Remote work policy, leave, VPN: why your employees keep asking the same questions

The same Monday, again and again

It's Monday morning. In your HR inbox, you find:

"Hi, I wanted to know how many remote work days I'm allowed per week?" "Hey, I forgot how to submit a leave request — which tool do I use?" "Hello, how do I set up the VPN from home?"

Last week, you answered all three of these questions. And the week before. And the one before that.

This isn't unique to your company. According to a Gartner study, repetitive administrative questions account for 35 to 50% of the total HR solicitation volume. And yet, the information exists — it's in the employee handbook, in the policy memo, on the intranet.

So why do your employees keep writing to you?

The information exists, but it's unfindable

The problem is almost never the absence of information. It's the difficulty of accessing it.

In most mid-to-large companies, internal documentation is scattered across multiple locations:

An irregularly updated intranet
Poorly structured SharePoint or Google Drive folders
"All-staff" emails sent six months ago
PDFs named "Remote_Policy_FINAL_v3.pdf"

Finding the right answer takes time — often more time than simply messaging HR. And that's exactly what employees do: they take the path of least resistance.

This isn't laziness. It's rationality.

The invisible cost of these interruptions

Every question received has a real cost. Not just response time (averaging 4 to 8 minutes per email), but also:

Context-switching time: every interruption costs the interrupted person an average of 23 minutes of focus
HR schedule disruption: entire half-days fragmented by incoming requests
Frustration on both sides: the employee waiting for an answer, the HR professional answering the same thing for the tenth time

Multiply this by 50, 100, or 500 employees, and you have hundreds of hours lost every month across your organization.

Why this isn't an internal communication problem

The first reaction in many companies is: "We need to communicate better." So they send a summary email, rebuild the intranet page, organize an information session.

Two weeks later, the questions resume.

Because the problem isn't that employees didn't receive the information — it's that they can't find it when they need it, in the context where they're working.

An employee setting up VPN for the first time at 6:30pm isn't going to reread the policy memo sent three months ago. They're going to message someone.

The question is: who?

The alternative: an instant answer, in their work tool

That's the principle behind Eloise. Rather than redirecting to a document nobody reads, Eloise answers directly — in Teams or Slack — based on your internal documentation.

Employee: "Eloise, how many remote work days am I entitled to per week?" Eloise: "According to the remote work agreement updated in March 2025, you're entitled to 2 remote work days per week, extendable to 3 with your manager's approval. Here's the link to the full agreement: [Remote Work Agreement 2025]."

The answer is immediate, sourced, and requires no human intervention.

The most frequent question types

The questions that come up most often in the companies we work with:

🏖️ Leave and absences: balance, request process, deadlines, approval rules
💻 Remote work: number of days allowed, covered equipment, declaration process
🔐 Access and tools: VPN, passwords, application access, technical onboarding
💰 Pay and benefits: payment date, payslips, profit-sharing, health insurance
📋 HR procedures: sick leave, training, annual review, internal mobility

These five categories typically represent more than 70% of recurring solicitations in an organization.

What this concretely changes for HR

When these questions are handled by Eloise:

✅ HR recovers 2 to 4 hours per day for higher-value missions
✅ Employees get answers in seconds without waiting for someone to be available
✅ Information is always up to date: Eloise reads your current documents, not a 2022 FAQ
✅ Zero additional tool to adopt: everything happens in Teams or Slack, where teams already work

The right starting point

You don't need to restructure everything to get started. Simply upload your existing documentation to the Creates platform — employee handbook, company policies, HR procedures — and Eloise learns to answer from that content.

Deployment takes a few days. Results are visible within the first week.

Want to see how it works for your specific use cases?

Schedule a personalized demo