How Lucidya cut leave approvals from days to minutes with automated leave management

The company

Lucidya builds AI tools that help brands manage customer experience and make sense of digital conversations at scale. It is known as a leader in Arabic-language AI, an area where few platforms go deep.

Inside Lucidya, the culture rests on trust, respect and passion. The People & Culture team wanted employees’ day-to-day experience of HR to reflect that culture, and the old way of handling routine requests didn’t.

The challenge: an approval cycle that ate up days

An employee needing time off filled in a form. The form went to a manager, then to HR, and sometimes back again for a missing signature. Each step added a delay, and every request had to be tracked down by hand.

“Everyone in HR knows this struggle: the paperwork, and an approval cycle that used to take up so much of our time, especially for leave requests.” — Alhanouf Alzeyadi

Each delayed approval left an employee unsure whether their plans were confirmed, and left HR spending time on follow-up. Leave balances, work arrangements and company announcements also sat in different places, so employees had to ask HR for answers they could have looked up themselves.

The decision

Lucidya needed one system to take routine HR transactions off paper and put them where employees and managers could act on them immediately. ZenHR’s employee self-service and automated workflows met that need.

The solution: one system for requests, approvals and updates

• Digital leave requests and automated approvals: each request goes straight to the right approver, who responds with one click.
• Employee self-service: employees check their own leave balances and history without emailing HR.
• Work location visibility: everyone can see where each person is working from, keeping hybrid arrangements clear.
• Announcements and circulars: management publishes them in ZenHR, so employees have one place to find them.

“It’s easy for employees to log into ZenHR, check their leave, see where they’re working from, and stay updated on the circulars and announcements from management. Everything is easy to refer back to because it’s all in one system.” — Alhanouf Alzeyadi

The results

• Leave approvals went from days to one click.
• No more leave paperwork: requests, approvals and records all live in ZenHR.
• Fewer routine questions reaching HR: employees look up balances, work location and announcements themselves.
• One reliable channel for internal communication: circulars no longer get lost in inboxes.

“Approvals that used to take us days, or a whole day, are now done with a click.” — Alhanouf Alzeyadi

Advice for HR teams

“Be patient. That’s the most important thing. You’re dealing with the most important project you’ll ever work on: people.” — Alhanouf Alzeyadi