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Employee best practices
Start with a focused job, give the employee only the context and access it needs, and make the expected outcome easy to review. Expand the workflow after its instructions, tools, and safeguards are reliable.
Role and outcome
Define one job and what done means
Give the employee a role narrow enough to evaluate. State the inputs it receives, the output it should produce, the decisions it may make, and the conditions that require review. Prefer an observable outcome over a broad instruction such as "help with operations."
Role: Review the weekly revenue pipeline and prepare an exception report.
Use the connected CRM and finance data in read-only mode. Flag material changes, missing owners, and deals whose forecast category conflicts with recent activity.
Done when: Produce a concise report with evidence for every finding, a proposed owner, and a list of follow-up questions. Do not update records or contact customers.Context
Separate durable knowledge from the task
Put stable procedures, review standards, and reusable methods in employee instructions or skills. Keep the current request, date range, audience, and one-time constraints in the task. Use Memory for relevant private or organizational knowledge and Storage for working files that should remain available to the employee.
Access
Start read-only and grant deliberately
Begin with the smallest useful set of accounts, data, and tools. Read-only access is usually enough for research, reconciliation, monitoring, and draft preparation. Add write access when the job genuinely requires a change, and scope each grant to the employee identity that performs the work.
Grant a credentialHuman review
Put approvals around consequential actions
Let the employee gather evidence and prepare work without unnecessary interruptions. Require approval before it sends a message, publishes a report, updates a system of record, acknowledges an alert, or takes another action your organization wants a person to review. An approval should describe the exact proposed action, not grant a broad temporary exception.
Review how approvals workIteration
Review outcomes before adding automation
Inspect recent activity, findings, usage, and pending approvals. Correct the durable instruction or skill when the same problem could affect future work; correct only the current task when the issue is specific to that request. Automate a recurring workflow after its inputs, expected output, failure handling, and review boundaries are clear.
Common mistakes
Avoid vague roles and premature access
- Combining several unrelated jobs in one employee role.
- Putting credentials, tokens, or secret values into instructions.
- Granting write access before confirming that read-only work is insufficient.
- Using task prompts for rules that should live in a skill or durable configuration.
- Automating a workflow before its expected output and failure states are reviewable.
- Correcting individual runs without updating the instruction that caused a repeated problem.