47% Fewer HR and IT Help Desk Tickets: How a University Gave Staff a Single Place to Find Everything

University staff navigate one of the most document-heavy work environments in any sector: HR policies, collective agreements, academic regulations, procurement rules, IT security procedures, research ethics guidelines, finance governance, occupational health requirements — all of them updated regularly, all of them essential for doing the job correctly, none of them findable through the organisation's intranet. The result is a tax on productivity that most universities accept as unavoidable. One university stopped accepting it. Staff now find any policy, procedure, or form in under two minutes. HR and IT ticket volume for avoidable enquiries fell 47% in a single semester.

The University's Staff Information Environment

The university employs approximately 5,200 staff: academic staff (teaching and research), professional staff (administrative, technical, and specialist functions), and casual academic staff. Its staff information environment had grown organically across three decades of changing technology: a SharePoint-based intranet implemented in 2016 (partially migrated from an earlier system), a separate HR portal for leave applications and pay information, a financial systems platform, an IT service management portal, a research management system, and a collection of faculty-specific SharePoint sites maintained independently by each faculty.

The HR team maintained 840 policy documents, guidelines, and templates across four versions of their SharePoint site. The IT team maintained 620 knowledge base articles, procedure guides, and setup instructions. The Finance team maintained 280 procurement and financial procedure documents. Research Services maintained 360 ethics, grant management, and research governance documents. These 2,100 documents were spread across six separate systems and sites, each with its own navigation structure and search index.

The HR help desk received an average of 180 tickets per week. The IT help desk received 340 tickets per week. An internal audit conducted by the People and Culture division in Q1 2024 found that 47% of HR tickets and 38% of IT tickets were for information that was published in a policy, procedure, or knowledge base article — but which the staff member had been unable to find through the intranet's search.

What Staff Were Actually Looking For

The HR team's ticket audit identified the ten most common information-seeking HR ticket categories: flexible work arrangement request procedures (top category, 18% of information tickets), parental leave entitlements and application process (14%), performance review timelines and templates (11%), probationary period requirements and documentation (9%), salary sacrifice and superannuation procedures (8%), workplace injury reporting and return-to-work processes (8%), study assistance scheme eligibility and applications (7%), employee assistance programme access procedures (6%), misconduct and grievance procedures (5%), and redundancy and separation procedures (4%).

Every one of these had a current, accurate policy document on the HR intranet site. The average document was 8–12 pages long and contained all the information the staff member needed. But the intranet's keyword search couldn't bridge the gap between 'can I work from home three days a week?' and 'Flexible Work Arrangements Policy 2024.pdf'.

The IT help desk audit showed a different but structurally identical problem. Staff searching for VPN setup instructions, multi-factor authentication configuration, software licence request procedures, or data classification requirements couldn't find the relevant knowledge base article through keyword search. They raised a ticket. An IT analyst read the ticket, found the knowledge base article, and sent a link. Average resolution time for these tickets: 3.2 days. Time the IT analyst spent on the resolution: 8 minutes.

The Deployment

The university's Chief People Officer and Chief Information Officer jointly sponsored the Keyspider Workplace Search deployment — an unusual alignment that reflected the recognition that the problem was shared between their two functions. The procurement was approved in June 2024, with a go-live target of the start of Semester 2 (late July) to capture the peak policy-search period — the time when large numbers of new and returning staff are navigating HR processes, IT setup, and institutional procedures.

Keyspider Workplace Search was configured to connect six source systems: the HR SharePoint site, the IT knowledge base (hosted on a ServiceNow instance), the Finance SharePoint site, Research Services SharePoint, the central university SharePoint intranet, and a legacy network drive structure used by Professional Services for templates and forms. Access controls from each source system were preserved: staff in Finance could access finance documents, while HR-restricted documents (such as individual performance management records and case files) were accessible only to HR team members with appropriate permissions.

The permission model used the university's existing Azure AD / Entra ID groups — no new access control lists were created. Every staff member's search results reflected exactly the permissions they already held in the source systems. A casual academic staff member searching for 'flexible work arrangements' would see the public HR policy. An HR business partner searching for 'performance management case file template' would see the restricted HR toolkit documents that casual staff did not have access to.

The search interface was embedded in three locations: the university intranet homepage, the HR portal sidebar, and the IT service management portal — ensuring staff encountered the unified search from whichever entry point they used. An AI answer layer was activated for policy questions specifically: queries phrased as questions ('how do I apply for parental leave?', 'what is the process for reporting a workplace injury?') returned an AI-generated step-by-step answer drawn from the relevant policy document, with the source cited and a link to the full document provided.

Total deployment time: 14 days from contract signature to live across all six systems.

Results: One Semester

HR Help Desk

At the end of Semester 2 — approximately 14 weeks post-deployment — HR information-seeking ticket volume had fallen 47% compared to the equivalent semester of the prior year: from an average of 85 information-seeking tickets per week to 45. Total HR ticket volume fell 22% — the reduction in information-seeking tickets was partially offset by a modest increase in complex, individual-circumstance queries (consistent with staff now self-serving simple policy questions and reserving HR contact for genuinely complex situations).

The HR team lead reported that the character of tickets had changed qualitatively, not just quantitatively. 'The tickets we receive now are the ones we should be receiving — situations that actually need an HR professional's judgement, not a link to a document.'

IT Help Desk

IT procedure and knowledge base tickets fell 38% over the same period. The IT service manager noted an additional benefit: the Workplace Search deployment had surfaced 47 outdated knowledge base articles — items that appeared in search results but generated staff feedback indicating the information was wrong or superseded. The search analytics dashboard showed these as high-click items with low satisfaction ratings (tracked through a simple 'was this helpful?' feedback widget on the results page). The IT team updated or retired all 47 articles within 30 days of identification.

Staff Experience

A staff survey conducted at the end of the semester collected 1,420 responses — 27% of permanent staff. Ninety-one percent rated Workplace Search as 'useful' or 'very useful'. The median reported time to find a policy or procedure through Workplace Search was under 2 minutes, compared to a median of 'more than 15 minutes' reported for the previous intranet search — with 34% of respondents indicating they had previously given up and raised a ticket rather than continuing to search.

"I spent 20 minutes trying to find the flexible work arrangement form last year. I gave up and raised an IT ticket. It took three days to get a response that just contained a link. Now I type 'flexible work form' and I have it in five seconds. I can't overstate how much time this saves."

— Professional staff member, Faculty of Engineering

Onboarding: The Compounding Benefit

The deployment's impact on new staff onboarding was an anticipated benefit that proved larger than projected. New staff — unfamiliar with the institution's systems, policies, and procedures — generate disproportionately high help desk ticket volume in their first 90 days. With Workplace Search available from day one of their intranet access, new staff in Semester 2 generated 52% fewer HR and IT information tickets in their first 90 days than the equivalent cohort onboarded in the prior year.

The People and Culture team attributed this to new staff's confidence in self-service: when a single search bar returns accurate, cited answers to any policy or procedure question, new staff attempt self-service first. When self-service fails (which it did for genuinely complex queries), they then escalate. The prior pattern — attempting intranet search, failing, and immediately raising a ticket — was replaced by a more graduated self-service behaviour that substantially reduced the help desk burden during the highest-cost period of the employment lifecycle.