Big Ambitions Employees, Demands and Happiness

“Happiness” means two things in this game and they get mixed up. Your character has a happiness meter. Your employees have satisfaction, driven by demands. The two connect at exactly one point, covered below, and it is the one people miss.

The four kinds of demand

Benefits. Bronze, silver or gold health insurance. An employee with this demand has to be assigned to an HR manager who holds the matching insurance partnership with the hospital — there is no other way to grant it. This is the demand that makes people ask who needs HR.

Environment. Two demands live here, and one of them is about you: the employee wants the owner’s happiness at 50% or more. Let your own meter drop and every employee with that demand is unhappy at once. The other is a clean work environment: the building at 80% cleanliness or better, which is what the optional cleaning hire is for.

Equipment. A specific piece of furniture in the building. A more expensive item of the same type counts — the wiki’s example is a Stump Mesh office chair satisfying a demand for an office chair. 0.11 added two demands of this kind with the new office businesses: desk calendars for event planners and desk globes for travel agents.

Schedule. Part-time (10–30 hours a week) or full-time (30–50), a four- or five-day week, no morning, afternoon, evening or night shifts, free weekends, or no cleaning shifts. These are satisfied entirely in the scheduler — nothing to buy.

When you need an HR manager

An HR manager sits at a computer workstation in your headquarters and is hired from City Workforce Inc. For every employee assigned to them, they do three things: raise that employee’s skill while they work, send a temporary worker to cover a sick shift, and manage a health-insurance plan.

So the answer to “do I need HR” is: the moment an employee’s demands include insurance, or the moment a sick cashier costs you a day’s trade. Below that, a first shop with one or two staff runs without one. Higher-skilled HR managers can handle more employees; the number is one of the things skill sets, and hiring a low-skill one for a large staff leaves people unassigned.

How to get an HR manager

An HR manager cannot work from a shop, so the order matters:

1. Have a headquarters. It is an office business with no customers — rent an office building and start a headquarters in it (more on that below).
2. Put a computer workstation in it. A workstation is three pieces of furniture, not one: a desk, a chair and a computer. Mr. Scott’s Office Supplies in Lower Manhattan sells all three.
3. Hire from City Workforce Inc. The recruitment agency on 4th Avenue in Lower Manhattan handles the office and headquarters roles. Visit once and talk to the representative; after that you can start a search by phone. It is closed at weekends. A headhunter you already employ can find one too.
4. Assign them. Put the HR manager on the workstation and the headquarters schedule, then assign employees to them. Insurance needs one more step: the HR manager has to hold the matching bronze, silver or gold partnership with the hospital.

A headhunter can be linked to your HR managers, and then replacements arrive on their own: within a day when an employee resigns, within three to five days when a rival poaches one, and at once when one retires.

The headquarters

Every back-office role in the game lives here: purchasing agents, logistics managers, HR managers, headhunters, and the pricing manager that 1.0 added. Each needs its own computer workstation; cleaners are the only staff who do not. There are no customers, so the building’s traffic index does not matter here.

You can furnish it yourself or have Kingdom Office install a headquarters layout. The installer fits exactly as many workstations as the office’s capacity allows — 4, 8, 10 or 50 depending on the building — and its furniture leaves little room to squeeze more in. Furnishing it yourself, you can keep adding workstations until the floor runs out.

Your own happiness is a business input

Because that environment demand reads the owner’s meter, your happiness is not cosmetic. The wiki’s list of what raises it is long — renting your first apartment, hitting business milestones, a park bench, the skate park, books, Friday gambling, the boat, a DJ booth at home, exercising, television, computer games. Anything that costs money and time in a way that looks like a distraction is, once you have staff with that demand, part of payroll.

1.0 tightened the loop from the other direction: energy now burns faster when hunger and happiness are low, so a neglected meter also shortens your working day.

Uniforms and the 3672 shortcut

Employees can be given uniforms from a uniform locker. Build 3672 added an Assign Uniforms button to the locker itself, which replaces assigning them one at a time — worth knowing before you open a shop with a dozen staff.

Training that never finished

If an employee’s training stalled in the first days after 1.0, that was a bug. Build 3674, on 2 September, fixed employees getting stuck when they tried to quit, which Hovgaard says was making training, imports and deliveries fail. The note says it should clear up as you play through to the next day.

Related

• Getting started — which agency hires which role
• Warehouses and deliveries — the roles a warehouse needs, and where they sit
• Startup cost calculator — who each business type has to hire