How do exclusions work in Empuls platform settings?

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What are exclusions in Empuls?

Empuls gives HR administrators fine-grained control over who participates in each recognition or engagement program. The exclusions setting lets you carve out specific individuals or groups so they are skipped during program execution — without affecting their overall account status or access to other Empuls features. This is especially useful for contract workers, probationary employees, senior leadership who prefer to stay off nomination lists, or teams temporarily exempt from a recognition cycle due to org restructuring.

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Where to configure exclusions

Exclusions are managed under Platform Settings → General in the Empuls admin console. Admins can apply exclusions at multiple levels — by individual employee, by department, by location, or by employment type — depending on how your HRIS data is structured. If Empuls is connected to an HRIS like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, or Darwinbox, employee attributes synced from those systems can be used as exclusion filters. For example, you can exclude all employees with the employment type “Contractor” automatically, so the rule stays current as your workforce changes.

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Common use cases

A typical scenario: your company runs a quarterly peer nomination award. You want to exclude employees who joined in the last 30 days, since they haven’t had enough time to be evaluated fairly. Setting an exclusion rule based on the “date of joining” attribute means new joiners are automatically skipped from nominations without any manual intervention each quarter. Another example: your IT and security team uses Empuls integrated with Slack and MS Teams. You may want to exclude bot accounts or service accounts that appear as users in your directory from receiving recognition nudges, keeping automated messages clean and relevant.

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What exclusions affect

Exclusions can apply to:

• Award nominations — excluded employees won’t appear as nominees or nominators in a given award cycle
• Automated nudges — Empuls won’t send engagement prompts (birthdays, work anniversaries, peer recognition reminders) to excluded users
• Leaderboards and reports — excluded employees can optionally be hidden from recognition leaderboards for that program

Exclusions are non-destructive. An excluded employee still has full access to their Empuls account, can redeem existing rewards, and participates in any programs they haven’t been excluded from.

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Keeping exclusions up to date

Because Empuls syncs user data on a scheduled basis with connected HRIS systems, exclusion rules based on employee attributes update automatically. Manual exclusions (by name or employee ID) require an admin to revisit the list periodically. Empuls recommends auditing exclusion lists at the start of each recognition cycle to ensure accuracy. Empuls is SOC 2 Type II certified and ISO 27001 compliant, so all configuration changes — including exclusions — are logged for audit purposes. Learn more: Empuls Help Centre — General