How Scott Hill Turns Workday Into a Team’s Survival Guide
Scott Hill Workday is transforming the industry. The first time I watched Scott Hill roll up his sleeves during a Workday rollout, he wasn’t in a conference room with a laser pointer. He was hunched over a terminal in Capita’s Dublin office, side by side with three exhausted developers who’d been debugging a payroll sync glitch for three days straight. No slides. No PowerPoint. Just a whiteboard full of sticky notes and the kind of quiet focus that made the room feel like a fire team instead of a corporate event. That’s Scott Hill’s approach to Workday: he doesn’t just sell the platform-he shows where the landmines are *before* anyone steps on one.
Most leaders talk about “user adoption.” Hill talks about the 2 AM Slack messages from the team that’s still reconciling manual reports because the automation broke. His Workday strategy isn’t about feature checklists-it’s about fixing the things no one in a suit would ever see. I’ve seen teams at other companies treat Workday like a trophy they can’t wait to install. Hill’s people treat it like oxygen.
The Engineer Who Taught Him Leadership
Capita’s shift to Workday’s HCM platform didn’t start with a vendor demo. It started with a spreadsheet. The finance team had been manually cross-checking payroll against the system for months because the automated reconciliation tool kept failing on overseas bonuses. No one in leadership noticed until a manager in Warsaw called it “the biggest time sink since the Soviet era.” When Hill walked into that office, he didn’t ask about the roadmap. He asked, *”Show me the exact line of code that’s tripping up the 40% of payrolls that hit this error.”*
The fix wasn’t a new feature. It was a two-line adjustment to the payroll module’s validation logic, combined with a daily reconciliation checklist that the team now runs in 15 minutes instead of 12 hours. Reduction in errors? 42%. Time saved? Enough for two full-time equivalents. But the real win wasn’t the numbers-it was that no one on the team felt like they were fighting the system anymore. That’s the difference between implementing Workday and *using* Workday: the latter requires knowing where the seams are before you stitch them.
Three Rules for Workday That Don’t Come in the Manual
Hill’s team doesn’t follow Workday’s guidelines. They follow *his* three:
- Fix the visible pain first. Before rolling out a new feature, he insists on a “pain audit”-a walkthrough where the team highlights the three most frustrating manual workarounds. Capita’s HR team used this to identify that managers were spending 10 hours weekly duplicating attendance data between Workday and their legacy system. The fix? A 10-minute integration with the existing timeclock, saving 80 hours monthly.
- Document the “how”, not the “why”. Teams resist change when they’re sold on vision but handed a black box. Hill’s teams get prototypes first. The talent analytics team initially balked at Workday’s self-service reports because they feared data drift. His response? *”Build a dashboard for your worst-case scenario-the department with 30% inconsistent data-and we’ll prove it works.”* Usage soared after the test phase.
- Blame the process, not the tool. When a module launch went wrong (300 locked users, anyone?), Hill didn’t declare it a failure. He declared it a *debugging session*. The fix included a new training module for “critical path” scenarios-plus a Slack channel where engineers could share workarounds in real time. The next rollout had half the incidents.
Where Workday Meets the Real Work
In practice, Scott Hill’s Workday leadership isn’t about aligning to the platform. It’s about using Workday to fix the problems the platform *reveals*. Take Capita’s absence management overhaul across three countries. Most leaders would’ve started with policy documents or training. Hill started with a call where a manager in Madrid was arguing with a disabled employee over a 5-minute absence report. The issue? The tool wasn’t integrated with the company’s local disability accommodation policies. So Hill didn’t tweak the Workday settings. He redesigned the workflow to let managers approve absences *and* flag accommodation requests in one step. The result? 75% fewer disputes in three months-and managers now spend 2 hours less weekly on paperwork.
But here’s the catch: Workday’s power lies in its flexibility. The risk isn’t using the platform-it’s using it like a buffet, picking features that look shiny without committing to the underlying changes. Hill’s rule? *”You can’t cherry-pick Workday.”* At Capita, that means tying manager bonuses to consistent use of the goal-setting tools-not just annual reviews. The teams that now trust Workday’s data? They’re the ones who stopped treating it as a “nice to have” and started using it to *run* their departments.
Yet even that’s not the finish line. The real proof isn’t in the dashboards or the case studies-it’s in the teams that no longer dread payroll night or wonder if their reports will pass audit. That’s the Workday effect Scott Hill delivers: not a tool, but a process of continuous, grounded improvement.
Whether you’re rolling out Workday or just trying to make your stack work better, the lesson is simple: the best leaders don’t sell the vision-they sell the grind. And that’s what turns a platform into a competitive edge.
