Building trust in automated decisions: time off requests
B2B
Mobile
Growth Design
July 23, 2025
Before
In 2024, we created an automation workflow that allowed clients to instantly approve employee time-off requests based on their company’s policies. Initial rollout was successful, with an 8.8% increase in adoption, and around 432,237 time off requests decisioned over 3 months.
During testing, our analysts and support specialists parsed >100 feedback tickets and found that our customers’ employees were frustrated when requests were automatically denied without knowing why. Our sales teams encountered a similar sentiment with customer executives and HR administrators, who questioned if automatic decisioning was worth the trouble of more employee escalations.
After
To make sure customers felt confident in their setups and their employees understood time-off request decisions without needing to escalate, we reactively displayed the decision reasons on the request form, leading to an estimated 90% reduction in employee escalations, driving a potential 30% increase in adoption.