When someone leaves us, a workflow does most of the work. On the leaving date it disables the account, removes licences and group memberships, raises a ticket for the depot to collect the laptop, and forwards the person's mailbox to their line manager for ninety days, so that nothing from a customer or supplier is missed. For about four hundred leavers a year it is quick, consistent and correct.
Last year a warehouse team leader resigned after raising a formal grievance against her manager. HR was handling it, and it had not concluded when she left. On her leaving date the workflow looked up her manager in the HR system, as it always did, and forwarded her mailbox to him.
Over the next three weeks he received twenty six emails meant for her. They included correspondence from HR about the grievance, a message from her union representative and a letter from our occupational health provider. He did the right thing and told HR on the second day, but by then he had read enough, and the forwarding kept running because nobody in HR knew how to stop it. She found out when her outcome letter mentioned it, and she complained to the Information Commissioner's Office.
The automation had done precisely what it was built to do. The rule was right for nearly every leaver. What it lacked was any way to know when it was wrong, and the people who did know, in HR, had no part in the workflow at all.
We changed three things. Mail is no longer forwarded. The leaver's address now sends an automatic reply naming a team mailbox, and a manager who needs the old mailbox can request access, which IT grants once HR confirms there is no open case involving the two of them. The HR system has a flag for an open grievance, investigation or claim, and any leaver carrying it stops at a person before anything is granted to anyone. And HR can pause any step of the workflow from their own screen.
A rule that is right four hundred times a year will still be applied to the one case it should never touch, unless someone who knows about that case is able to stop it.
– Serguey Shinder
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