The original question wasn’t complicated.
An employee asked their manager something about a workplace process.
The manager wasn’t sure.
So they forwarded the question to someone in the office.
That person thought finance might know.
Finance sent it back to the manager.
The manager asked another manager.
Eventually, leadership became involved.
By the time someone contacted the appropriate HR resource, five people had touched a question that probably should have required one handoff.
Nobody had done anything unreasonable.
That was exactly the problem.
Everyone Was Trying to Help
When we reconstructed what happened, there wasn’t one obvious mistake.
The manager didn’t know the answer, so they asked someone.
Reasonable.
The office administrator received a question outside their normal responsibilities, so they forwarded it.
Also reasonable.
Finance recognized that it wasn’t really their issue.
Reasonable again.
Each individual decision made sense.
The complete process didn’t.
We Counted the Handoffs
The path looked something like this:
Employee → Manager → Office Administrator → Finance → Manager → Department Head → HR Support
Seven steps.
For one question.
And that didn’t include the messages asking:
“Do you know who handles this?”
The actual answer wasn’t our biggest concern anymore.
The route was.
The Employee Saw the Delay, Not the Internal Confusion
From inside the company, we could see people trying to solve the problem.
From the employee’s perspective, it looked different.
They asked a question.
Then waited.
Then followed up.
Then heard:
“We’re checking.”
Then waited again.
Employees don’t see the five internal conversations happening behind a response.
They experience the time between question and answer.
That distinction matters.
We Realized We Had Built a Human Search Engine
Whenever someone didn’t know where a question belonged, they searched the company manually.
Ask Sarah.
Sarah asks Mike.
Mike thinks Jessica might know.
Jessica remembers that someone handled something similar last year.
Eventually the question reaches the correct destination.
That can work in a ten-person organization.
It becomes expensive as the company grows.
We Started Tracking Questions by Destination
Instead of trying to document the answer to every possible employee question, we did something simpler.
We identified categories.
Daily Work
Usually starts with the manager.
Scheduling and Department Operations
Typically stays within operational leadership.
Workplace Policies and People Questions
May require an internal HR contact or outside HR support.
Finance Questions
Go to the appropriate finance resource.
Technology Problems
Go to whoever owns systems or IT.
Safety or Urgent Workplace Concerns
Follow the designated escalation route.
The categories didn’t need to predict every question.
They just needed to get people moving in the correct direction.
Ownership Was More Important Than Expertise
This was a useful distinction.
The person who owns a question doesn’t necessarily need to personally know the answer.
They need to know what happens next.
Suppose a manager receives an unfamiliar workplace question.
Ownership might mean:
- Recognize the category.
- Gather the necessary context.
- Route it to the appropriate resource.
- Make sure the employee receives a response.
That’s much better than simply saying:
“I don’t handle that.”
We Found Questions With No Clear Owner
Those were the interesting ones.
Some questions bounced around because two departments thought the other department owned them.
Others bounced because nobody had ever formally decided.
The process worked only because experienced employees knew the company’s unwritten routing system.
New managers didn’t have that advantage.
New Managers Were Hit Hardest
Someone who had worked at the company for eight years could usually find the right person.
They knew everyone.
They remembered who solved a similar problem three years ago.
A newly promoted manager didn’t.
So they either asked several people or tried to answer the question themselves.
Neither was ideal.
We had accidentally made institutional memory part of the job requirement.
We Looked at Repeated Questions
Another discovery came when we stopped treating every request as unique.
Several managers were asking variations of the same questions.
That meant we were solving the same problem repeatedly.
One manager would spend 30 minutes finding the answer.
Two weeks later, another manager would repeat the entire search.
The company wasn’t learning from itself.
But We Didn’t Try to Create a 200-Page FAQ
That was tempting.
If people keep asking questions, document every answer.
Except that giant internal guides have their own problems.
They become outdated.
People stop reading them.
Exceptions appear.
Information changes.
Instead, we focused on routing.
I don’t need every manager to memorize every answer.
I need them to know:
Where does this type of question go?
That’s much easier to maintain.
We Created a Simple Ownership Map
Ours wasn’t complicated.
It basically answered three things for each category:
Start here.
Escalate here if necessary.
Don’t send it here.
That last part was surprisingly useful.
Finance had been receiving questions simply because employees associated anything involving numbers with finance.
Operations received questions because managers didn’t know another destination.
Defining what a department doesn’t own reduced unnecessary handoffs.
We Added an Escalation Rule
Routing works well for normal situations.
Unusual situations still happen.
So managers needed to know what to do when the category wasn’t obvious.
Instead of sending the question to five coworkers, they had one escalation route.
That created a stopping point for uncertainty.
Trion Solutions Fit Into the Map
Our relationship with Trion Solutions became more useful once we defined when outside HR support should enter the picture.
Before that, managers sometimes went in opposite directions.
One contacted HR support for almost every people-related question.
Another tried to resolve everything internally.
Neither extreme was particularly efficient.
We wanted managers to recognize which questions were routine, which belonged with company leadership, and which situations could benefit from additional HR guidance.
That made Trion Solutions part of an intentional support structure rather than simply another name someone might try when they didn’t know where else to go.
We Also Defined Who Communicates Back
This was something we’d previously ignored.
A question could reach the correct person and still feel unresolved because nobody knew who was responsible for responding to the employee.
So we added another principle:
The person who receives the question shouldn’t disappear just because someone else is helping answer it.
If I tell an employee I’m checking something, I still own the communication until there’s a clear handoff.
That prevents the employee from having to restart the conversation.
“Ask Them Yourself” Became Less Common
Previously, an employee might hear:
“You need to ask another department.”
That creates another handoff.
Whenever practical, we preferred:
“I’ll get this to the right person.”
Or:
“This belongs with X. Here’s exactly where you should take it.”
Small difference.
Much better experience.
We Measured Friction Instead of Just Response Time
I started paying attention to:
Number of Handoffs
How many people touched the question?
Repeated Explanations
Did the employee have to tell the story multiple times?
Wrong Destinations
Which teams regularly received questions they didn’t own?
Manager Uncertainty
Which categories created the most confusion?
Repeated Questions
Are we solving the same issue from scratch?
These were useful indicators of process quality.
Our Routing Test Became Very Simple
I can test a company’s internal structure with one question:
“If an employee asked you something you couldn’t answer, would you know exactly where to go next?”
If most managers say yes, good.
If the answers are:
“Probably Sarah.”
“Maybe finance.”
“I usually ask around.”
then we don’t really have a routing process.
We have a network of helpful people.
Those aren’t the same thing.
The Question Wasn’t the Problem
The original employee eventually received an answer.
Technically, the process worked.
But five people spent time moving the question around before it reached the right destination.
Multiply that by dozens of employees.
Then dozens of managers.
Then an entire year.
Suddenly, unclear ownership isn’t a minor administrative inconvenience.
It’s an operational cost.
That’s what the original question taught us.
We didn’t need every manager to know everything.
We needed every manager to know what happens when they don’t know.
Once we solved that, a lot of ordinary workplace questions stopped taking tours through the entire company before someone answered them.