In large companies, the biggest delays often come from the top.

So after an IT team proved HR was bottlenecking payroll permissions, the HR manager was eager to automate approvals to get it off her desk.

But once she realized this entailed making all payroll information public, she had serious regrets.

Keep reading for the full story.

HR & Payroll manager asked to automate their decisions away

In my first job, I worked in IT as an access and permissions administrator at a large company with significant technological debt.

The environment included custom software dating back to the Windows 9x and even DOS era.

This was quite difficult work.

Initially, the work was quite tedious, involving a lot of back-and-forth communication between multiple departments.

We had to ensure that each employee had the necessary training and documentation to access data in the scope requested by their manager.

They also were constantly slowed down by red tape.

Additionally, we needed approval from the manager of the department related to the system role in question.

On top of that, the company’s excessive paper-only bureaucratic workflow made the work go at a snail’s pace.

A single SAP account for a blue-collar worker required at least three forms signed by different people.

Leadership really didn’t care to speed things along.

The heads of departments responsible for signing those papers didn’t feel any urgency to send them to us quickly.

A good example of this is when I, myself, waited over two weeks after being hired in the IT department before my first account was set up.

Until then, I only had a guest account that allowed me to access the main internal website with the company’s procedures, regulations, and other basic information.

Up to this point, each signed form had to be physically delivered to us, which was agonizingly slow given that the company had multiple branches.

So then came the beauty of automation.

We decided to automate away the paperwork.

Our first step was to allow the use of scanned documents.

But the process still required some level of human oversight.

It was a partial success: while it eliminated the courier delays, management still required us to sign the physical copies afterward, which we mass-stamped at the end of each month.

The next step was to introduce a fully electronic workflow.

After some compromises, they finally got it done.

We faced significant resistance from upper management, so we had to settle on a system that mostly replicated the existing paper processes.

Despite this, it was a game changer.

This made things a lot easier on everyone.

We created presets that managers could select and customize as needed, using data from these customizations to create better-fitting presets.

We also developed workflows that automatically generated and assigned subtickets for necessary approvals and tracked how long it took, sending reminders if needed.

And finally, we got approval from HR to access layoff data to generate user block/removal tickets.

Still, HR wasn’t happy.

Some time after we rolled out the new system, the HR/Payroll manager made a big fuss.

She was furious that her team was still waiting weeks to get their permissions and questioned whether all our work had been for nothing.

That really struck a chord with me.

Inside, I was overjoyed, but I did my best to keep a neutral expression.

There were still quite a few bottlenecks in that department.

At that time, we were working on summary reports with burndown and bottleneck charts, and I already knew that tickets requesting HR/Payroll access were spending most of their lifespan waiting for her or one of her sub-managers to approve them.

The manager immediately went on the defensive, claiming she couldn’t keep up with the amount of tickets.

Then the HR/Payroll manager made a huge miscalculation.

She then requested a change: she wanted any request from her employee to be automatically approved within the relevant scope of their sub-department.

For example, a request for an HR worker to have full HR access and limited payroll access would be automatically approved for HR access but not for payroll, and vice versa.

I was skeptical but wasn’t exactly in a position to argue.

I asked my boss to join the discussion and explained that the goal was to prevent overly permissive approvals that could lead to unauthorized access.

The employee tried to reason with her, but her mind was already made up.

I tried to convince her to brainstorm together potential edge cases before making a blanket approval, but she was already set on her decision and wasn’t interested in discussing details.

My boss shrugged and said it would be her responsibility.

He told her to write up an official document outlining the change, and we would proceed with the implementation.

The only request we had was to include a line that each such request would still be created, assigned as normal, and marked as “automatically approved by (name of the main HR/Payroll manager) decision.”

So the employee moved forward with making it happen.

I uploaded the scan into our system and, anticipating that it would eventually backfire, made a photocopy to keep it handy in the top drawer of my desk.

The original copy went to the archive.

It didn’t take long for the HR/Payroll Manager to realize her mistake.

A few weeks later, she stormed into our room.

The speed with which she flung open the door made it clear she was furious.

She demanded to know why we had granted full access to payroll data to her subordinate.

I think it was the only time I ever heard anyone yell in the company.

The employee states the obvious and receives even more pushback.

I calmly reminded her of her request to automatically approve in-department access requests.

She wasn’t having it, explaining that one of her low-ranking subordinates from the Payroll sub-department had accessed the salaries of everyone in their department, including managers, and was unhappy with the paycheck disparity.

“Isn’t it obvious that they shouldn’t be able to do that?”

“Well, yeah, to a human, but that decision was automated away by your request.”

She was then greeted with the consequences of her own actions.

I handed her a copy of the document she had signed, which instructed us to automatically approve any and all such tickets without exception.

Immediately afterward, she asked us to roll back the change while she wrote up another document to cancel the previous one.

Her attitude about work completely changed after that.

In the following days, she meticulously reviewed all those tickets and requested us to reduce access for several users.

I have to admit, she did a thorough job and kept up a good pace in reviewing new requests—doing it daily instead of once every week or two as before.

In the end, we managed to distill a subset of permissions that could be approved automatically and proceeded to implement a similar approach with other departments.

Hot tip: Always make sure you understand what you’re signing before you sign it.

What did Reddit think?

Transparency is a great thing for workers.

It’s essential for employees to understand their true worth.

There’s little point in gatekeeping your salary from others.

All companies could stand to be a lot more transparent.

The bottleneck finally cleared, but so did any semblance of confidentiality.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.