Tech & Innovation Blog
Driving Resiliency and Sustainability: We’re All Connected
Future of Work, Innovation, What We Do
Driving Resiliency and Sustainability: We’re All Connected
By Jesse W., Senior Director of Application Development
I firmly believe in leaving things better than I found them. Mindfulness around economic, social, cultural, and natural systems allowed me to develop a sense of environmental responsibility.
Last year, ADP launched the Green Business Resource Group (BRG) to join our other nine BRGs, which place a focus on diversity, inclusion, sustainability, and belonging. Green has a specific purpose of promoting how to conserve and restore our communities’ natural resources. We are driving initiatives to support ADP’s commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and target net-zero Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions by 2050.
Remember how I said I believe in leaving things better than I found them? It’s groups like Green that create opportunities for me to meet like-minded associates who feel the same way.
I was thrilled to learn the community already has over 2,000+ members globally in its early stages, which means there are that many people who are putting sustainability goals first and have an interest in preserving our future. 
Since joining the Green BRG, I have learned how technologists calculate the electricity costs in our public cloud computing in Scope 3, the indirect greenhouse gas emissions that arise from a company’s value chain. This got me thinking. How can my team at ADP help these efforts?
Resiliency helps our business operate technology at peak efficiency and provides teams with a way to lower operating costs for our clients. As the Senior Director of Global Cloud Strategy, I focus on enterprise resiliency and leverage sustainability principles across the team.
By practicing resilience, the teams provide clients with lower operating costs. Sustainability continuously modernizes and improves our best technical solutions to support meaningful business outcomes.
While both practices are complex in planning, I encourage leaders to implement the concepts in team strategies and apply “thinking green” as a problem-solving approach. Further reading: Implementing Environmental Awareness Practices in the Workplace.
As ADP’s partnership with public cloud providers and private cloud use rises, we must think about efficiency gains and how our work tremendously impacts carbon dioxide emissions.
I encourage you to find a group that speaks to your principles and values. I challenge you to widen your sphere of influence and see how you impact the wellness of our world. Consider spending a few hours every month volunteering and understanding eco-friendly practices or starting a conversation on environmental awareness with another individual.
No matter your role or where you are in the globe, we’re all connected. It’s time to take on the global human responsibility of leaving a positive impact. Join me today in finding your community, and consider joining a community or advocacy group that inspires you!
#Sustainability #Enviroment #EnergyEfficiency #Leadership #GlobalGoals
Interested in supporting culture and career opportunities at ADP?
Visit who we hire and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Lifion, Innovation, Award
Jesse joined ADP just over a year ago, and his work on the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team for Lifion had already created an impact. He shared insights on how ADP is pursuing new technologies to benefit the world around us.
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Jesse W., the Senior Director System Reliability Management, recently won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award, honoring visionaries in tech space and making significant contributions to the world of tech.
Jesse helped created a Global Reliability Operating Model that gives developers clearer direction, more agency, and improved job satisfaction while allowing them to deliver more innovative codes to customers faster and with fewer mistakes. His contribution to ADP represents a new culture of ownership-driven outcomes rooted in document-driven engineering, self-service onboarding, and human-centered designing.
Jesse focused on his team, “I want to give credits to the teams we work with. Without them, we would not be able to execute this larger strategy.” He worked with engineering leaders from product-minded approaches to backend engineering, connecting technology capabilities to business goals. Together, they build faster and safer software.
What are some fun facts about you?
I am an innovation leader, a prop plane pilot-in-training, and a vintage Japanese watch collector.
Could you tell us about the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team?
The EREL team is a platform engineering group that builds tools and infrastructure with a vision to help enable an outstanding developer experience at Lifion. It offers capabilities for feature teams to manage their security and develop their cloud-native infrastructure. My team works with them to provide self-service incident and change management.
A vital part of this success is the Global Reliability Operating Model (GROM), a holistic approach to building complex software in the cloud. GROM has allowed software teams to work autonomously, pushing collaboration to the max and minimizing complexity within Lifion’s systems. EREL is constantly building upon its systems, focused on feedback to understand what tools and pipelines can evolve to improve the user experience.
What words would you use to describe engineers at work?
Simplify, Innovate and Grow. EREL actively measures its impact based on real data available to them within the systems. Utilizing real-time data makes this possible and provides a creative space for all engineers at work.
Jesse (right) with his family
What advice do you have for those with a focus on innovation?
Separate the ideation and inspiration from the execution allows your leadership and individual contributors to devote their full intellectual capacity towards solving problems in the most innovative way.
Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible. Look out three, four, five, or even twenty steps ahead of what can be done right now, then figure out the north start you need and inspire your teams to meet the larger business goals.
Congratulations, Jesse and the EREL team!
Learn more about working at Lifion and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Wins 2020 Breakthrough AI Award
Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science
Accessible Video Controls
Video: AI and machine learning to help our clients
[TEXT] Welcome to ADP DataCloud
[DESCRIPTION] In animation, a man speaks.
[TEXT] Hi, I’m Jack. I’m excited to share some of the recently launched DataCloud Features that are helping our clients navigate the Dynamic Workplace.
[DESCRIPTION] The word “Start” on a screen. Underneath it, the numbers 1 through 4. Jack touches number 1.
[TEXT] We’re helping Organizations Understand how their workforce has been impacted by Covid-19. How? Data Mashups. Data Mashups – Covid Workforce Impact. Data Mashup refreshes daily, displaying the # of Covid-19 cases documented by Johns Hopkins. This has helped organize and understand how their workforce has been impacted by Covid-19.
[DESCRIPTION] Jack presses 2.
[TEXT] We’ve identified Millions in tax credit opportunities for our clients. How? Say Hello to Storyboards. Storyboards – Employee Retention Tax Credit. Storyboards helps clients easily identify if they are eligible for Employee Retention Tax Credits. The platform will automatically calculate the tax credit opportunity based on eligible employees. E.R. T.C. has proactively surface to millions and tax credit opportunities for our clients.
[TEXT] 3. We are helping millions of Practitioners monitor employee sentiment about returning to the workplace. How? Meet Return to Work. Return to Work – Readiness Survey. Practitioners can now send short surveys to collect worker Readiness and sentiment about returning to the workplace. Surveys are delivered to workers through the easy-to-use a. D. P. Mobile app. Practitioners are monitoring employee sentiment about returning to the workplace.
[TEXT] 4. We’ve helped Practitioners Answer key questions about their organization. How? With Organizational Benchmarks. Benchmarks – Organizational Benchmarks. Clients can take a deep-dive into their organizational data and benchmark their company against peers. Uncover organizational questions like what percentage of labor cost do my peers spend on sales and marketing. Discover how their head count breakdown compares to their industry. ADP DataCloud, Learn, Get Inspired, Join the Conversation
Congratulations to our DataCloud team! Recognized for its impressive capabilities and significant value it brings to businesses, ADP’s DataCloud won a 2020 AI Breakthrough Award in the “Best AI-based Solution for Data Science” category. Watch the video.
In a constantly shifting world of work, businesses, now more than ever, are looking for a solution that helps them make informed decisions about their organization. Enter ADP DataCloud, a powerful people analytics solution.
Utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), the solution analyzes aggregated, anonymized HR and compensation data from over 30 million workers in more than 730,000 organizations to allow companies to benchmark and compare compensation data, turnover rate, and overtime. Endless possibilities open for better managing a global workforce when pairing this empirical data with the power of machine learning (ML) and AI.
The AI Breakthrough Awards recognize the top companies, technologies, and products in the Artificial Intelligence industry today. As more and more companies join the growing global AI market, this awards program honors those that stand out among a crowded field of competitors. In other categories, winners included IBM, Capital One, NetApp, and others.
Congratulations to the team for all your hard work to deliver amazing solutions and real-time trends to our clients. Way to break through!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Next-Gen Payroll Captures the 2020 Top HR Product Award
Recognition, Awards
ADP’s products continue to earn awards at a time when our clients need our innovative products the most. We are proud to be named a “2020 Top HR Product” by HR Executive.
ADP’s products continue to earn awards at a time when our clients need our innovative products the most. We are proud to be named a “2020 Top HR Product” by HR Executive.
ADP’s Next-Gen Payroll Platform enables companies of all types – from local small businesses to global conglomerates – to pay their employees their way. This real-time global payroll platform gives clients and their employees unprecedented transparency into how they are paid, along with predictive insights and suggested actions. Companies no longer need to guess the impact of regulatory changes but can proactively model these changes in real-time and plan for the future. At the same time, employees, contractors, and gig workers all have complete visibility into how their pay is calculated along with actionable tips on improving their financial wellness. Who couldn’t use that?
Built natively on the public cloud, this real-time global payroll platform:
- Gives practitioners and employees unprecedented transparency into how they are paid;
- Empowers practitioners to more easily understand the effects of regulatory and policy changes, enabling a stronger strategic partnership with business leaders by demonstrating bottom-line impact; and
- Delivers a breakthrough employee experience with predictive insights to model and understand the effect of potential life changes.
Winning solutions at the HR Technology Conference are selected based on several criteria, including their level of innovation, value-add to the HR professional, intuitiveness for the user, and ability to deliver on what they promise.
#TradeTalks: How Companies Can Scale Their Workforce With Contingent and Gig Workers
ADP WorkMarket GM Jens Audenaert joins Jill Malandrino on Nasdaq #TradeTalks to discuss how companies can scale their workforce with contingent and gig workers as they rebuild through #COVID19.
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Leaders Make Top 100 HR Tech Influencers List
HR Tech Influencers, Senior Leaders, Recognition
With an eye on innovation and transformation, two ADP leaders have once again earned a coveted spot on the second annual Top 100 HR Tech Influencers list released by Human Resource Executive®.
Marcus Buckingham
Don Weinstein
That’s right. For the second year in a row, Marcus Buckingham, Senior Vice President and Co-Head of the ADP Research Institute, and Don Weinstein, Corporate Vice President for Global Product & Technology at ADP, have made this list. The list includes leading thinkers from across a wide variety of business functions – executives, advisors, consultants, analysts, implementers, and many more. ADP is one of just a handful of companies to have more than one influencer on the list.
Across the board, this collective group was heavily evaluated on a wide range of criteria and measured on their record of influence amongst Human Resource (HR) organizations. The individuals on the HR Tech Influencers list have a high reputation for unique strategies, innovative solutions, and bring a positive influence on today’s HR-tech marketplace.
Join us in celebrating and honoring both Marcus and Don on making this list for the second year in a row. Their contributions towards innovation continue to propel ADP’s transformation into one of today’s most forward-thinking technology companies.
Being on the list showcases our continued focus on developing innovative technology to help our clients when they need it most. According to Human Resource Executive, “The work that lies ahead will need the unique human touch that only HR can provide—and that approach can be magnified by the deployment of smart HR-technology solutions.”
Podcast: HRExaminer Executive Conversations w/ Don Weinstein, ADP
HRx Radio – Executive Conversations
Guest: Don Weinstein, Corporate VP, Global Product and Technology, ADP
Episode: 371
Air Date: June 26, 2020
Guest Bio
Don Weinstein, leads ADP’s Global Product and Technology team, overseeing client-facing product development and internal technology (CIO/CTO) operations. In this role, Don is responsible for ensuring that the GPT organization is aligned with ADP’s strategic goal of becoming the world’s leading provider of Human Capital Management solutions.
Don joined ADP in 2006 as VP of Corporate Strategy and has held a variety of roles in strategy, product management and business development.
Most recently, Don served as Chief Strategy Officer of ADP, where he stood up the ADP Ventures group that built organic, net-new revenue-generating businesses for ADP and also led the Global Strategy team in completing numerous strategic acquisitions. Previously, he had been Senior Vice President of Product Management, where he was responsible for managing ADP’s portfolio of HCM products as well as directing the company’s annual product innovation investments. He also led the Global Product Management team through its transition to an Agile organization.
In addition to helping enhance ADP’s brand as an innovation thought leader, Don has been instrumental in introducing key new products that have delivered rapid success in terms of new product sales. These include ADP Mobile, ADP Analytics and the ADP Marketplace.
He also has served as Division Vice President of Strategy and Product for ADP’s Small Business Services and Major Account Services divisions, where he led numerous successful new product introductions including RUN Powered by ADP®, ADP Workforce Now®, and ADP Talent Management.
Prior to joining ADP, Don held senior strategy roles within IBM Corporate Strategy and PriceWaterhouseCoopers Strategy and Change Consulting. He began his career in 1990 with General Electric as an Edison Engineer.
Don received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rutgers University, an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Transcript
Important: Our transcripts at HRExaminer are AI-powered (and fairly accurate) but there are still instances where the robots get confused and make errors. Please expect some inaccuracies as you read through the text of this conversation. Thank you for your understanding.
Full Transcript with timecode
[00:00:00] John Sumser: Good morning and welcome to HR Examiner’s Executive Conversations. I’m your host, John Sumser and today we’re going to be talking with Don Weinstein, who leads ADPs global product and technology team. Don’s been a guest many times over the years and it’s great to have you back. How are you Don?
[00:00:31] Don Weinstein: I’m doing great, John. Great to be back. How are you?
[00:00:35] John Sumser: Well you know, outside of the fact that I’ve been in prison for a hundred days I’m doing great. I have a good roomate in solitary confinement. But man, I was not prepared for this. How about you?
[00:00:49] Don Weinstein: Yeah, no, likewise. I think you and I are both are in the same boat. I now have more roommates than when I started the year with some of my college kids moving back in with us and, you know, we’re all adjusting and we’re all adapting to the new realities.
[00:01:01] And even the bandwidth constraints, you never find out how strong your wifi signal is until you’ve got five teenagers or three teenagers and five people on it. But. Everybody’s healthy thankfully. And we’ll see, hopefully, you know, here I’m in New Jersey, uh, you know, the trend lines have been positive and we’re, we’re back on to phase two of our reopening and hopefully getting to phase three, just watching out to make sure we don’t have that dreaded the second wave.
[00:01:26] John Sumser: Yeah well, I’m here in California and we’re seeing the second wave.
[00:01:30] Listen, would you take a moment before we get too far down the conversation would you introduce yourself? So the few people in the audience who haven’t run across you before will know who you are.
[00:01:42] Sure I’d be glad to. So Don Weinstein, I’m corporate vice president of global product and technology for ADP.
[00:01:49] And what that means is I basically am responsible for anything and everything technology and product related, and it’s a little bit, it’s actually a somewhat unusual role. In that it combines all of our external facing, you know, client facing product work with also all of our internal technology function.
[00:02:07] So think about it as the traditional CIO role and CTO role all wrapped up into one. So if anything goes wrong, it’s all my fault is how I like to say it.
[00:02:16] John Sumser: But your influence in ADP is vaster than that. When I think about ADP, I think there’s Carlos who is the jovial CEO and then when he has any questions about anything he turns to you to get the answer. So, it’s bigger than you describe I think.
[00:02:33] Don Weinstein: I’m sure Carlos would appreciate being described as jovial. And he’s an amazing CEO. And I think the thing about Carlos that everybody says the most is a very high integrity person in his case, which is critical. If you think about what we do in terms of handling so much of the nations and the economy’s payroll, you want a really, really high integrity person running the show, but I’m glad that his external persona is jovial. I’ll let them know that. I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.
[00:02:58] John Sumser: Oh you know, he’s just easy to like, he’s just really easy to like. He creates a sense of trust in every interaction that I’ve ever seen him in.
[00:03:13] Don Weinstein: I agree. That’s the integrity dimension in particular, right. Because you know, we talk about the speed of trust and all that, and you know it when you have somebody that you’ve worked for that you trust, it does create that safety environment to be able to do your best.
[00:03:27] John Sumser: Yeah, just to keep dwelling on this a little bit of my sense is the way he builds trust is by giving it. Right, that’s the trick that I think most people don’t understand is, trust engenders trust. And so if you lead with trust, you get trust back.
[00:03:43] Don Weinstein: That was really well said. You know I hadn’t heard it put that way before, but as you describe it, now, that’s exactly the way it’s experienced on the team.
[00:03:51] So I have to quote you on that.
[00:03:52] John Sumser: Well, you know, add that to your long book of John Sumser quotes. It’s probably hundreds of pages long by now.
[00:04:00] So, you’re an engineer by trade. There are not great quantities of engineers who have a highly visible positions in HR and HR Tech. Well, how do you see the relationship between those two disciplines?
[00:04:15] Don Weinstein: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think engineering engineers at their core are problem solvers, very pragmatic people. You see a problem or you see a process or there’s no process or problems that can’t be fixed or improved.
[00:04:28] You know, in my world, we talk about how do we eliminate friction or pain in every single process or interaction between a worker and the client. And really just try and take an extensive. Do you, with that to say, not only looking at the pain that people complain about. But also sometimes there’s pain that people don’t complain about because they’ve just learned to accept it will to live with it as a way of life.
[00:04:52] But, you know, engineers, we were trained not to accept anything for what it is, but to always assume that there’s a better way and constantly be on the search for that better way of doing things. But at the same time, you know, I think the discipline of HR and human capital management reminds us that, well, there’s a human side to this and that the people who are engaging, that they’re not just bits and bytes, they’re actual people on the other side of the product and the technology.
[00:05:19] And we really have to humanize our approach to optimization problems and also recognize that people don’t always respond in the ways that you might expect on your spreadsheet or your prototyping process. So. No, I think to that end, we’ve got a couple of interesting things at ADP in terms of roles that we’ve added to the team.
[00:05:39] So we have both behavioral psychologists. I have a couple of PhD, behavioral psychologists on the team who help us try and understand and even communicate with emotion to the clients and the, and the workers. Ultimately you’re on the receiving end of everything we do. And we have a corporate anthropologist who likewise.
[00:05:57] Is trained more than the art of observation, not almost to recede in the background and see things for how they are. And then the engineering side can come back and say, here’s how they could be. But recognizing that we are dealing with people here and people can be emotional beings and you have to handle the psychological aspects, not just the operational side.
[00:06:20] So I’ve spent some time with Martha Burns. She’s pretty amazing. She’s your corporate there. This leads me in a weird way to the next question, which is there’s a lot of unrest in the country right now. Um, diversity and inclusion have become important things for corporate executives to talk about, but in general, talking doesn’t get much.
[00:06:44] And the unrest is about the fact that people have been talking about stuff for years. ADP as the biggest player in the HR tech space by law leaving here. So would you talk a little bit about how you guys were thinking about and what you’re doing in Georgia?
[00:07:01] Yeah, it’s a great point, John. And I think you’re right.
[00:07:05] Fundamentally, that’s been a lot of talk for a long time, but maybe not as much action. And that’s what you, one of the factors, obviously, a lot of factors, but one of the factors contributing to the general sense of frustration. This has always been important to us. This is not like something new, both internally within ADP.
[00:07:21] I think if you look at any of the, kind of the external reference bodies, like diversity and core, that human rights council that generally speaking ADP scores pretty highly on them. What types of things, because we do care. But I think point about being the largest provider in the human capital technology space, you know, we not only have to lead by example, but we have to also help others.
[00:07:43] So along those lines of few things that we’ve done and are continuing to do is, you know, we launched, uh, our pay equity explore part of our data cloud, which was analytics and insights to help clients, companies identify where they might have discrepancies pay discrepancies by race, by gender or by ethnicity.
[00:08:03] Somewhere in their organization and do it in a way that action orient. Well, it’s not just to say, look, you’ve got these pay discrepancies, but here’s the, the individual here’s where they work. Here’s what the market benchmark says. It should be click here to take action on it. We try and make it much, much more action oriented did around it.
[00:08:21] Not just analysis, but rectifying some of those disparities. Similar on the recruiting side, we’ve gone out with our candidate relevancy algorithms, which are really, we’ve been out there for a few years now have attempted to strip biases out of the talent acquisition process by removing things like race or gender or other ethnic identifiers from a candidates background, and really zero in and focus on just pure skills.
[00:08:47] And I think we’ve seen good examples of that. I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and. No. So I read in the book outliers about the experience that had with the orchestra is I forget which one it was, where they had a very low penetration of, you know, very small number of females in the orchestra relative to the total population of musicians.
[00:09:08] And when they went to blind audition, it instantly jumped up in a normal, I still about 50 50, which is where you would expect it to be versus I don’t remember the number, but it was far below 50% of their orchestra. So it just kind of bore out this point, the point that if you could strip out that there was some unconscious bias in the selection process.
[00:09:25] And to the extent that you could strip that out, things could follow a more natural. Sequence. And so we’ve had some of these things in the market for a while now with some success, I would say my hope is that I think we’ll get more traction with them going forward, by the way, just one thing to point out when we’ve introduced these types.
[00:09:43] So capabilities, we haven’t charged for them. We haven’t tried to monetize them. It’s like if you’re a client of ADP, you know, if you’re using our recruiting solution, We’re we’re going to give you that candidate relevancy album for free, essentially, because we think it’s important for you to have it and use it.
[00:09:58] We’re not trying to make a buck off of helping fix what I think is an important problem. And then, you know, in addition to that, I think one of the things we’ve really, and looking at going forward as we started an AI ethics board, because this topic about algorithms in the workplace and machine learning, you know, if you do have biases that are already present in the workplace, you know, if you put algorithms around that, are they going to correct for the biases or if implemented poorly, there’s always the risk that they could just reinforce them.
[00:10:26] We could be more efficient at implementing your biases. So. We started an AI ethics board. And it was important that we had a mix of not only internal, but also external participants, you know, from outside the company. So from inside, we have our chief privacy officer. We had our head of corporate diversity as well as our chief audit officer, but then we also got some external counsel from the world of HR practices and employment practices, legal counsel, to be part of our AI ethics board.
[00:10:56] John Sumser: Other than today, we should have a long conversation about the things that I’ve been learning about ethics, that you have to have a fairly rapid turnover with people on the other score, or they will tend to become a rubber stamp, but that’s not on the list for today. Thanks for talking about it a little bit.
[00:11:15] I’ve been curious about what you’re doing there. You run this big global development. What are the hard parts of your job is that you’ve got a huge ADP software development project with major developments all over the world. And I was always blown away by how complicated that is and gracefully executing.
[00:11:36] That was my question is help me a little bit more about that. And then having that broadly distributed workforce. Does that prepare you for the crisis when you had to move everybody in the company from their offices have been working from home seven.
[00:11:54] Don Weinstein: Yeah, let me tackle the second part first then I think in a sense it did a little bit in that due to our breadth, we felt with a multitude of regional issues in the past, mostly natural disasters like hurricanes in Texas and Florida, or flooding in Chennai or the yellow vest strikes in Paris where the transportation system was shut down.
[00:12:15] All of which caused us to close offices temporarily. And so doing our business continuity plans into practice. Every organization has a business continuity plan, but you never know how good it is until you actually have to put it in and see how it works. But I think what was unique about this time was that this was our first global, well, everything else was regional, like, okay, well, we’ll send the folks from this office into a remote setting and then we’ll distribute the workload around.
[00:12:42] But mission is truly global, which put a tremendous amount of load on our internal network. In particular, you know, our VPN capacity was never sized past 60,000 associates logged in at the same time. And whereas economies like North America and two events in Europe had a little bit more, more of a history and a practice of working from home.
[00:13:02] In other areas of the world, but in India, it was never really a work from home environment. People didn’t even have laptops and trying to procure laptops in those locations right now, almost impossible. And we in fact, went out and we bought wireless cards and had associates plug the wireless cards into their desktops, bring their desktops home because they might not have even had good infrastructure at home.
[00:13:24] We created our own internal geek squad that would go out to the associates houses and check in on their setups and make sure that they could operate. It was quite a logistical undertaking, but, you know, we managed to, to get that all done and not really miss a beat. I think it’s always, for us, it’s been an advantage having that global footprint in part, because we provide services to clients in almost 140 different countries go through ourselves and through our partner network.
[00:13:51] And so. Being able to have engineers in the markets, software developers in the markets where we’re doing business just important to stay close to our clients, our global clients, and, uh, make sure that we’re also close to the local regulatory environment. Again, part of this change that’s happened in light of the pandemic governments around the world are all passive legislation to try and sustain their economies.
[00:14:17] Here in the U S obviously we’ve talked a lot about the cares act and the paycheck protection program, which we’ve been on the front line. And I do use a military battle analogy of frontline to describe the response to the PTP program, which keeps changing. But globally, we’ve had almost 2000 legislative changes that we’ve had to implement in a multitude of countries around the world.
[00:14:42] John Sumser: Yeah, one of the times seven for you. So you moved all these people probably are opposites to remote work settings that now every one of those 60,000 people is competing with three teenagers in the house. What are you learning? You start to get your balance in this new work environment. Yeah, well, look, working from home has been a hot topic and it’s been at the forefront ever since.
[00:15:07] I think it was Marissa Meyer, a Yahoo called all the Yahoo engineers back in from working from home. And there was this hot debate out there. Lots of folks they’re being even more productive now that they’re working from home. I do see a greater blurring of work, you know, for instance, as I mentioned now that we have our global workforce on the VPN and we were monitoring VPN activity, just to make sure we have capacity, you could actually see the patterns of work around the world.
[00:15:34] The biggest thing I saw was how many hours people were logging and it seemed like that was up. And that folks are always connected and not just connected, but being active. But, you know, on the productivity side. And I think this debate is not going to quiet down. It’s only going to ramped back up again on is working from home, more productive or less productive.
[00:15:52] My personal experiences. We have a hundred percent of everybody working remote. I think we’ve had some pretty good, good productivity. As we start to look now at organizations doing a partial return to office. I think that’s going to be hard. If you’ve got 50% of the folks in the office, 50% remote to sustain that same level of productivity and that type of environment.
[00:16:14] There’s more sensitivity to making sure everybody who’s remote is heard when a hundred percent of the group is remote, but I’ve experienced it myself firsthand. If we have a meeting and, you know, a majority of people are in the office and a minority are on the video call, making sure that we’re balanced and everybody has a chance to be heard and participate equally.
[00:16:32] It can be a challenge. And I do wonder how that’s going to evolve. As people start to slowly open back up and return to their offices. Cool.
[00:16:41] John Sumser: So you’ve got 810,000 customers extraordinary, but you’re watching what’s happening as those 810,000 customers. What is she? How’s the world really reacted to this.
[00:16:57] Don Weinstein: Yeah, it’s a great question. We’re able to walk that very closely. You know, I think we talked about it even a little bit when the national underemployment report that we put out and Carlos did mention some of this at the analyst day, but she liked you’re in the U S the economy hit rock bottom, kind of around the end of April or the beginning of may.
[00:17:14] Certainly our may employment report was pretty rough. And then the one that just came out in early June, which went through the middle of may, it was still down, but it was down much, much less than the April report. Or if I could throw an engineering term at two with a second order, derivative turned positive, which is the change in the rate of decline.
[00:17:34] That decline much, much, much less. And so we’re starting to see green shoots across the board in terms of how many hours are being clocked or logged by the workforce. What’s the dollar wage that’s getting paid. So we definitely, I feel like we bottomed out and things are ticking up true V-shape recovery, so to speak.
[00:17:54] I still haven’t gotten back to where we were prior to the start of the pandemic, but it’s definitely trending in a positive direction. I think now what we’re all on the lookout for is that second way, you know, things continue on the current course and trajectory. You know, you could see us in the second half of the calendar year, almost getting back to where we were before, but nobody knows what’s going to happen with the virus and what’s going to happen with the related economic expansion.
[00:18:20] But right now, at least it feels like we’re on a positive trajectory, albeit off of a very low bottom.
[00:18:26] John Sumser: [00:18:26] So to jump, you are now one of the largest providers of machine learning in the industry and the heart of machine learning is history. I wonder how your views of machine learning have changed over the last 90 days, because we’ve heard this play place where history may not be as relevant as it was 90 days ago.
[00:18:52] Don Weinstein: The great question. I think we. I’ll go back to kind of the national employment report example for a second. You know, we track it. Relatives could be BLS, the Bureau of labor statistics. And in a normal month, we might be looking at deviations. I mean our employment report and the BLS report that might be on the order of tens of thousands of jobs.
[00:19:13] And, you know, in our may report, we were down two and a half million. Everybody thought that was crazy until the BLS came out and said, well, no, the economy added two and a half million shots, which is really cool.
[00:19:28] But the deviation between the two numbers, as I said, we’d go into panic attack. If the deviation, you know, was in the tens of thousands, that was a deviation of 5 million. And nobody even batted denied because everything was just a volatile at the time. I think it’s important to recognize to your point then, which of those?
[00:19:47] So you’re right. The machine learning is learning on the data it’s learning on history. And I think the key thing is to understand what data sets are materially impacted or impaired because of the volatility of the environment and which ones aren’t. Because not everyone is, as I mentioned, you know, we were looking at our skills, taxonomy and running a machine learning algorithm against that to try and help identify the best candidates, regardless of race, gender, and ethnicity, that doesn’t change.
[00:20:16] I don’t know that that has changed necessarily in this at the same time. I have to be mindful of those, because for instance, you may have had a preference for candidates who were closer to your office. And now that you know, maybe there’s more flexibility to working from home. You don’t want to start screening out those remote candidates as much.
[00:20:36] So I think the most important thing to your point, what have we learned about machine learning is you just can’t put it on autopilot. And let it run and the algorithms will tune themselves, but I think they benefit in our own hands. If you actually understand what’s inside them, what are the factors that they’re keying off of?
[00:20:54] What are the waiting and just recap those assumptions and say, does that still make sense? And definitely materially impacted based on what’s happening. There’ll be some cases where that hasn’t changed. There may be others that have, you know, compensation factors may be interesting to look at because you know, we’ve been chugging along on our market.
[00:21:12] They pay rating was talked about before and the good news is, you know, we have a lot of data in general. I find when you have a volatile environment, having too much history in the, in the algorithm can be problematic because you might overweight the history accidentally. So I think that, you know, do we tighten down those time periods now and try and understand a little bit better?
[00:21:34] Is there a material turn going? Yeah, but I think the question, the big picture question that you raised there is, you know, what have we changed in our view about machine learning? Or I would say evolve. It’s really just understanding that this isn’t something that can run on autopilot, that us as the provider of the algorithms, in some cases, and for sure, a client company or organization as the consumer, you really want to know what’s in there.
[00:22:00] Yeah. You can’t assume that it’s operating as usual, but at least make that proactive chalk and say. Hmm. Is this going to give me a credible result or should I be mindful of the underlying factors? Cause I don’t want to stay. We’ll just roll them all out now because it history has changed because some of them are still going to be very, very useful, but you have to make that kind of conscious deliberate assessment and not just allow things to operate as is.
[00:22:25] If that makes sense.
[00:22:26] John Sumser: That makes perfect sense. If you’ve got a couple of extra minutes, I wanted to ask you about innovation, right? You have a remarkable innovation program, ADP. Um, I’ve been leaving with it for years and now we’ve got everybody Christmas. How’s innovation going in this environment. And how are your innovation centers doing?
[00:22:48] Don Weinstein: Yeah. So the innovation centers are cranking along as I’ve shared before. I think folks believe that their productivity is up getting really good metrics about knowledge worker productivity is a hard challenge for us, but we look at the throughput of the delivery and they’re cranking along. You know, one of the things we do as well, we’ve been doing some engagement pulses as the workforce has transitioned to a working from home.
[00:23:11] You know, we acquired Marcus Buckingham’s company a few years back and we’ve adopted his engagement pulse and the engagement framework. I mean, it’s quite remarkable. And one of the beauties of it is that it’s kind of manager empowering, so I can run an engagement pulse for my organization whenever I want to.
[00:23:27] So we actually ran one right in the middle of the downturn and we had had a baseline just beforehand and we actually saw engagement went up five points, which was remarkable and it gives you that adrenaline rush. So, you know I believe that we’re continuing to execute. And in fact, in some cases, a little bit of an adrenaline rush happening where folks are working even harder because there’s this blending now of, you know, work like the work home separation, which never was really there to be begin with is even tougher right now, but works fermenting with some new tools to help us do kind of virtual event storming and brainstorming on virtual yellow stickers and user journeys.
[00:24:04] But I think as we moved off site. I think that innovation culture has stayed intact and just transferred to digital. But one of the reasons I think that was the case is that we already had established those centers. And the programs and the teams and they were already mature. I would not be as confident about starting something brand new, like, hey, would I start up a brand new innovation center or team right now?
[00:24:31] Especially because we’ve hired a lot from the outside. I wouldn’t be as confident in that at the moment. I think we’d have to think through that one a little bit harder. But taking the existing kind of, you know, more mature team that had been working together and had already kind of moved into that performing phase and then going virtually, I think that’s been a smoother transition than we feared.
[00:24:52] John Sumser: That’s fantastic. So we’ve run through our half hour. It’s been a great conversation. Anything you want to add before we go?
[00:24:58] Don Weinstein: You know, I think it’s been, as you said, the pandemic has been all encompassing. You know, we’ve had to focus on business continuity. We’ve had to focus on compliance and now we’re turning our attention to, okay, some clients are looking to return to office. Others are trying to figure out how do they navigate their new digital future. And we just kind of keep progressing this thing in waves. You know, we’re sort of on wave three of our pandemic response and nobody knows what wave four is going to look like, but we’re committed to staying out in front of it.
[00:25:27] And you know, it’s been a challenging time. It’s been a crazy time, but it’s also been one where I think at least within my organization, you know, I look at the engagement scores. I look at the productivity, it feels like in many spaces, people like rising to the challenge and rising to the occasion. You know, that’s really gratifying to see.
[00:25:44] So, hopefully you guys are staying safe and sane over there and we’ll try to do likewise.
[00:25:49] John Sumser: We are. So would you take a moment and reintroduce yourself, tell people how they might get ahold of you?
[00:25:55] Don Weinstein: Yeah. Don Weinstein, corporate vice president of global product and technology for ADP. The easiest way to find me is to look me up either on LinkedIn or message me on Twitter, DonWeinstein1.
[00:26:07] John Sumser: Thanks Don. It’s been great having you. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner’s Executive Conversations, and we’ve been talking with Don Weinstein who is ADP’s lead for global product and technology.
[00:26:19] Thanks for tuning in today and thanks again Don. We will talk to you back here next week. Bye bye now.
ADP Wins Prestigious Ventana Research Digital Innovation Award for Next Gen HCM Platform
ROSELAND, N.J., July 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Identified for having the most striking impact in the human capital management (HCM) market, ADP was recognized as a winner in Ventana Research’s 13th Annual Digital Innovation Awards for its Next Gen HCM platform. Named as winner for the HCM category, ADP was selected based on the award program’s stringent criteria, earning acclaim for Next Gen HCM’s advanced technology and ability to drive change and increase value for organizations worldwide.
Learn more about ADP’s Next Gen HCM technology
Ventana analysts examined vendor submissions for their innovative technology approach; how it applies to people, processes, information and technology; the best practices it supports; the degree of team involvement; and the technology’s business impact and value.
“The range of ADP’s Next Gen HCM innovation that merited the award includes dynamic teams and matrix organizational structures, AI-driven insights, and global compliance,” said Steve Goldberg, VP & research director of HCM at Ventana Research.
Differentiating ADP’s Next Gen HCM is the platform’s design for team-based, agile ways of working as a complement to traditional hierarchical structures, as well as its ability to adapt and scale. The customizable solution enables organizations’ flows of work while driving team performance and the ability to rapidly adapt to changing needs. Built cloud-native from the ground up, the global platform supports a personalized experience that cultivates fluid, dynamic work to unlock greater value for the organization.
“We’re incredibly honored that Ventana Research has recognized the impact our Next Gen HCM platform can have on businesses,” said Don Weinstein, corporate vice president of global product and technology at ADP. “Change is only accelerating in today’s business landscape, as we navigate a world that’s becoming increasingly uncertain. With our vast experience in supporting clients, ADP has studied what makes a business successful, and what can stand in its way. We’ve used this knowledge to deliver a flexible and adaptable solution that can support our clients as they evolve amid dynamic conditions and grow with their businesses as fast as needed.”
To help businesses thrive in a new world of work, ADP’s Next Gen HCM provides data-driven insights into how people work best; access to an ecosystem of mini-apps to personalize the workforce experience; benchmarking capabilities from aggregated and anonymized ADP client data spanning 810K+ companies and 30M+ employees; and the ability to react quickly to changing global compliance requirements.
For more information on the Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards, visit https://www.ventanaresearch.com/resources/awards/innovation. To learn more about ADP’s Next Gen HCM platform, visit https://flowofwork.adp.com/.
About Ventana Research
Ventana Research is the most authoritative and respected benchmark business technology research and advisory services firm. We provide insight and expert guidance on mainstream and disruptive technologies through a unique set of research-based offerings including benchmark research and technology evaluation assessments, education workshops and our research and advisory services, Ventana On-Demand. Our unparalleled understanding of the role of technology in optimizing business processes and performance and our best practices guidance are rooted in our rigorous research-based benchmarking of people, processes, information and technology across business and IT functions in every industry. This benchmark research plus our market coverage and in-depth knowledge of hundreds of technology providers means we can deliver education and expertise to our clients to increase the value they derive from technology investments while reducing time, cost and risk.
Ventana Research provides the most comprehensive analyst and research coverage in the industry; business and IT professionals worldwide are members of our community and benefit from Ventana Research’s insights, as do highly regarded media and association partners around the globe. Our views and analyses are distributed daily through blogs and social media channels including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. To learn how Ventana Research advances the maturity of organizations’ use of information and technology through benchmark research, education and advisory services, visit www.ventanaresearch.com.
About ADP (NASDAQ: ADP)
Designing better ways to work through cutting-edge products, premium services and exceptional experiences that enable people to reach their full potential. HR, Talent, Time Management, Benefits and Payroll. Informed by data and designed for people. Learn more at ADP.com
ADP, the ADP logo, and Always Designing for People, are trademarks of ADP, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2020 ADP, Inc. All rights reserved.
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SOURCE ADP, Inc.
For further information: Leann McDonough, ADP, Inc., (973) 974-6861, Leann.McDonough@adp.com
Podcast: Nasdaq’s #TradeTalks: Linda Mougalian talks about ADP’s Innovative Solutions for a #WFH Environment
#TradeTalks: ADP’s Innovative Solutions For Employees and Clients As We Adapt to a #WFH Environment
ADP Sr. Division VP Go To Market Strategy Linda Mougalian joins Jill Malandrino on Nasdaq #TradeTalks to discuss ADP’s innovative solutions for employees and clients as we adapt to a #WFH environment.
ADP’s Linda Mougalian on Data, Reopening, Gigs and Compliance
Q&A: ADP’s Linda Mougalian on Data, Reopening, Gigs and Compliance
We spoke with Linda Mougalian, division vice president of product marketing and strategy for ADP, about data’s role in helping employers navigate the pandemic, the widening role of the gig economy, and the pressure on business when compliance becomes a moving target.
I wonder whether the return to work effort is going to be one of those things that moves in fits and starts, because of the unpredictability of the virus. What are your thoughts about how businesses are going to be able to deal with that?
What I’ve been observing, both from an ADP standpoint and from a broader industry standpoint is, is that the way we’re going to get through this is with data. I think that we’re getting to a leveling out.
To a certain extent, a lot of the initial waves of answers were around “OK, here’s how we’re all going to shut down,” and “OK, here’s how we’re all going to return to work.” What we’re finding is that there’s a lot more nuance. So within states, you’ve got multi-phase plans coming out. Then you’ve got each of the counties and specific locations where they’re actually looking at the data to determine what’s their specific scenario, what makes the most sense for them to move forward.
I think the way you described it, as moving forward in fits and starts, is a good way to think of it. But I do believe that from an employer standpoint, knowledge is power. If you understand the data, that’s going to be how you’re able to have some level of competence as you’re moving forward.
Q&A with @ADP’s Linda Mougalian. We talk data, gigs, compliance and #COVID-19: “From an employer standpoint, knowledge is power.” #HR #HRTechCLICK TO TWEETOne of the things that we have is a data mashup, where we’re taking data from Johns Hopkins and mashing it up with HR data, so we can see where the cases are and where our employees are. That’s one type of data. And then the other piece of it isn’t just about how people are feeling and what are the stats. It’s about what’s their sentiment about coming back to the office? Do they feel comfortable?
I just had a conversation with one of my co-workers and asked, “How comfortable are you coming back?” This was just a personal conversation, and he said, “Well, I’m not very comfortable at all. I will be perfectly happy to be one of the last people to come back.” As an employer, it’s important to know that, and to get a read on the emotional readiness of employees to come back to the office, as well as all of the logistics—whether they’ve got the sanitizers, PPEs, a way to distance and all of those other data elements. I think this is another aspect of data that will help employers move forward.
ADP’s been doing a lot with AI and with machine learning, and much of it’s geared toward making data more accessible to the business person or business owner. Is that kind of accessibility becoming more important? Are you hearing more demand for that kind of flexibility?
Yes and yes. We went about it with something we call Executive and Manager Insights. Basically, we’re looking at all of our data and distilling it down into tiny nuggets of insights at the team leader level, and pushing it out to them. So, if I’m a manager I can go into particular office and see that my turnover is high. These insights can be prompted and pushed to their mobile device, so they get proactively notified that there’s something going on. Then we give them the ability to drill down and understand more about why it’s happening.
From a data standpoint, it’s about understanding what’s going on, having the ability to dig in and understand what to do with the data so you can move forward. We’re not necessarily just saying, here’s the trend and you can dig into it and figure things out on your own. One of the things that we have is this idea of story boarding and presenting things in very clear English, with recommendations. So we’ve moved from predictive insights to being prescriptive.
I think as we get further into the return to work, it’s going to be even more important to get more of this data around the sentiments that people have. As they’re coming back to the office, what are they looking for?
I do want to point out that we take the privacy really, really seriously. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about privacy as we’re developing all of these data insights. We’re making sure that we’re working with Legal and, where it makes sense, to have things aggregated. In other instances, where it’s more appropriate, we’ll disclose some specific things. So, for example, health attestations are not stored against an individual. Those are stored in aggregate. Things like that.
I’d like to shift gears a little bit and look at the gig economy and contingent workforce. Here again, I’m wondering what you’re seeing. How is the use of technology evolving, especially in light of COVID and the changes that the workforce is undergoing?
The story that I love to tell about this one is the idea of the volunteer surge. I’m going back a couple of months, when there was a lot of uncertainty around the capacity to actually address all of the cases that were going to be coming in. There was this big push, and ADP’s WorkMarket was a big part of actually trying to help generate more people who were qualified to help us through this.
We basically decided we were going to create a talent pool where people could say they’d like to participate in this. We help track the training, so they’re actually getting the training they need. And then they were paired with [organizations] in whatever their locality was, once they had sufficient training. They were specifically placed to help manage the caseloads.
To me, the idea of a gig ecosystem that allows that is huge. And I think that’s going to continue to be the case, as we think about people adapting to the new world of work. In some cases, it means that people are lucky enough to do their jobs from home, as I do. In others, they may be either displaced or find there’s a different need. Over the long term, people are starting to say their traditional experience in working doesn’t have to be a 9-to-5 job. They’re finding ways to make connections and do the things that they love to do through this gig environment. I think that’s going to continue.
From an employer standpoint, I know that there’s a lot of interest in leveraging gig workers because it’s a way to manage through some of this uncertainty. So I think that both from an employer and a worker standpoint, this idea of opening up opportunities where we can pair people with skills with employers with needs—in a very flexible, agile way—will continue to grow.
Do you think it’s going to be permanent, in that more employers will rely more on gig workers as opposed to full-time workers?
It’s so hard to say right now, just because of the environment we’re in. I’ll go back to the idea of evolving in fits and starts. Employers are still trying to find their way. So whether it’s going to be permanent is a tough question to answer right now.
But I do think that on the employer side, whether it’s going to be permanent is one question. On the worker side, people see that they have more flexible options. If you were to ask what’s my gut on this one, I’d say you’re going to see more people who would like to continue to have that gig experience, where maybe they’ve got a full-time job and a gig on the side, or maybe they’ve got a part-time job and a gig on the side.
When we did our engagement study, the folks who were most engaged were the ones who had a part-time job and a gig on the side. It gave them a nice balance of having the stability of a more traditional job for at least part of the time, and access to benefits and things, while they were able to have a creative outlet, or something they had passion about, in the context of their gig work. So I think that from a worker standpoint, once people find their way to a situation that works for them, I believe there’ll be more people who find gig working is a part of that.
A little bit of this is left to be seen, but I think that the first time we try something, it’s a little bit scary. A lot of people and a lot of businesses have been put in a position where they’re trying things for the first time. Some of them are going to find they like this. Or maybe they were a little bit apprehensive about trying it before, but are a whole lot more comfortable now that they’ve had to do it.
Let’s talk about compliance. It seems to me compliance can be a heavy lift right now, with new laws, location-by-location restrictions on opening and what have you. What are you seeing among different types of employers, in terms of how they’re coping and keeping up with all of this?
I can tell you a little bit about our experience here at ADP and some of the things that we’ve been doing to help from a compliance standpoint. From the first moment that there was a legislation around this—this goes back to when the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] became effective—we’ve been pushing out content, and we’re working with the government and others to make sure that we’re as on top of this as we can possibly be. So we have compliance specialists around the world, because this isn’t necessarily just the U.S., this is also international.
From an employer standpoint, we saw the appetite for people to see this information. One of the interesting things that I heard very early on was that as employers were trying to navigate through what they needed to do from a compliance standpoint—and in addressing all of the COVID-related processes—HR and payroll providers were among the top resources they were looking to.
So we put out content. We had an employer preparedness kit, we had an employee communications tool kit. We had webinars, we put out a PPP website. We put all of this content out there, and we found that people were thirsty for this.
With our PPP site, one of the things we saw was not only were people visiting it, but they were staying there longer than any normal traffic. They were looking at the assets we made available for the tool kit, the preparedness kit. We were finding that on this PPP site, they were actually staying five times longer than a normal visit.
Compliance has always been a double-edged sword in that everybody knows it’s important, but a lot of employers don’t really pay enough attention to it. Has that changed because of the virus?
I relate this a bit to the ACA [Affordable Care Act] a few years back. That was a situation where people also didn’t necessarily have the robust information they needed, and they needed to jump on board.
I’d say with this, we’re in a situation where businesses needed to understand exactly how much people made. This is about pay information for the most part—how much Paycheck Protection Program were businesses going to be eligible for. You’re talking about the employee-retention credits, how much of what they were paying was going out against pay as opposed to other expenses and things like that.
I think that people absolutely have a heightened awareness of the need to keep and track data. When it comes to pay information, companies are, generally speaking, more rigorous about keeping that information. But when you tie that to the compliance aspect, and really look at how much of this retention credit am I going to be eligible for, I think that people probably are a whole lot more intimate with their data now than perhaps they were before.
With the ACA, there was data they weren’t tracking and they had to scramble a bit to get the right data into their systems. Although there’s some of that here, I think the bigger thing is this idea of getting super close to your data, understanding where you are and making sure that you’re headed in the right direction from a compliance standpoint, and from an eligibility standpoint, when you think about the employee retention credits.
Disclosure: ADP Next Gen is a sponsor of the HCM Technology Report
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