How Flo gave a lean People team its capacity back

Flo builds the women's health app used to track cycles, pregnancy and reproductive health. The company operates across multiple locations, each carrying its own employment policies, contracts and handbook rules, and its People Ops team is small and lean by design.

Flo came to Harriet with two priorities: reduce the number of tickets landing in People Ops, and automate the HR templates and documents that were eating the team's time. The single largest source of volume was document requests, employees asking for letters, contracts and other paperwork that had to be assembled and populated by hand every time. Behind that sat a harder problem. Each location carried its own policies, and working out which rules applied to which employee took real time and real expertise. People Ops held that complexity in their heads for every query, which slowed responses and made support difficult to scale as headcount grew.

The timing made it sharper. Not long after the engagement started, several members of the team went on maternity leave or left the business, shrinking an already small team just as hiring, and the support load that comes with it, kept climbing. Flo started the engagement apprehensively. That changed quickly.

Documents that fill themselves

The first and most immediate win came from connecting Flo's HR system directly to Harriet. With that connection in place, Harriet could autofill the employee documents that made up Flo's biggest category of requests, pulling accurate, current fields straight from the HRIS rather than asking People Ops to compile them by hand. The change in how document requests were handled was close to immediate.

Policy answers that know where you work

Next came the handbook. Harriet was set up to answer employee questions about policy tailored to each person's location and the complexities that came with it. Instead of routing every policy question through People Ops so somebody could work out which rules applied, Harriet matched the query to the right location and answered it directly. Employees got answers to policy and handbook questions around the clock, across all of Flo's locations, and response rates lifted noticeably.

Automations, once the trust was there

As Flo grew more comfortable working with Harriet, the scope widened from answering questions to running workflows. Three themes shaped what got automated. HRIS data integrity: keeping employee records accurate and complete, flagging and resolving gaps before they turn into problems. Onboarding: getting new starters set up correctly in Flo's systems from day one, without manual admin. Employee integration: making sure new joiners are connected to the right people and the right information as soon as they arrive.

These are representative rather than the whole list, and together they mark a shift in what Harriet is for at Flo. It started as a tool that answered questions. It became an operational extension of the People Ops team.

What the capacity actually bought

For a People Ops team that was already lean, and became leaner still as colleagues went on leave or left the business, the effect was less about convenience and more about capacity. Self-serve answers to policy and document requests took the highest-volume, lowest-complexity work off the team's plate immediately. The deeper automations then freed further time by absorbing the manual, repetitive work around onboarding and HRIS upkeep.

That mattered most where it counted. A small team facing a steady stream of new hires was able to keep pace without adding headcount, and to redirect the hours it did have towards higher-value work that genuinely needed a person.

What comes next

Flo and Harriet are still building. Further automations are in progress, with the aim of unlocking more capacity for a team that has already shown what a lean People Ops function can do with the right support behind it.

The pattern underneath it, self-serve first and automation second, runs through Harriet's use cases for other teams, and through Cint's move out of the shared inbox.