A colleague came back from twelve months of maternity leave in April and could do nothing at all on her first morning. Her account had been deleted in November and her mailbox with it. Her laptop had been wiped and reissued to somebody in another department. Two systems she had administered for six years no longer held any record that she existed. Putting her back together took nine days, and four years of her sent mail was simply gone.
Nothing malfunctioned. Our leaver process is triggered by a status in the human resources system, and that status changes when a person stops being active on the payroll. Twelve months of unpaid leave sets the identical flag to a resignation. On top of that we run a dormancy rule that removes an account after ninety days without a sign in, which is a sensible control and one I would defend, and to that rule somebody on leave is indistinguishable from an account nobody remembers creating.
She was not the only one. Looking back eighteen months we found a man returning from long term sickness whose licences had been reclaimed, a woman on secondment to a customer who lost her access halfway through it, and, running the other way, an analyst who moved from finance to operations in January and kept every one of her finance permissions for eleven months, because a person changing jobs inside the company is not an event our process recognises at all.
Our systems know two things about a working life. The day it begins and the day it ends. Human resources hold a dozen states between those two, and all of them arrive at my department as a single field with two values, because that is the mapping somebody agreed in an afternoon in 2018 when the integration was built, and nobody has looked at it since.
Leave now suspends rather than deletes, with the mailbox retained and an owner recorded. Dormancy skips people we know are absent. A return ticket is raised automatically a fortnight before the expected date, with a two day target. Moving between departments is an event in its own right and the receiving manager confirms what is still needed.
For the people this gets wrong, the first sign is a locked door on a morning that was already difficult enough.
– Serguey Shinder
