Consolidating questions about working time models in HR
A service company with almost 700 employees receives many requests about working time models every day, and HR administration loses time.
- Services
- Human resources
Key metric
Processing time per standard request
2514min
Average processing time per HR request
At a glance
Starting point
The company offers a wide range of working time models, from full-time and part-time to fixed-term project contracts. Changes are mostly requested by email or through a self-service portal. HR administration handles 80 to 120 requests a day, around half of which concern working time models, extensions or changes. Information on the rules is spread across works agreements, policies and templates on several drives and in the HR system. Many employees ask similar questions, for example about part-time work during parental leave or switching from a fixed-term to a permanent contract. Each time, HR administrators have to find and check documents and write individual replies.
- 80-120
- HR requests per day
- 700
- employees
The challenge
HR administration is stretched thin because standard requests about working time models take up a lot of time. Each request first has to be understood, matched to the right set of rules and checked against the individual contract data. The relevant information is spread across policies, works agreements and notes, often in different versions. Questions are frequently asked several times because answers are not clear enough or employees describe their situation differently. Depending on complexity, handling a request takes between 15 and 45 minutes, and urgent cases such as expiring deadlines compete with routine questions. At the same time, HR is expected to give reliable, consistent information and comply with legal requirements.
Typical symptoms in the organization
Why this remained unsolved
Until now, the problem was seen as an unavoidable side effect of a complex HR landscape. The requests seemed too small-scale for a dedicated IT project, yet too numerous to ignore. Classic FAQ pages were hardly used because employees prefer to describe their situation in their own words. Rule-based forms would not have covered many special cases and would have been costly to maintain. HR also had no development capacity of its own to build a flexible system that understands free text and takes contract data into account.
Our solution
An agentic workflow supports HR administration in handling requests about working time models. Incoming emails and portal messages are read in automatically, understood and assigned to suitable categories such as a switch to part-time, an extension of a fixed-term contract or a reduction in working hours. The system pulls in relevant contract data from the HR system, checks standard situations against stored policies and works agreements, and drafts structured replies. HR administrators see all information and suggestions in one interface, can make adjustments and approve the reply. Complex cases are flagged so that experienced colleagues can handle them specifically.
Where generative AI comes in
Generative AI understands freely worded requests, identifies the underlying concerns and assigns them to suitable categories. It summarizes the relevant rules from policies and works agreements, drafts replies based on contract data and turns differently worded or incomplete information into a structured HR proposal.
- Read-only integration with the HR system to retrieve contract data, working time models and fixed-term contract information.
- Classification of incoming emails and portal messages by concern, urgency and required HR review steps.
- Generation of draft replies that combine individual contract data with the matching rules from policies and works agreements.
- Interface for HR administrators to review, adjust and approve replies and to flag complex special cases.
- Analysis of request volumes, processing times and frequent topics to continuously improve policies and templates.
How the HR workflow works
Collect requests
Incoming emails and portal messages are captured automatically, matched to the employee and created as an HR request in the workflow.
Understand the concern
Generative analysis identifies the concern, assigns it to categories such as a switch to part-time or a fixed-term extension, and checks urgency based on deadlines.
Link the rules
The workflow pulls relevant contract data from the HR system and links it to the matching rules from policies and works agreements.
Draft a reply
Based on the identified situation, the system generates a structured draft reply with clear options and guidance for the employee.
Approval and refinement
HR reviews the draft, makes adjustments, approves the reply and flags special cases that should be better supported by automation in future.
Measured: after 3 months in production
Period: after 3 months in production.
| Metric | Value | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Processing time per standard requestKey metric | 8-15 minutes instead of 20-30 minutes | Time tracking before/aftermeasured |
| Share of automatically prepared replies | 65-75 percent of requests | System measurementmeasured |
| Corrections needed after sendingQuality metric | 5-8 percent need follow-up | Sampleestimated |
Cost-effectiveness
The solution mainly covers standard situations. Complex special cases under employment law still have to be reviewed by experienced HR professionals. Changes to works agreements require careful maintenance of the stored content.
Integration and operation
Also works for
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