In this interview, Bryce Davis, Workforce General Manager, discusses the challenges of managing large, distributed workforces, especially in a remote‑work context. He explains that relying solely on technology to enforce time‑and‑attendance honesty is a short‑term fix; true solutions require an organizational layer that aligns HR policies, payroll processes, and transparent communication. Davis stresses the importance of involving payroll teams early to understand downstream effects of complex contracts and to avoid overburdening them. When it comes to employee monitoring, he argues that uncommunicated surveillance feels like spying and erodes trust. Instead, leaders should first realign everyone around the company mission, explain the purpose of any tracking tools, and engage employees in the decision‑making process. He also outlines how global SaaS companies can efficiently schedule across time zones using a “follow‑the‑sun” model, which hinges on demand forecasting and placing the right people in the right places at the right times. Real‑world examples, such as Domino’s Pizza’s granular demand prediction, illustrate how understanding business demand drives effective rostering. Overall, Davis advocates for a balanced approach that blends technology, clear communication, and strategic scheduling to maintain trust, productivity, and operational continuity across distributed teams.
Chapters
Cool.
So I understand, you know, you're working with these big organizations, multiple departments, multiple employees within them. You know, there's going to be a certain amount of difficulty and complexity in managing all these employees, especially more so now with large volume of teams moving remotely. What's some approaches you've seen or you assess with, you know, time and attendance tracking to avoid, you know, discrepancies and then, you know, obviously dishonesty from employees? How do you guys keep track of that?
Yeah, so there's both a sort of a technological layer to it and there's kind of an organizational layer, I suppose you could call it HR for lack of a better word. I think the What I've seen time and time again is we get people coming to us and they essentially have a HR problem in that, you know, employees might be being dishonest or that, you know, that people are stealing from the business or whatever, and they kind of want a technological solution that will catch those people out. You know, quite often in the face of something like that, a technological fix is only ever a band-aid, and it's basically doomed to fail because people like that can find ways around anything. As much as I can sit here and tell you, yeah, we track 100% of XYZ, people are always going to find a way to sabotage it or just not use it, just withhold themselves from the whole process.
Yeah.
So firstly, I mean, fixing anything like that and just getting to the core of that is really important. And then I'd say, yeah, like the process, introducing some technology into the process, whatever that may be, to make everything one, more transparent, because I think that creates a lot of friction between people when People don't know whether their timesheets are being received or who has access to that. Just making sure everyone can get on the same page. And then I'd say this, I guess, for any business owners or anyone who's interested in this stuff is go and speak to someone who's doing your payroll because that's kind of where all the externalities end up.
Mm-hmm.
So we often find these critically overworked payroll teams because people have negotiated these crazy contracts with people where there's all this stuff that's super hard to calculate. And inevitably, we come in to automate all of it. But people don't really think about the downstream effects of it. You know, just, just in the same way that the accounts team always hates salespeople because they're creating, you know, really complicated deals that are just so hard to bill customers for. Payroll is quite the same. So I think working back from any issues that that arrive there are important as well.
And then adding to that, how do you— so we've done this before, you know, we have time tracking tools where people, you know, they're being monitored and we're keeping track of their hours and their time and screenshots, all of the above. And then others where, you know, they're kind of set goals and they're trying to trust it to deliver. How do you suggest keeping that balance when you're managing a team where you feel you're monitoring them at all the time and micromanaging them their day-to-day versus, you know, setting that goal and then just giving them trust to deliver? How do you keep that balance?
Yeah, so the tracking one is interesting. We've done a bit of work on this in terms of, you know, trying to educate people. I think this tracking thing is the perfect storm for businesses for the reason we've already discussed, which is you've got people working from home, so they already feel like they're separated from the company's mission. They're already kind of feeling like they're an island to themselves, or, you know, they're, they're less able to align themselves with other people they're working with, and it breaks down trust over time. And then, of course, the business is feeling something the same way as well. It's saying, well, we have all these employees, we're not quite sure what they're doing. We really hope that they're doing the right thing. And they want to protect, you know, their investment, and that leads them to put in some sort of monitoring software. But of course, everyone perceives this as being spying because there was no work done upfront to explain why we'd want to do it. And I think that's the biggest thing. Before you do anything with technology, any process change, anything, it's good to then realign everyone around the mission first. So to say, you know, hey guys, you know, one of the big concerns for the business is that, you know, we all want to make sure that we're pulling in the same direction during COVID It's hard for us to do that. We appreciate it's hard for you guys working from home. We want to create a system where we can Have transparency across the board and align everyone. This is what we want to do. You know, what do you think? And sort of engage your employees around it. You know, I think if you explain to employees why we're doing this, you know, you might actually uncover something that means you don't need to do that in the first place. Or if you are going to do it, then it's understood by everyone. But the worst thing you can do is just yeah unilaterally put in something like this and don't explain it. And yeah, I think there's some pretty famous examples in the UK of. You see banks around the place who are having employees, you know, suing them or, you know, basically just revolting over this stuff.
Yeah, a lot of them are saying, you know, invasion of privacy and, you know, all that, right? So it's a challenge, but yeah, that's a good point, right? As long as you explain it and show, but I mean, hopefully you don't get too much pushback, but it's all business in the end, right? You're part of it, I think, and you have to either accept it or work with it, right?
Yeah. And employees will just, will just, will check out if they're not engaged with it. Like, they'll just, they'll just not use it. You know, if there's, if there's no penalty for doing that. Yeah.
And do you enforce penalties? I don't know. I don't know how you can, but yeah. So another kind of challenge I want to speak about is, you know, international or global SaaS companies, right? They're managing scheduling or you call it rostering. They require employees to schedule different parts of the day for 24 hours, maybe because of the industry or the time zone difference, such as, you know, with you in Australia and then the UK. How do you suggest making that process more efficient and keeping that communication fluid among the international distributed teams?
Yeah, so I think on this, you know, scheduling is really kind of what it comes down to is managing demand on the business. So, you The common one, and I think that we have in our business, is we have this follow-the-sun model where, like I said, we've got teams in Australia and the US and throughout Asia and the UK. And essentially what that allows us to do is essentially operate 24 hours a day during daylight hours. And the reason why we do that is because we have this demand on our business from customers all around the world to support them to use the software, to make sure they're getting results, to Maintain the product. So all of these things are sort of demands on our business, and scheduling, what it really tries to do is make sure that the business is ready for that demand or any predicted demand. And if it's putting the right people in the right place at the right time, and those people are trained and all that sort of good stuff. So really what we try to do is step back and we try to work out what are the kind of demands on the business, what are the inputs, you know, what does the demand look like? Is it stable? Is it lumpy. You know, one of our biggest clients, Domino's Pizza, they've got this down to a science, essentially, where they're trying to predict how many pizzas are being made in 15-minute periods. And they've really, really boiled that down. And they have a very linear business model and a very linear process around it. Yeah, which is why they can make pizzas that arrive at your door so quickly. But, you know, You don't have to go that far around it, but you do have to understand what's kind of driving your business and how you can actually put the right people in there to meet that demand.
I guess when you have, what is that, 30 minutes or it's free guarantee, the downside is, and the risk of not putting that in place is pretty high, so it's well worth it.
