The new flow added a summary screen that showed workers their exact clock-in and clock-out locations on a map just like the contractor would see it. This made mistakes more obvious and accountability more real. We also added automatic rounding to the nearest 15 minutes and snapped unusually long shifts to the project schedule, so payroll ops didn’t have to clean up the mess later. What workers saw matched what was sent to contractors. That small shift in visibility and friction made a huuuge difference.

I designed a way for workers to review and edit time entries anytime before they were submitted to contractors. In theory, it gave them more flexibility. In practice, almost not many used it. My guess is either they nailed it on the first try (best case), didn’t know they could make edits later (plausible), or still assumed the contractor was ultimately in charge of time (unfortunately still true in some cases).

We added clock-in and clock-out maps to give contractors a clearer view of when and where shifts started and ended. We didn’t have direct metrics on trust, but we saw contractors using that data to settle disputes, which in my view suggests they believed it. On the flip side, workers were notified when their time was approved or changed and could dispute it directly. Instead of ops chasing people down, both sides had the info they needed. Our team went from spending 3 days a week resolving time disputes to just a couple of hours.

Clock-in and clock-out times were all over the place, sometimes showing 24-hour shifts, other times missing entire days. Some clocked out hours after their shift ended, or forgot entirely and only noticed when clocking in the next day. Many workers didn’t review their time before submitting. This led to inaccurate time sheets getting sent to contractors and a cascade of manual corrections later.

Each week followed the same painful pattern. Our payroll team rounded worker-reported hours and sent them to contractors, who cross-checked them against their own logs usually treating theirs as the source of truth. When the numbers didn&’;t match (which happened a lot), payroll and support ops were left sorting it out. That meant chasing foremen, piecing together timelines, and trying to resolve disputes with limited context. Workers were often left in the dark sometimes waiting weeks to get paid correctly.

Hiring through Buildforce was supposed to be easier, but our time tracking flow added more overhead for contractors. Many already had systems in place, so using ours felt like extra work... not an upgrade. On the worker side, the flow was too easy to speed through (they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong) and too hard to correct later. Meanwhile, our ops team was stretched thin, manually reconciling time across three disconnected perspectives.