View user's Drafts as an Enterprise Admin

I can't believe what I'm reading here. Drafts are your private work space and there's no reason for anyone to see what's in there. 

This is analogous to a manager asking for access to everybody's email. 

A lot of people like to work in the drafts folder before putting it into a team's folder because the moment it's out for everyone to see people will start critiquing it.

This isn’t about ‘managers’ critiquing files early. It’s about enterprise admins having access to draft files - the same way IT have access to email accounts likened in your analogy.

In the event an employee leaves or is removed from the org, all drafts go into an unassigned drafts folder regardless. There’s many reasons why admins should be able to access:

If a user on a collab seat makes a design file in drafts, the user is:
A. Unable to move it to a folder, as they do not have design access
B. Unable to share it with others including admins, as they do not have design access

Often times to solve this, users request a full seat during this process “X wants to share a file from drafts” - providing admins access to see these files at this stage would allow them to immediately justify the seat request, instead of opening a dialog.

Its enablement is for troubleshooting, and to ensure finished documents are moved into the org.

Seems like overreach to me 

I think you really want to see if people are freelancing on the side 

I highly doubt Figma would add this feature.

Not that this is even a concern, but employees shouldn’t be using their corporate Figma account or any corporate account to freelance regardless? 

Again this is a security feature for Super Admins of Enterprise accounts - as you are a user, this feature request is not for you

Wow… so this is how some “higher-ups” think.

The only way you can justify viewing people’s drafts is if you can also justify randomly opening employees’ emails or checking the notepad sitting on their desk — after all, those are company assets too.

If someone hasn’t moved a draft into the official project files, it simply means the task is NOT finished and isn’t ready for review yet - same concept as email draft, people type some things and then decide not to send, would you wanna see those too? Hiring people you don’t trust is an organizational issue, but even in a workplace, there’s still such a thing as privacy. I guess your need for control tends to override that.

Don’t get me wrong — I understand why management would want a feature like this. But you also have to understand why IT’S NOT HAPPENING… unless Figma wants Facebook-level lawsuits.

I would be careful with the “providing access to all drafts”. I am a manager and I do think this is breaching privacy. 
There should be ways for employees to “work in private” on their tasks before sharing their work with other people. Without private drafts there is no way to do that in Figma… 

Also keep in mind that:
- Admins are not necessarily “higher up”, they can also be an assigned team member. 
- Some people do use Figma or Figjam for tasks that need to remain private (e.g. discussions on strategic topics, HR topics, team evaluation prep work...) 

Idea:
If the worry from a company perpective is leaking information, perhaps some rule can be installed, like “you cannot share a draft with someone outside the organisation”… (?)

My question remains: what is the need behind “I should have access to all drafts as an admin”? Is it about just seeing there is a file or being able to read it’s content?
 

I also would raise my hand for this feature. In our case, we have a lot of UX and UI designers working on projects. Every now and then people create projects in their drafts and may get ill or have a longer vacation and they forgot to pull the documents into an accessible folder. In those cases, a whole development team is blocked and it’s impossible for someone else to continue the work, because the files are just like non existing. And weeks of work that may have been put into the concept or design is practically vanished (for some time). This can happen to everyone in an company or enterprise environment.
We neither do have time to peek into all the designers files nor are we interested in any of their private things. And we don’t care if they use the licencse to do some freelance work in their free time. But there should be an option to access or move a single file (which we typically can identify from a users work history) into an accessible project folder.

There could still be something like a «private» folder where users can drop some files nobody else (not even super-super admins) could access. This way some private or freelance files can still be created and stored inside those folders. But files from the draft-area should get a «rescue me» option for the cases described.

This can also explained/introduced to users. I don‘t have any surveillance or observation in mind but want so safe projects, teams and a ton of money to get access if someone is on a long sick-leave (due to an accident or severe illness) or if someone went into a vacation without moving the file from draft to a project folder.

As an enterprise admin I really need this. We have been managing teams and projects. Someone created a private project within a team. We have removed his account because they left the company and now no one can be assigned to the project. 

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I'd push back on this feature request. Most of the use cases mentioned here point to organisational or trust issues rather than genuine product gaps, and I think Figma's roadmap has more valuable features to prioritise. Giving admins visibility into active members' drafts risks undermining the trust between teams and managers/admins, which seems counterproductive.

That said, as ​@Celine_  pointed out:

"Admins can't view drafts created by active members. However, when someone has been removed from the Organisation / Enterprise, you can manage their drafts to get access to them."

This existing functionality already covers the legitimate need (recovering work from departed employees) without requiring ongoing visibility into active members' drafts.