Creating a workforce management Glide app for 600+ employees

When the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, Darren Murphy worked in IT in the hospitality industry. With zero tourism happening, he suddenly found himself out of a job with plenty of free time during the lockdown.

With 20 years of IT and product development experience, he turned his attention to his passion for building his own app and discovered Glide. He immediately fell in love with how easy and powerful the software was for building his own software. With abundant time, he immersed himself in learning everything he could about Glide throughout the lockdown.

“I watched all of your videos, read the whole library from beginning to end, and got involved in the Glide Community,” says Darren. A few months into this side project, a former colleague from a previous company, Charles Reed, reached out with a problem. Charles is the CEO of Royal Greyhound, and he had limited visibility into the day-to-day staffing operations in his large organization. Darren joined the Royal Greyhound team, a solution partner for the Port of Singapore. The company’s contract is to supply crane operators, truck drivers, and everyone who keeps the port running. The organization had no IT department and was fragmented, with its HR, finance, IT systems, processes, and documents in different places.

“There were all these siloed compartments, and everyone was just doing their own thing with their own spreadsheets,” says Darren. “There was no single source of truth in terms of employee databases. It was just a big mess.”

Darren joined the company to lead IT and had a hunch that he could build something with Glide to solve Charles’s problem.

With over 600 workers and needing to pull in real-time data from operations, finance, and HR, Darren knew building this app would be a massive project. So, he started working on a new Glide app in early 2021 to tackle the company’s most immediate problems: rostering, equipment breakdowns, pay slips, and an employee database. The impact was immediate across the company. For Charles, this meant he finally had the visibility he needed to make data-driven decisions as CEO. The level of granularity made an even bigger impact on supervisors and HR.

“We now can track the average number of shifts each worker does per month,” says Darren. “We can break this down into different groups, plot that as a distribution chart, and then target those workers that need encouragement.”

We have a baseline of shifts per month, but if someone works more shifts, he gets a bonus. By using the app, we can identify team members that may need more encouragement. That was something that was very difficult to do before. We can also do a bit of crystal ball gazing. We can look at the target number of workers we want to supply to the port and see how we're projecting so we can make adjustments, which we could never do before.”In addition, since they hire many foreign workers, this new workforce management app makes it easy for HR to keep all of their employment passes and work permits in one place. Now, HR can have a roster of all work permits in one place. For instance, they can run a report to see any permits that need to be renewed next month. It is no longer a mad scramble to get everything done. It is not just the CEO and supervisors who love this new app. The drivers also love it since they always know what’s expected of them.

“Now, the drivers can actually track their own performance and see their targets on a day-to-day basis,” says Darren. “It used to be that they would only find out when they got their pay slip at the end of the month. But now, because they have their own dashboard, they can track how they progress each month.”

Darren was surprised at how the workforce management app he built in Glide has evolved over time. The initial vision was to consolidate and automate various tasks in Google Sheets. As more people in the company realize what this Glide app can do, their vision continues to expand. In fact, Darren is now working on a new desktop app, including an HR-specific one for expense claims and PTO approvals.