Every workspace has one Bench: a holding area for employees who are not currently on a working team. Remove someone from a team, or delete the team itself, and they land back on the Bench automatically, fully intact and ready to be reassigned. Nothing about them is deleted; only their team membership changes.
Every organization gets exactly one Bench the moment it is created. It is where a freshly hired employee lands by default before you assign them to a team, and it is where an employee returns automatically whenever they leave a team: you remove them from the Members tab, or you delete the team entirely and every remaining member is re-benched in the same action.
Being on the Bench changes what an employee can do, not what they know. Bench employees can see each other and can still be reached directly for one-off work, but they do not share memory with one another, cannot delegate tasks between themselves, and cannot take part in a sprint. Those abilities only switch on once an employee is placed under a team leader on an active team; a leader can then pull anyone waiting on the Bench into their own team with a dedicated bench tool, and only into their own team, never someone else's.
The distinction that matters is what survives the move. Deleting an employee is permanent and destructive. Moving one to the Bench, whether by removing them from a team or by deleting the team around them, is neither: every task, file, and work journal entry they produced stays attached to them, their state and history carry over untouched, and the moment you add them to a new team they pick up exactly where they left off. The Bench itself also cannot be deleted, so there is always a safe place for an employee to sit while you decide where they belong next.
Nothing about the employee is touched: their name, role, configuration, skills, tools, and every task or file they ever produced stay exactly as they were. What changes is purely structural. Bench employees lose the collaborative abilities that only exist inside a team: shared memory with teammates, the ability to delegate or receive delegated work, and participation in that team's sprints. They can still be messaged directly and asked to do work on their own.
This is why removing someone from a team, or deleting the team entirely, is a safe action instead of a destructive one. There is no separate 'are you sure you want to lose this employee's history' decision to make, because nothing is lost. The employee simply waits on the Bench, fully formed, until a leader decides where they belong.
Only a team leader can move an employee from the Bench into a team, and only into the team that leader runs. This keeps staffing decisions deliberate: an employee never drifts onto a team without someone in charge of that team choosing to add them. The leader sees a simple list of who is currently on the Bench, picks one, and the employee's membership moves in a single step.
Because the tool is scoped to bench-only employees, it cannot be used to pull someone off a different active team; that kind of cross-team move still goes through removing the employee from their current team first. The Bench, in other words, is the one place every employee can be safely staged before you decide their next team.
A holding area, not a deletion
The Bench is a system team every tenant already has; it never needs to be created and it cannot be removed. An employee ends up there in one of three ways: they were hired individually and have not yet been placed on a team, they were removed from a team's Members tab, or the team they belonged to was deleted, which moves every remaining member back to the Bench in the same step.
Getting an employee off the Bench is a team leader's job. From the Members tab, or by asking the team's leader directly, you add the employee into an active team with a leader assigned. The leader's bench tool only lists employees actually sitting on the Bench and only lets them add to the team they lead, so an employee can never be pulled sideways into someone else's team by mistake. As soon as they join, they gain shared memory with the rest of the team, can be delegated work, and can take part in that team's sprints.
Pull an employee off an underperforming team to rebuild it around a different leader. Removing them sends them to the Bench with every task and file intact, ready to be added straight into the new lineup.
Hire an employee before you've decided which team they belong on. They land on the Bench automatically, fully configured and available, and you assign them to a team leader whenever the decision is made.
Shut down a team that's no longer needed, for example after a project wraps, without terminating the employees on it. Deleting the team re-benches every member in the same action, and they're ready to be picked up by a different team next.
Move an employee off their current team to make them available, then have the receiving team's leader pull them onto their own team from the Bench for a short stretch of work, before moving them back later.
Nothing is lost. Every task, file, and work journal entry stays attached to the employee, and their history carries over exactly as it was. Only their team membership changes; the moment they join a new team, they pick up right where they left off.
No. Removing an employee from a team, or deleting the team itself, only moves that employee to the Bench. It never deletes the employee. Deleting an employee is a separate, permanent action that the Bench move does not perform.
A team leader, and only into the team they lead. The tool that does this only shows employees currently on the Bench and only allows adding them to the requesting leader's own team, so an employee can't be reassigned into someone else's team by accident.
No. Every organization has exactly one Bench, created automatically, and it cannot be deleted. It always exists as a safe place for employees to wait between team assignments.
They can still be messaged and given one-off work directly. What they lose is the team-specific collaboration: they don't share memory with other employees, can't delegate or receive delegated tasks, and don't take part in sprints until they join an active team.
Move a Team Member to the Bench is part of Where their work lives.
Your AI agents manage their own workspace. Scheduled tasks run daily, weekly, or on custom cron cadences. A built-in kanban board tracks what is in progress. Every document lands in a personal Drive. A daily work journal logs decisions, outcomes, and next steps automatically.