People ops policy work breaks into two halves. The HRIS holds the published handbook, the acknowledgment ledger, and the employee record. The agent reads regulation updates, compares them to current language, and proposes a redline. The question is where the proposal lives between draft and publish, and who signed off on each clause. Dock is the surface for that middle.
Workday, Lattice, and BambooHR stay the system of record for the published policy, the acknowledgment events, and the employee assignment data. Dock is the system of record for what the agent interpreted from a regulation feed and proposed as a change. Each Dock row carries a pointer back to the platform record (workday_policy_id, lattice_review_id, bamboohr_handbook_section_id), the agent identity that drafted, the HR reviewer, the legal reviewer, and timestamps for each. The agent re-fetches platform data via fresh API reads when it needs current handbook text or current acknowledgment counts. The cached draft does not become the policy. The approved draft, pushed back to the HRIS, does.
The policy-drafts table
| draft_id | source_regulation | workday_policy_id | agent_draft_by | hr_reviewer | legal_reviewer | status | published_at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pd_4411 | EEOC 2026 pregnancy accommodation update | wd_pol_882 | agent.policy.mei | priya@ | jordan-legal@ | approved-published | 2026-05-22 |
| pd_4412 | CA SB-1047 AI hiring disclosure | wd_pol_140 | agent.policy.mei | priya@ | jordan-legal@ | legal-rework | null |
| pd_4413 | NYC pay transparency amendment | wd_pol_307 | agent.policy.mei | priya@ | null | awaiting-legal | null |
Each row points at the Workday policy it amends, names the regulation that triggered the draft, and tracks which human signed which gate. The redline itself lives in an attached Dock doc keyed to the draft_id.
The workflow
The agent pulls a regulation diff from the feed it watches. It opens the matching Workday policy, fetches the current language, and writes a redline into a Dock doc. It creates the policy-drafts row with status: awaiting-hr. Priya in HR reviews the redline against the source regulation and either approves or returns it with comments. On HR approval, status moves to awaiting-legal and Jordan in legal reviews for liability language. On legal approval, the agent calls the Workday API to update the policy, triggers the Lattice acknowledgment workflow for affected employees, and writes status: approved-published with the publish timestamp. The handbook section in BambooHR updates from the Workday push. The Dock row is the only place the regulation citation, the redline, and both approver names sit together.
Why this matters
Policy work fails when the why behind a clause is lost. Six months after publish, nobody remembers which regulation drove the change or which lawyer signed the language. The HRIS shows the current text. The audit needs the trail.
Pushing the proposal into Dock keeps the agent honest. The draft is not a Slack message that scrolls away. It is a row with a status, a reviewer queue, and a clock. HR and legal each touch their own gate. Neither can be skipped, and the order is enforced by the row schema. See agent audit and compliance for how the trail reads.
The agent never publishes alone. The publish call to Workday is gated on legal_reviewer is not null and status = legal-approved. That gate is the difference between a drafting tool and a system that ships policy.
FAQ
Does the agent edit the Workday policy directly? No. The agent reads current Workday text and writes the proposed redline into a Dock doc. Only on legal approval does the agent push the new text to Workday via API.
What if HR and legal disagree?
The row sits in legal-rework or hr-rework status. The redline doc gets comments from the dissenting reviewer. The agent does not arbitrate. See Dock for legal.
How do you know which agent drafted which clause?
Every draft row carries agent_draft_by with the agent identity. Each clause in the redline doc is attributed to that identity. Read agent identity and agent identity lifecycle.
Does this replace the handbook in BambooHR? No. BambooHR still serves the handbook to employees and tracks acknowledgments. Dock holds the drafting trail. See Dock for HR.
Sources
- SHRM, Employment Law and Compliance, notes that 89 percent of employers report needing additional FMLA training, indicating ongoing policy maintenance gaps.
- SHRM, HR and Workplace Policies, directs employers to share core policies during onboarding and at appropriate intervals, implying a regular review cadence.
- The Josh Bersin Company, About page, frames foundational HR as policy-driven and recommends shifting toward integrated, AI-enabled operating models.
