Timezones, effective dating and Workday

I recently received an email about timezones in Workday, wondering how all the pieces come together regarding the timing of transactions, as it's a SaaS solution, hosted in the US.  In particular, when and how do things such as a hire become effective, particularly when it's a timezone around Asia or India, where today is already tomorrow?  A few points:

Workday gives you a few options, when it comes to timezones.  You can set timezone in 3 areas, or you can keep the delivered defaults:

• the tenant (default = US Pacific)
• locations (default = tenant timezone)
• on the user (default = location timezone)  Only an admin can set a user's timezone, a user cannot self-select.

Workday has this piece of guidance on Community:
Effective dates are in Pacific Time. When something becomes effective, it is effective all over the world, because all users are logged into the Workday servers in the Pacific Time zone.

I guess this makes sense, as California is the 'end' of the date around the world.  So by the time it becomes effective there, everyone else has already reached this date.  However, on a practical sense, this means that if you make a business process change active as of August 1st, for Austrailia and countries in this part of the world will be closer to the 2nd before the change becomes active.

We discussed this topic a bit in the HRMS Fundamentals class, as we were hiring employees and kicking off workflow approvals.  We noticed that if the initiator was in Singapore and the approver was in New York, the transaction was date/time stamped with the local user settings.  As a result, it looked like the transaction had been approved before it was entered.

So--the idea would be that you date things according to your location.  So if your new hire starts on August 1, then make the effective date August 1, so that your history on the person will be correctly displayed.

A tip:  If you are doing EIBs or other admin tasks--best to adopt the timezone of the impacted population, so that your event dates ring true.  Otherwise, you may end up with incorrect timing for mass transactions.