Starting point
The company, around 250 employees across two sites, had rolled out Copilot to everyone six months earlier. IT distributed the licences, there was a company-wide training, and after that not much happened in HR. The three people there used Copilot to smooth out emails. The work that actually ate time carried on as before: a reference letter started from the last similar document and took an hour. The minutes of the leadership round were written in the evening from the recording. The fourth question about the home office policy in one week was typed for the fourth time.
The moment it tipped was a reference letter. A manager had written one with Copilot herself, from three sentences, without HR seeing it, and the employee walked into HR with the document because one phrase read like a coded downgrade. The head of HR called me the same day. Not because she wanted to get rid of Copilot. She wanted it to run under rules the team knew.
At the first meeting the head of HR, the works council chair and the data protection officer were all at the table. The works council said the sentence I hear in almost every one of these projects: nobody asked us during the rollout what the tool does with personnel data. The data protection officer had read Microsoft's documentation on processing inside the tenant and was reassured about where data is stored, but not about access to HR folders. That set the frame of the project before a single routine was built.
Approach
The first week belonged to the stopwatch. Each of the three people in the team noted for a week which task came how often, how long it took and whether it needed a decision or was just writing. The list was short and clear in the end: reference letters, minutes and recurring employee questions together took the largest share of writing time, and none of the three needed a decision in the first step. Those became the three routines.
The works council was there from the first build session, not as an inspector but as a co-author. We walked through every routine together: what goes in, what comes out, who checks, where the result lands. For the minutes that meant, for example, that individual employees' personnel matters may never end up in a Copilot summary, and that participants are informed before every recorded meeting. That ended up verbatim in the amendment to the IT works agreement, because the works council had phrased it itself.
The reference-letter routine was the first to stand. The manager delivers eight bullet points in a fixed template, HR opens the letter template in Word, starts Copilot with the company's prompt and gets a shell in the German reference language (Zeugnissprache, the coded grading wording used in German references) the company uses. The review step is non-negotiable: grade level per paragraph, completeness of duties, no wording that could be contested. Only then does the letter go for signature.
The skeleton of the prompt from the project. This is the frame of the reference-letter prompt the team has worked with since. It already works like this. What turned it into the company's own prompt during the project is listed below, and that is the part that saves the hour.
The finished prompt, ready to copy
All six building blocks in one prompt. Replace the bracketed placeholders with your own details.
You are writing, as an HR officer at [company], a qualified German reference letter (Arbeitszeugnis) for [first name last name], [position], employed from [date] to [date]. Use only the bullet points below. Do not invent duties, achievements or numbers. If information is missing, ask me instead of assuming. Reference language: overall grade [grade]. [The company's rules for reference wording] Structure: [structure from the company's reference template] Mark every passage where you are unsure or make an assumption with [check]. Manager's bullet points: [bullet points from the form]
- The company's reference languagewhich phrase corresponds to which grade, which sentences are banned because they were contested once before.
- The structure from the company's own templateorder of paragraphs, closing formula, handling of parental leave and part-time.
- The bullet-point form for managerswhich five fields are enough for the draft to be right the first time.
- The review stephow HR can tell in ten minutes whether the draft can be released.
The snag came in week three. Copilot in Outlook initially answered employee questions with knowledge from the internet instead of the company's policy, because the policies sat in a folder Copilot had no access to. IT created a dedicated SharePoint area only for the approved policies, the data protection officer signed off access to exactly that area, and the works council added the list of documents in it to the agreement. Since then Copilot answers with the passage from the policy, and HR reads every answer before it goes out.
In parallel ran the sessions on the wording of the works agreement. That was the slow part, and it should be: the works council meets every two weeks, the data protection officer wanted to see the access rights in the tenant himself, and two clauses on controlling the prompts were rewritten three times. The routines ran in test mode with anonymised data during that time. At the end of month three the amendment was signed, and the team ran the three routines alone for a week while I stayed in the background.
Outcome
A reference letter now runs like this: the manager fills in the bullet-point template, HR builds the draft with Copilot and checks it, the signature follows the same day. The minutes of the leadership round are ready half an hour after the meeting without anyone listening to the recording in the evening, and personnel cases never appear in them. Employee questions about leave, home office and parental leave are answered from the policy, with the passage cited, and no answer promises anything about an individual case any more.
The works council signed the amendment to the IT works agreement, with the three use cases, the review step, the list of approved policies and a review date after six months. The team has since built a fourth routine on its own, job ads from the requirements profile, and presented it to the works council at the review, as the agreement provides. It did not need me for that, and that was the point of the project.