Monday Government Talent sync

Person #9: Can you hear me? Hello? Person #15: Yes, ma'am, I can hear you. Clearly. Person #9: Good, good. Everyone? I think— can everyone see my screen or no, wait, let me just— no, I'm sharing the wrong window. Hold on. Can you see the dashboard or are you seeing my emails? Person #13: I see emails. Person #9: Ugh. Okay. Yalla, one second. Sorry. I have a hundred unread. It's— okay, now? Can you see it now? Person #15: Yes, ma'am, I see the ServiceNow dashboard now. Person #9: Perfect. Alright. So, welcome everyone, thank you for making time. I know it's Monday and the week is short, but inshallah we make it count. We have a few things to get through. I want to talk about the HR law rollout, the Tomouh numbers, and then the ServiceNow situation, because I keep getting messages about it. But first— let me just— how was everybody's weekend? Anyone do anything nice? Or no? Person #13: I took the kids to Yas. We did the— you know, the waterpark. It was fine. Exhausting, but fine. Person #16: Stayed home. Washed the car. Person #9: That's it? Wallah? You're telling me you washed the car and that's the highlight? Ya akhi, I need to get you a hobby. Person #16: I have a hobby. It's called not being in the office. Person #9: Fair enough. Fair enough. Ahmad, what about you? Person #15: Sorry, ma'am, I was— yes, I was actually reviewing the ticket categorization schema. The weekend was good, quiet. My daughter had a small birthday thing. But I wanted to— if I may, I can share a couple of observations about the current backlog. Person #9: See, this is why I like you. Everyone else is at the waterpark, he's at home doing ticket schema. But yes, let's get into it. Before we jump to tickets, I want to do a quick round-robin. Just so I have the state of play, because I was in the ADEC scorecard meeting on Thursday and I need to be able to speak to things by Friday. And I'm still learning all the acronyms, by the way. Someone said "SLP" and I nodded along for ten minutes before I realized they meant a government entity and not, you know, a speech language pathologist. Person #13: Service Level... something? Person #9: No idea. Anyway. Layla, do you want to start with the HR law drafting? Where are we on the articles that came back from Legal? Person #13: Sure. So the legal review came back on Thursday. Forty-seven comments. Most of them are minor— definitions, cross-references, that kind of thing. But there are two substantive ones. Article 12, on probation, they want clarity on the extension beyond six months and whether it needs Executive Council sign-off or if it's delegated to us. Person #9: And what's your recommendation? Do we want it delegated or do we want the Council to hold it? Person #13: Honestly? Keep it at the Council. If we take the delegation, then every entity that has a problem child on probation comes to us, and we're the bad guy. Let the Council own it. Person #9: Interesting. I actually— I'd push back on that a little. If we hold it, we can shape the precedent. Otherwise it becomes a political football every time a CEO calls a board member. But let me think about it. What's the second one? Person #13: The second one is Article 28, on the salary scale. Specifically the housing allowance bands. Legal says the draft allows for some flexibility in the mid-band, but the entities are going to argue it's too rigid. ADNOC is already paying— well, I'm sure Omar can speak to that better than me. Person #16: ADNOC pays twenty-two percent above us on the mid-band. The banks pay about thirty-one percent above. And they get in-kind housing on top, so roughly another eight to ten percent in equivalent value. We are not competitive in the mid-senior grades. Between grade 10 and grade 13, we lose people. That's the gap. Person #9: And we can't just— we can't match them. I know. The finance people would kill me. But what if we did something like what the Singapore government does, where they do retention payments at the five-year mark? A lump sum, tied to performance. It's not a salary increase, it's a retention tool. Person #16: Nice in theory. But our performance management data isn't reliable enough yet to justify differential retention payments. We'd be rewarding people based on managers who haven't been calibrated properly. You want to pay someone a retention bonus in 2031 based on an appraisal from a manager who gave everyone a four last year? Good luck defending that in an audit. Person #9: Okay, okay. I hear you. But we have to do something. The law is fixed on the scale, so the flexibility has to come from somewhere. Can we do a market allowance that's reviewed every two years? Like a separate line item, not part of the base? Person #16: That's a compensation practice that exists. It's called a market premium. It doesn't require changing the law. But it does require a budget, and it does require us to define which roles are eligible and for how long. If it's a permanent premium, it's just salary with extra steps. If it's temporary, you have to deal with the culture of— people don't like a benefit that goes away. Person #9: Yalla, we'll park that. I want a one-pager from you, Omar, on market premium examples. ADNOC, Mubadala, and maybe one or two international ones. Not a full benchmark, just a landscape. Can you do that by Wednesday? Person #16: I can send a slide by Wednesday if I don't get pulled into other things. Person #9: I'll make sure you don't. Ahmad, your turn. The ServiceNow situation. I keep hearing about the backlog. What's the actual number? Person #15: So, ma'am, the current open ticket count across all HR categories is 8,740. The breakdown is: Tier 1, the HR shared services team, they have 6,110. Tier 2, meaning things that get escalated to the sections, they have 2,630. And of Tier 2, about 680 have crossed their SLA already. Meaning they're past the response time or resolution time depending on the category. Person #9: Six hundred and eighty is a lot. What's the SLA compliance for Tier 2? Person #15: For Tier 2, the overall is eighty-six point four percent. We had a target of ninety-two percent. The problem is concentrated. It's not across the board. Two entities are responsible for about forty percent of the overdue tickets: the Department of Municipalities and Transport and ADEK. And within those, it's not the full catalogue. It's specifically the employee relations cases, grievance escalations, and some of the HR case— the HR case management. Person #13: I could have told you that. DMT and ADEK are both still sending their ER cases in via email and then someone in their HR team comes to the portal a week later and asks "where is my update?" They don't use the portal the way it was designed. And ADEK has had a huge restructure, so their HR team is literally three junior coordinators right now. They don't know the system. Person #9: What's the— how long until they get a new HR director? ADEK, I mean. Person #13: The board approved a new HR director two weeks ago. But the person is serving a notice period, so realistically October. Maybe late September. Person #9: Okay, so we have a month of this. What do we do in the meantime? Ahmad, can we— what are the options? Do we redeploy people? Do we open a special lane for those two entities? Because I don't want this to become political. You know, the Chairman sees a number like this and starts asking questions about whether the system works. Person #15: Actually, ma'am, there's a technical option we can use. We have the group inboxes for those entities. We can route those emails into the portal automatically— we already ingest them. The problem is they're not being logged. So the emails come, they sit in a shared mailbox, and nobody creates a ticket. I can put in a workflow that auto-creates a ticket for any email from those entities with specific keywords like "grievance" or "case" or "appeal." That gives us the ticket, and then it tracks to the SLA. Person #9: That's a good idea. Why didn't we do that before? Person #15: We did. For DMT and ADEK it was on the roadmap for Q4. But because of the backlog, we pushed it up. I can have the workflow ready by Thursday if I get the keyword list confirmed. Person #13: Wait, but that doesn't solve the actual problem. It gives us a ticket, but the ticket is still waiting for their HR team to provide the information. Auto-creating a ticket doesn't mean anyone is working it. It just means we're tracking that we're waiting on them. That's not a fix, it's a measurement. Person #15: No, you're right. But it changes the conversation. Right now, when we report to the Executive Council, it looks like we're missing SLAs. If the tickets exist and the SLA clock is running, then we can show that the delay is on the entity side, not on the DGE side. And we can use that to pressure their leadership to staff up. Person #9: I love it. That's a smart move. It's not a fix, but it protects us politically and it puts the pressure where it belongs. Do it. Ahmad, send me the keyword list before you go live. And I want to see the numbers on Thursday. Can you— do we have a weekly report or can we make one? Person #15: We have a report. It's generated every Sunday. I can schedule an extra one on Thursday for you. Person #9: Perfect. Omar, I know you don't do tickets, but is there something in the rewards space that's contributing to the backlog? Because I have a feeling some of those tickets are about the salary scale and people asking about their allowances. Person #16: Some of them. Not most. Most of the rewards tickets are Tier 1, standard questions like "when is my bonus paid" and "can I change my dependent's allowance." Those get answered quickly. The ones that get stuck are the exceptions. People whose salary was matched at a different rate before the merger, or who have special provisions in their contract. Those go to my section and they're handled case by case. There's no rule for them, so they take time. Person #9: How many of those? Person #16: Currently, about 140 that are with me. I've cleared sixty from the start of the year. But every time we onboard a new entity to the unified system, we get a new wave of exceptions. It's not a backlog you fully clear. It's a trickle that you manage. Person #9: A trickle that you manage. I'm going to put that on a poster. Okay. Layla, what about the onboarding calendar for the entities onto the system? Where are we? Person #13: We had to reschedule two entities in October because they weren't ready. The HR leads said they didn't have enough time to clean their historical data. So the revised calendar is: Khalifa University, in November. They're on schedule. ADNIC and the two others— Abu Dhabi Media and the... hold on, I have it here— Abu Dhabi Media and the Department of Education and Knowledge? No wait, ADEK already is on. Sorry. Abu Dhabi Media and the... National Library? Person #9: The National Library and Archives? That's a small one. Person #13: Yes, that one. So three in November, and then we have a big wave in January. About— what did we say? Person #15: Twelve entities in January. The ADERP-HR transition, the first major wave after the new law takes effect. Person #9: Twelve in January feels aggressive. What happened to the phased approach we talked about last week? We said maybe six and then learn and then six more. Person #13: That was before the software vendor pushed back on the timeline. They said doing it in two waves costs more, because the integration testing has to be done twice and they have to bill us for two separate resource mobilizations. They gave us a discount if it's one wave. Person #9: Of course they did. How much of a discount? Person #13: Four percent. Person #9: Four percent. And how much is the risk if we have a bad go-live in January, an integration failure, and we have twelve entities offline? What does that cost us? Person #13: It's a risk. But the integration is mostly tested. The issues we had with the first wave were about data quality, not the system. And we've done data-cleaning workshops with those entities. They know what they have to do. Person #9: I'm not going to block it, but I want to see the risk register updated. And I want a conversation with the vendor where we say: if it fails, they pay for the second wave. Is that in the contract? Person #15: Not exactly. The contract has standard milestones. It doesn't have a service credit for a failed entity go-live. Person #9: Then let's amend it. Or if we can't amend it, let's have a side letter. I know legal might not love it, but if the vendor is confident, they'll sign it. If they're not confident, that tells us something too. Person #13: I can get that to legal by the end of this week. Person #9: Good. Now— can we talk about Tomouh for a minute? Because I went to the Mawaheb people last week and there was a thing. Actually, wait. Let me be careful. I need to check my numbers. The user numbers— the civil servants who have active profiles on Tomouh— we're at something like 41,000, right? Person #13: Last I saw, 41,700. And the completion rate for the mandatory training— the one the law requires— is at 78 percent. Person #9: 78 percent, and we need 100 percent by end of year. That's a gap. What's the issue? Is it access? Is it time? Do people not know? Person #13: It's not access. It's prioritization. Entities look at their operational workload and they don't release people to do the training. And some of the training is long. The fundamental programs are four to eight hours. For someone in a front-line service center, finding eight hours is hard. Person #9: Can we break it into modules? Like, 20 minutes a day for a few weeks instead of a full day sitting? Person #13: We can. We've been saying we would for months. It's a development effort. We have the budget, we just don't have the designer time. The team is fully allocated on the new law communications. Person #9: Hmm. Maybe we use the videography and content team from Corporate Communications. They keep asking me for "more human stories." What if we turn the mandatory training into short videos with real people? Like, a procurement officer who did the training and then found savings, or a service manager who used the customer service module and then improved her entity's TAMM rating. Use them as case studies, not as talking-head lectures. Person #15: That's a very different content format. But it could work, actually. If the videos are ten to fifteen minutes, and they're structured with the same learning objectives, we can map the course completion and the certificates. It's a build, but it's a build we can manage. Person #9: Fine. Layla, can you and the team scope that? Talk to Corporate Communications, get a sense of their availability. If it takes two months to make the videos, then we have two months of people still doing the old format. We don't make the deadline better by waiting. Person #13: I'll get a timeline by Tuesday. But I want to flag— there's going to be a question of quality. Vid— corporate Comms has a certain style. Sometimes it's a bit, you know. Person #9: A bit what? Person #13: A bit... cinematic. They love the drone shots. For mandatory compliance training, people want to see a schedule and a checklist. Not a behind-the-scenes of a fish market with a voiceover about "the journey of excellence. Person #9: Okay, you're being funny, but you're— you're not wrong. So we brief them hard. We give them the learning objectives. We do the storyboarding ourselves and they handle the production. We don't let them go off and come back with a short film. Person #13: Good. Person #9: Omar, you've been quiet. Anything on your side I should know about? Grace period calculators? The new law's first salary changes— everyone's going to be looking at their pay slip in January. Person #16: Yes. The main thing is that the grace period for entities to comply with the salary scale ends on the 1st of December. After that, they have to be on the new structure. We've had 34 of 53 entities confirm their compliance. The remaining 19 have not confirmed, and we have no data to know if they're working on it or ignoring it. Person #9: Which 19 are ignoring it? Person #16: Most of them are smaller authorities. But two are not small: the Abu Dhabi Public Health Center and the... it's the one in Al Dhafra. The— logistics services? No, not logistics. Person #9: Al Dhafra? The region municipality? Person #16: The Al Dhafra Region Municipality, yes. They have a significant number of employees on legacy contracts with allowances that don't map to the new scale. They've had three different HR directors in the last year. I don't think it's bad faith. I think it's chaos. Person #9: Okay. I'll call the municipality's director. He and I used to work together at the— he was at Mubadala, actually, before he went there. Let me give him a nudge. But I want us to have a formal letter ready as well, so he knows it's not just a friendly call. Person #16: I'll prepare the letter and give it to you today. So you can send it after your call. Person #9: Thank you. Good. What about— do we have a sense of the total financial exposure if we have to correct allowances retroactively? For the ones who've been underpaid since the law took effect? Person #16: For the 34 entities who confirmed, we estimate it's about 14 million dirhams in correction payments. Plus administrative workload of about 900 hours across the payroll teams. For the 19 who haven't confirmed, we can't estimate because we don't know their gaps. Person #9: Fourteen million. That's— okay. That's a number I'm going to need to say out loud in front of the Finance people. Do we have that in a slide you can share with me? Person #16: I have it in an Excel file. I can convert it to a slide. Person #9: Convert it. To a slide. Not a slide deck, just one slide. The number, the breakdown by entity, and the timeline. Person #16: You'll have it tomorrow morning. Person #9: Beautiful. Thank you. Ahmad, one more thing on service desk— the "happy path" we've been talking about. The employee who's been calling about their end-of-service benefit? That was— that went viral, in a small way. The video had, what, a hundred thousand views? Person #15: We reached about 120,000 on the official channels. Different platforms. I was surprised. It was just a simple walkthrough of the process, done in an animated format with a voiceover. It wasn't meant to be a piece of content. Person #9: But it shows something. People have questions, and they want answers in a format that's quick. Do we have a plan to do more of those? For the top ten ticket categories? We could cut our Tier 1 volume by— I don't know— maybe 20 percent if people could self-serve the answer. Person #15: We could do a series. But I need to be careful about the content. The executive council's communication policy says any public-facing content that involves a service process needs to be reviewed by the entity that owns the process. So if we do one on, for example, "how to calculate your gratuity," the entity that owns the payroll system needs to sign off. That process takes time. Person #9: We'll manage. Let's draft a list of the top ten ticket topics and get them into the next communications cycle. If we're doing videos for Tomouh— I'm not going to say the phrase "content engine," because I hate myself for even thinking it— but if we're doing videos anyway, let's see if we can use the same production partner for both. Person #15: I'll send you the list tomorrow with the ticket volume and the estimated impact if we can reduce them. Person #9: Great. So let me just— let me go back to the numbers I have from you, Ahmad. Eight thousand seven hundred forty open tickets. Is that going to be a problem when we present at the board? Because I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, the Chairman is going to say, "How can you have eight thousand tickets? Person #15: The eight thousand includes Tier 1 which operates under a different SLA. Tier 1 is a 24-hour response, 5 business days to resolution. They're currently at 94 percent compliance. Tier 2 is at 86.4. The headline number that we report should be the Tier 2 number, not the aggregate. We don't normally report the aggregate. Person #9: But if someone sees the dashboard— Person #15: We control who sees the dashboard. The leadership view is pre-set to show Tier 2. The aggregate is only visible to a few of us. So the board sees 86.4, not 8,740. Person #9: Okay. Good. That's good. But I want to make sure the 86.4 doesn't get worse. Because we've got October coming, we've got the GITEX holiday, we've got the November waves of onboarding. The system is going to be under pressure. Do we have enough capacity on the Tier 2 side if the volume spikes? Person #15: For the existing category mix, yes. We have 14 human resource specialists on Tier 2 and they clear about 90 tickets a week each. But if the mix changes, if we get more ER cases or more exception requests, the average handle time goes up by a factor of three or four. Person #9: So we're fine until we're not. Person #15: Correct. Person #9: I want you to— and you might have already done this, tell me if you have— I want a trigger plan. At what point do we hire contractors? At what point do we escalate to the section heads to take tickets out of the queue? Just so we're not inventing the thing in the middle of a crisis. Person #15: I have a staffing model. I built it in— we use it for the workforce planning. It models to the 95th percentile of ticket arrivals. The problem is, we've never fully staffed to the model. We're always one or two people below because of budget approvals. The model says we need 16 Tier 2 specialists. We have 14. The two extra were in the budget request that was deferred. Person #9: Deferred when? Person #15: In June. The Department of Finance asked us to trim 5 percent of the operating budget, and the CXO decided to defer those two positions instead of cutting something else. Person #9: Hmm. That was my predecessor's decision, so I won't relitigate it. But I'm going to need those two positions. Even if we hire them as contractors so it doesn't hit the headcount ceiling. Let me have a conversation with the Undersecretary this week. I can't promise anything, but I think there's an argument to be made because the SLA slippage directly affects the scorecard. Person #15: If we get the two people, I can commit to 92 percent within five weeks. If they're experienced. If they're fresh, it'll take a bit longer because they need to learn the processes. Person #9: We'll find experienced. I'm not going to hand you juniors. Okay. Layla, you had something else on the— you had a note about the HR shared services on the new law? The article about service standards? Person #13: Yes. So Article 15 in the draft says that HR shared services must include a specific set of functions: onboarding, payroll, benefits administration, records, and time tracking. We have all of those in the current catalogue. But there's a new requirement for entities to publish their HR service standards. The draft says "entities shall inform employees of the service levels applicable to their requests, including but not limited to timelines for response and resolution. Person #9: That's important. That turns the SLA from an internal accountability tool into a public promise. If we're going to do that, we need entities to actually hit those SLAs. We can't have DMT and ADEK at 60 percent and tell employees "you can expect a response within five days. Person #13: Exactly. So there's a conversation happening about whether we delay the publication requirement by a year, to give entities time to get their act together. Or whether we push it and let the public scrutiny be the pressure mechanism. Person #9: What's your leaning? Person #13: I lean toward publishing. We've been talking about a "bill of rights" for employees for a year. If we postpone it, we look like we're protecting entities that don't want to be measured. But I also understand that some of the smaller entities don't have the same capacity, so they'll genuinely struggle to meet the standards. Person #9: What if the publication is on a curve? Like, we publish the standards, and we publish a compliance percentage, not individually but as a government-wide aggregate. So employees know there's a standard and roughly how often it's met, but we don't name and shame a single entity. Person #13: That's a middle path. It might satisfy most people. But I've already heard from one DG who said "if you publish an aggregate number and one entity drags it down, we all look bad." Which is a fair point. Person #9: It is a fair point. But it's also an argument for getting everyone to a baseline. Ahmad, what would it take to get every entity to at least a base level of HR shared services compliance by, say, April next year? Is that realistic? Person #15: It depends on what we mean by base level. If we mean opening tickets, responding within the SLA, and closing most of them on time, then yes— if we fix the two or three problem entities. If we mean full compliance with all the service standards including the newer ones like case management and grievance logging, then probably a year. We can't rush the trust. People at the entities know when a system is being used to cover problems. If we push too hard too fast, they'll go back to email and shadow processes. Person #9: I know. I've been in HR long enough to know that if you make people log into a system to get their work done, everyone goes to workarounds. We don't want that. We want the system to be the path of least resistance. Which means it has to be good, not just mandatory. Right now, is it good? Actually, let me rephrase. Is it good enough that a busy HR manager would prefer it to email? Person #15: For about fifty percent of the use cases, yes. For the other fifty, it's okay. The two pain points are the case consolidation— if an employee puts in multiple tickets about the same issue, they have to track them separately, and there's no linking— and the notification settings. We send too many emails, and people either mute them or ignore them. Person #9: So that's the experience piece. I want to see a plan for fixing those two things before the January wave. Because if we onboard twelve entities onto a system that's okay, they'll feel it on day one, and it'll create a bad impression that sticks. Person #15: I have a plan. It requires one integration specialist and about a thousand hours of development and testing. And we need the entity who owns the notification system to allow us to change the rules; we've been asking them for permission for two months. Person #9: Who owns the notification system? Is it the digital people? GovDigital? Person #15: Yes. The notification engine is a common platform, owned by GovDigital. They've had some personnel changes and our request slips down their roadmap every sprint. I don't think it's resistance; I think it's just not their priority. Person #9: I'll send a note to the GovDigital DG. He and I went to the Hult together— wait, no, did we? No, we didn't. I'm confusing him with someone else. Anyway, I know him well enough to send a polite message asking to move it up. But Ahmad, don't wait for them. If they can't prioritize it, maybe we can build a thin layer on our side that manages the notification templates without needing their change process. Person #15: We've discussed that. It's possible, but it creates a technical debt. If we build parallel notification logic and then later their system improves, we'll have to discard it. It'll look like waste. Person #13: Technical debt is fine if it's cheap and we can decommission it later. What's the cost? Person #15: It's probably forty to sixty thousand dirhams of developer time if we use a contractor. It's not a huge system. It's just a truncation of their engine down to HR-specific use cases. Person #9: Yalla. Do it. If we have to go back to GovDigital later and say "we solved it ourselves," that's a conversation I'm willing to have. Omar? Person #16: Sorry, I was going through the numbers while you were speaking. The notification thing is not really my area, but I wanted to say something about the cumulative impact. We have a few things all happening in the same quarter: the ticket backlog, the entity onboarding, the salary corrections, the Tomouh completion deadline. Each of those things is manageable on its own, but they all land on the same two or three teams. I've seen what happens when you multitask a team in a quarter like that. The quality on the salary analysis specifically will suffer because it's the most cognitively demanding work we do, and it will be the first place I lose focus. Person #9: That's a very honest thing to say. Person #16: I'm not a manager who hides his dependency issues. I'd rather tell you now than produce something wrong in November. Person #9: Let's look at it as a capacity plan. Ahmad, can you and Omar sit down this week and map the critical path between the ServiceNow backlog work and the salary correction work? I know they're different teams, but there's an overlap if you both need the data mapping from ADERP. Tell me where the pinch point is, and I'll lobby for whatever resource we need. Person #15: We can meet tomorrow afternoon. Person #16: I have the afternoon blocked for the letter to the municipality. But I can make time at 3:00. Person #15: Okay, 3:00. Person #9: Good. Then if there's nothing else— oh, wait. I wanted to ask about the Tomouh— no, the Mawaheb placement numbers. For the national talent hub. We said we'd get 350 Emiratis placed into government roles this year. Where are we? Person #13: 312 as of last Friday. Of that, about 190 are in government roles and the rest are in the private sector partnerships like Calidus and Hub71. We need 38 more by the end of December. The pace has slowed down in August because a lot of the hiring managers are on leave. Person #9: 38 by December is... doable. But I want to make sure we're not just putting bodies into roles that don't exist. Did we do the quality check— the 90-day retention rate for the ones placed in Q1? Person #13: The retention rate is 91 percent at 90 days, which is slightly above our target of 90. But the interesting— there's an interesting pattern: the dropout rate is higher for the ones placed via the private sector partnership. One of the Calidus interns, actually, he left because, and I quote, "I was promised a job, not a training program with occasional practical work." So they're feeling that some of the private sector placements don't lead to full employment. Person #9: And that's a reputation risk for us. If Mawaheb becomes known as "the place where you go and it doesn't lead anywhere," we lose the trust of the people we're trying to help. Can we have a conversation with Calidus about converting some of those training places into actual offers? Person #13: I've had that conversation. They say the trainees need to go through their evaluation cycle, and the next cycle is in November. I've asked if we can have a fast-track option for the ones who are already performing; they said there's a process, and they don't want to bypass it. Person #9: Hmm. I'll maybe take that up with one of the board members. I know someone at Calidus— actually, I don't, but I know someone who knows someone. Let me see if a polite text message moves faster than their evaluation cycle. Person #13: It probably will. Person #9: Good. Good. Okay, so we're aligned on that for now. And the 38 by December, inshallah, we'll get there. I don't want to push the private sector thing too hard if the retention is going to hurt us later. Quality over quantity. Person #15: Ma'am, if I may, we should also be careful about the ServiceNow ticket backlog. The SLA breach rate has been rising, and the entity satisfaction score from the last pulse survey was not good. The backlog is now at 4,700 tickets across all entities. We need to decide on the priority for the next sprint. Person #9: Right, right. The backlog. I keep meaning to ask— what's the actual breakdown? Is it the same categories over and over or is it spread out? Person #15: Mostly the same. Payroll corrections are about 40 percent. Leave processing, another 25 percent. The rest is onboarding and document requests. The payroll ones are the ones that get escalated to the DG's office, because people are angry about their money. So that's the pinch point. Person #16: The payroll ones are also the ones where we have to double-check everything because of the new law. The allowance changes are still causing confusion. Entities are submitting tickets that are actually policy questions, not process requests. They're asking "is my grade 12 housing allowance correct?" when they should be reading the circular we sent in June. Person #15: Exactly. And we are spending time on triage, not on clearing the queue. I have been telling the team to use the knowledge base, but the search is not good enough. The articles are too long. People do not read. Person #9: Can we shorten them? Like, a one-page "what changed for you" per grade level? My old HR team at Miral did that after the merger and the ticket volume dropped by a third in two months. People just want to know if they're better off or worse off. Give them that in two lines and they stop calling. Person #13: That's a good idea. But we'd need to be careful— if we publish something wrong, the grievance escalations will spike. I can have the policy team draft it this week, but they're stretched with the HR law implementation checklist. Can we look at the calendar? Eid al-Adha? No, sorry. It's almost... we're in late August. National Day is in December. The next holiday is actually nothing until November. Person #9: We have time then. Let's do it. Ahmad, can you give the knowledge base article templates to the policy team by Friday? Then we can publish by mid-September, before the end of Q3. That gives us two months to clear the backlog before the year-end rush. Person #15: Yes, ma'am. I will send the templates. Kindly coordinate with the policy team on the approval flow, though. I do not want to have the same problem as last time where the legal review took three weeks. Person #13: The legal review is not going to take three weeks. It was once, and it was because the wording was ambiguous. I'll make sure the draft is clean before it goes anywhere. Person #16: I'll review the salary and allowance numbers. If you want, I can give you the exact figures per grade by Wednesday. But if the article says "your allowance changed" without the exact number, it's going to create more work, not less. So let's be precise. Person #9: Yes, yes. Precise. That's our thing. Okay, so we have a plan: wait, I have a quick thought. Actually, I had this idea from a startup in Riyadh— they put a WhatsApp-style bot on their HR portal and it cut ticket volume by half. Could we do something like that? Instead of the full Copilot rollout, just a basic bot for the top 10 questions? Person #16: Nice in theory. But we already have the Copilot pilot in progress. Let's not add another tool and confuse people. Person #15: The Copilot is still in the sandbox. We can add a few intents to the existing model, though. The LLM can handle the top questions. But the accuracy on the payroll ones is still around 85 percent. For something this sensitive, I would not take it live until we have tested it against the new law. Person #9: Okay, so we're not doing the bot. Fine. Let's focus on the short articles. Ahmad, you'll have the templates. Omar, the numbers. And I'll speak to the Calidus thing. Anything else? The Mawaheb numbers are fine, the backlog is being worked, the articles are coming. Person #13: Just one thing— the ADEC scorecard indicator for "employee engagement" is due in two weeks. I need your sign-off on the narrative we submitted. I sent it to your inbox yesterday. It's short. Person #9: I'll look at it tonight. Send me a reminder. Actually, don't. I'll see it in the morning. Okay, I think we're done. Wait— no, one more. The Tomouh learning hub— the attendance for the new mandatory modules is at 62 percent. I want that above 80 by the end of September. Can we nudge the entities? Person #13: We can send a letter. But a nudge from us goes a long way if it's signed by the Undersecretary. Can you make that happen? Person #9: I can ask. I'll talk to her after this. Okay. Anything else? No? Good. Shukran everyone, good work. Yalla, let's go. *[A muffled voice in the background, possibly a child:]* Person #9: Sorry, that's my— no, it's fine. They're home today. Okay, bye. Yes, I'll send the reminder. Inshallah. Bye.