One of your employees needs a couple of days off to look after their grandmother.
You want to say yes. It’s a good thing to do.
But now you’re either wading through an absence request form, a policy to check, legislation to cross-reference, payroll to inform, and a system to update — or you’re quietly Googling whether this is emergency leave, dependants leave, or carers leave, whether it’s paid or unpaid, how to put it through payroll, and how to update the records without getting it wrong.
Either way, you’ve spent forty minutes on a decision that should have taken forty seconds.
That’s not HR. That’s HR getting in the way.
How did we get here?
Usually with the best of intentions. Something went wrong once, so a process got added. Then something else went wrong, so another layer appeared. Someone read an article about compliance best practice and bolted that on too.
Then legislation changed — and with the Employment Rights Bill bringing more changes than we’ve seen in a generation, it’s been changing a lot. So another policy gets added, another process gets updated, another layer appears on top of the last one.
And when you’re not sure if you’ve got it right, you ask AI. Which gives you a confident, well-structured answer that may or may not be based on legislation that’s six months out of date. You don’t know. It doesn’t tell you. But it’s the best you’ve got at 9pm on a Tuesday when you need an answer.
Before long, you’ve got a system that exists to manage the system. Managers spend their time navigating processes instead of managing people. Employees feel like they’re jumping through hoops for basic requests. And the culture you actually want — trusting, human, high-performing — gets buried under a pile of forms nobody reads.
I’ve seen this in every sector I’ve worked in. Manufacturing. Medical devices. Creative agencies. Publishing. The details change. The pattern doesn’t.
Compliance matters. Complexity doesn’t.
I’m not saying ditch your policies and wing it.
Compliance is essential. A clear disciplinary process protects you. A documented absence policy protects your employees. These things exist for good reason.
But there’s a difference between having the right structures in place and building a bureaucratic maze that nobody can navigate without a manual.
The test I use: does this process serve the business and the people in it, or does it serve the process?
If it’s the latter, it needs simplifying.
What simpler actually looks like
It’s not naive. It’s deliberate.
It means your managers have the autonomy to make sensible calls without escalating everything upward. It means your policies are written in plain English that someone actually reads. It means your HR is built around how your business actually works — not how a generic template assumes it does.
When things are clear and simple, everyone knows where they stand. The employee knows what to ask for and how to ask for it. The manager knows exactly what they can say. You authorise it. I handle the rest — the paperwork, the compliance check, the payroll note, the system update. Five minutes. A click of a button. Everyone gets back to work.
That’s what good HR looks like. Not a maze. Not a mountain of admin. Just the right structures, in plain English, so your people can get on with the job.
The question worth asking
How much time did you spend last week managing people, and how much did you spend managing processes?
If the ratio’s off, that’s worth a conversation.
