Answering how many sick days do I have
Balance questions cost more than they look. Each one is thirty seconds for the asker and a broken train of thought for whoever answers, several times a week, forever.
An employee is deciding whether to take tomorrow off. They do not know what they have left, and the policy document is somewhere they cannot find.
So they ask a person. The person checks a sheet, answers, and both of them lose the context they were holding.
Two things remove the interruption. The balance is on the employee's own screen. The policy wording is searchable in plain language.
The measurable outcome here is ticket volume. If the leaves category keeps producing the same question, the policy is unclear or the balance is not where people look. Both are fixable, and neither is fixed by answering faster. The assistant helps with wording questions, and the balance screen answers arithmetic ones.
Why one record instead of two
Balance questions look like pure HR, and the cost of answering them lands on delivery. Every interruption is somebody stopping work to look something up that the asker could read themselves. Self-service is not a feature so much as the absence of a tax.
What is switched on
- Leave
- Days used, allocated and remaining are shown to the employee for each type.
- Policies
- Published policies sit in categories with a summary each, readable without asking.
- Support desk
- Anything the balance screen does not answer becomes a ticket with a leaves category.
- Holidays
- Most balance confusion is really a question about whether a day was a holiday.
What the week looks like
Any time
The employee opens their own leave screen and reads used, allocated and remaining by type.
Any time
Policy wording is searchable. The beta assistant answers from the published policy text.
If unresolved
A ticket is raised under the leaves category and tracked to a status.
Year start
Allocations are set per user and per type on the quota grid, which is the number everything else reads.
Ongoing
HR watches the quota grid totals rather than answering the same question individually.
Questions people ask
How should staff use the assistant?
For a fast first answer drawn from the published policy text. The policy document stays the official source for anything that matters.
What makes a policy searchable?
Publishing it. Policies are chunked and indexed when published, and the authoring screen shows how many chunks are indexed for each one.
Can employees see each other's balances?
The baseline an ordinary employee gets covers their own attendance, their own leave and their own profile. Wider visibility is a role decision.
Can a manager see their team's balances?
That depends on the role. The baseline every employee gets covers their own leave and attendance. Wider visibility across a team is granted through the role model, which has 64 permissions and supports custom roles.