Answer policy questions from the handbook

Every company has a handbook and a set of questions the handbook already answers. The two rarely meet, because asking a person is faster than finding the document, and so the same six questions get asked forever.

This is a small win and an unusually reliable one.

Upload what you have, even if it is a mess

The handbook, the expenses policy, the leave policy, the thing in a shared document called "how we do reviews". It does not need tidying first.

Uploading the messy version and asking questions of it is actually the fastest way to find out which parts are missing, because the gaps announce themselves.

Test it against the questions people really ask

Not the questions you think are important. The ones that arrive.

According to our policies, how much notice do I need to give for annual
leave, does it change if it is more than two weeks, and which document
says so?

Ask five of these. You are checking two things: that it finds the right document, and that it says "our documents do not cover this" when they do not, rather than producing a reasonable-sounding answer from general knowledge about how companies usually work.

The invented answer is the dangerous failure, not the missing one. "The handbook does not say" sends someone to ask a human, which is where they started. A confident wrong answer about parental leave or notice periods gets repeated, acted on, and only discovered when it matters. Insist on a citation every time.

Give the employee its standing brief

You answer internal policy questions using only our policy documents.

Always quote the section your answer comes from and name the document.

If the documents do not answer it, say so and point them at a person. Do
not reason from what companies usually do. Do not soften a policy to be
helpful.

If the question is about someone's individual circumstances rather than the
policy, hand it to a human.

That last rule matters more than it looks. "How much leave do I get" is a policy question. "Can I take leave in March given what happened last year" is about a person, and it is not yours to answer from a document.

Watch what it cannot answer

Every handoff is a hole in your handbook, named for free. Most companies find three or four within a fortnight, and they are usually the questions that were being answered inconsistently by whoever got asked.

Fix the document, not the prompt.

What good looks like

The recurring questions stop reaching people, and the ones that do reach people are the ones that genuinely needed judgement.

The number worth watching is handoffs per week. If it is not falling after a month of you fixing documents, the handbook is thinner than anyone believed.