and current
- The headcount plan is compared with the roster instead of being cited from memory
- The performance cycle has a completion figure you can defend, not an impression
- The people-facing policies carry review dates, so a legislative change finds a document with an owner
Aggregate only
Review cycles are recorded as a population and a completion figure. There is no per-employee performance record here, and no column that could hold one — which is what lets the module run on the same access model as everything else.
One directory
The employment register extends the same people directory that names risk owners, policy owners and directors across the platform. Add a person once; every module that needs to name them already can.
Print-ready
Team structure by department, the review cycle register, the training log, the handbook and the code of conduct each print from the live record — the document you hand over is the one you maintain.
The module
Six things worth keeping a record of
Each is a fact about the team that somebody outside the team will eventually ask for. Together they replace the org spreadsheet, the onboarding checklist in someone’s drafts, and the handbook whose last review date nobody can name.
01
Team structure
Who is employed, in which department, on what basis, since when. The employment register reads names from the same directory every other module resolves owners to — one list of people, not a second one that drifts.
02
Role register
The roles the organization has decided it needs, which of them are critical, and whether each is filled. A critical role with nobody in it is the most important row in the register, and the one a spreadsheet loses first.
03
Headcount plan
A stated target per period, by department or org-wide, that the roster is read against. Not derived from open roles — a plan is a decision somebody made, and the useful reading is where it disagrees with reality.
04
Onboarding & training
The onboarding guide, a completion date per joiner, and the people training log. The date takes five seconds to record and is the only evidence of onboarding that survives the person who ran it.
05
Review cycles
That a performance cycle ran, over how many people, and how much of it completed — recorded in aggregate, never per employee. The governance question is whether the cycle happened and finished, and that is all this holds.
06
Handbook & Code of Conduct
Two documents with an owner, a status, an effective date and a review date each. Published means the team has been given it; a review date means somebody will be reminded before it quietly goes out of date.
Scope, on purpose
Four things it will not do, and why that is the point
Every one of these is a real need with a dedicated tool that does it well. Keeping them out is what keeps this module a governance record rather than a second copy of a system you already run.
Not an applicant tracker
Roles and headcount, never candidates. That a role exists, is critical, and is unfilled is governance. Who applied for it last Tuesday is a workflow with hand-offs, and belongs in a tool built for one.
Not payroll or benefits
Compensation, benefits enrolment and time off stay in whatever system pays people. ATLAS would only ever mirror that data, and a mirror that drifts is worse than no copy at all.
Not a per-employee performance file
What any individual was told in a review is not a record a board or an auditor reads. Holding it would make this module more sensitive than anything else on the platform, for no governance return.
Not an org chart
Departments, not reporting lines. A reporting graph changes far more often than the thing being governed, and the question a board actually asks — how many people, in what functions, are the critical roles filled — is answered by grouping.
Pairs with
Corporate Secretary keeps the legal register. People & Culture keeps the employment one.
Directors and officers are a statutory record with filing deadlines. Employees are an operational one with onboarding dates and review cycles. The two are different registers over different populations, and the platform keeps them that way — while the training log that Security and AI Governance already maintain becomes the same log People & Culture reads, so one session is never recorded twice.
Board records that hold up
Directors and officers, the minute book, written resolutions, the cap table, and the filing calendar.
Explore Corporate SecretaryAI Companion · People Lens
Ask the staffing question and get the register’s answer
When you connect Claude to ATLAS using your ATLAS ID, your companion reads the same role register, headcount plan and review cycles you do. No extra configuration required.
Ask the questions the record is there to answer, and keep it current from the conversation where the fact came up:
- list_people_rolesFind every critical role with nobody in it, before the board asks which ones are covered.
- create_people_review_cycleOpen this year’s cycle with its population stated, so the completion figure has a denominator.
- update_people_employmentRecord a departure or a department move the moment it is decided, not at the next audit.
Staffed to Plan, in Action
// Grounded Staffing Inquiry
User: "Which critical roles are still open, and are we at our headcount target for this period?"
AI Companion: [Calling list_people_roles, list_people_headcount_plan, list_people_employment]
✓ 2 critical roles open — Head of Delivery, Finance Lead
✓ H2 2026 target 30 · active headcount 26 · Delivery 2 under plan
Get started
Put the team on the record
Set up your organization in minutes. Most teams have their roles registered, a headcount target set and both people policies in draft in a single working session.
Start with People & CultureHandbook and Code of Conduct drafting
Need hands-on help? Use included advisory hours to have both people policies reviewed and brought current, with review dates and owners set before you publish.
Get help with this module