HR Head guide

Where each thing is configured

Two surfaces, and they overlap in three places. Worth knowing before you go looking for a screen.

• Only in Slack, by asking the bot: Approval Chains, Knowledge Base entries, an Employee's HR Contact, one Employee's Leave Balance, and deleting one Employee's data. Approving and denying Requests happens here too. There is no form for any of it — you ask, in a message.
• Only in the dashboard: your company name, activating the Workspace, connecting and disconnecting Slack, Hire Dates for many Employees at once, company-wide instructions for the assistant, the Memory it has kept about each Employee, and the read-only views of Requests and the audit record.
• Either: Leave Policies, HR Heads, and the Workspace timezone.

Approval Chains

Each Request type — day off, vacation, remote, late arrival — has its own chain, and changing one leaves the others alone. A chain is an ordered list of roles rather than people: the Employee's Lead, their HR Contact, or both. Roles resolve when the Request is submitted, so reassigning someone's Lead changes who approves their next Request without you touching the chain.

A fresh install seeds all four types with Lead then HR Contact. An empty chain auto-approves that type immediately.

A step whose role is not filled in on the Employee's profile is skipped rather than blocking — an Employee with no Lead goes straight to their HR Contact. If no step in the chain resolves to anybody, the Request is approved.

Approvals happen in Slack. The current approver gets the Request as a direct message with Approve and Deny buttons; denying asks for a reason, which the Employee sees. As an HR Head you can approve or deny any pending Request in your Workspace, whether or not the chain is currently waiting on you. The dashboard's Requests view is read-only.

Leave Policies

A Leave Policy holds an Accrual Rate for one leave type: vacation, or paid day off. It governs how a balance grows and nothing else — length of service bears on nothing, and who may spend a balance is a question for the Approval Chain. Sick and unpaid day-offs are untracked and consume no balance. Remote and late-arrival Requests consume no balance either.

Set a policy from the dashboard, or by asking the bot. State the rate per month rather than per year, or ask the bot to work it out: 20 days a year is 1.6667 days a month, and the difference between that and 1.67 is a day and a half over five years.

No policy is itself a decision. If a leave type has no policy, it does not accrue at all in your Workspace, and its balance moves only when an HR Head sets it.

Accrual grants the rate once for each full month an Employee completes, on their monthiversary in your Workspace's timezone, clamped to month-end for short months. It is anchored at the later of the Employee's Hire Date and the moment you created the policy, so nobody is credited for service predating your own policy. Grants are cumulative, never recomputed from tenure — a balance you adjusted by hand is not silently overwritten by the next run.

An Employee with no Hire Date on file accrues nothing. That is most of a Workspace on the day you first switch accrual on, which is why the dashboard lets you set Hire Dates in bulk.

Turning accrual off keeps every day already earned. Balances then move only when you set them, and if you switch it back on later, nobody is credited for the gap.

Who may ask

Nobody is gated on length of service. There is no minimum service rule, no qualifying date, and no automatic admission check of any kind on a Request: an Employee hired this morning can file one, and it walks the same Approval Chain as everyone else's.

That is a deliberate change rather than a gap. A rule that refused Requests at submission while no screen admitted it existed was worse than either enforcing it visibly or not enforcing it, so the concept went rather than the field. The judgement now sits with the approvers — which is where a small company keeps it anyway.

The one thing worth knowing is the consequence: a Workspace running empty Approval Chains has no guard at all, because an empty chain auto-approves. If length of service matters to you, put a step in the chain.

Someone with no Hire Date on file is never refused either. They accrue nothing until you fill the date in, and the bot tells them their balance is frozen rather than that they may not ask — the blank field is yours to fix, not theirs to argue about.

Balances

Each Employee holds two balances, paid day off and vacation. They are kept to four decimal places, because a fractional Accrual Rate summed over many months has to stay exact, and shown to two — rounded down, so the figure an Employee is told is never more than they actually hold.

Nothing checks the balance when a Request is submitted. An Employee with two days left can ask for ten, and that Request is filed and walks its chain like any other. On approval the days come off, and the balance stops at zero rather than going negative — so an over-budget approval is absorbed silently and leaves no trace in the balance. If that matters to you, the place to catch it is the approval, not the submission.

A vacation Request spends the business days between its start and end dates; weekends do not count. A paid day-off Request spends one day per date requested.

The Knowledge Base

Entries are written in Slack, by asking the bot — "save this: …". You can list them, correct one, or delete one the same way. There is no dashboard screen for any of it.

When an Employee asks something no entry answers, two things happen: the bot tells them it does not know instead of inventing an answer, and the first HR Head listed for the Workspace gets a direct message with the question. Reply with the answer and it is saved as an entry, and the reply resolves the Knowledge Gap. Reply "dismiss" if it is not something the bot should know.

The gap message goes to the first HR Head on the Workspace's list, not to all of them — worth knowing if you have several and the questions are landing with a colleague.