Tech & Innovation Blog
Remote Work Era: Three Challenges to Overcome
Impact, Voice of Our People, Future of Work
Time to grab on to the perfect opportunity to learn organizational skills, independence, and self-motivation!
Remote Work Era: Three Challenges to Overcome
By Amy H. Chiu, Tech Brand Content Developer
In May 2022, Airbnb’s career page received 800,000 visits since its remote work announcement. What’s the hype? When people say, ‘I work remotely,’ do you think of working from home in pajamas and not worrying about being stuck in traffic?
Remote working is more than that.
As we embrace hybrid and remote workspace, there are more conversations you and your team will be having, including challenges and solutions. As a full-time remote associate who works from a different time zone, I’ve learned methods to stay connected with my team.
My friends in tech often ask me what it’s like working remotely because some of them are considering switching their workstyle. My short answer is remote working is not for everyone.
The story began when I started working remotely as a freelancer a few years ago. Without going to the office, I engaged and experimented with various strategies to complete projects with accuracy and efficiency.
Challenge One – Communication
Are you afraid of missing the hallway conversation that could potentially build trust and work relationships among the team? As an extrovert, my solution is to speak up and share my updates during virtual happy hours and video calls. For example, I challenge myself to say more than “how are you” and answer more than “I’m good.” Having a real, human-to-human conversation during virtual happy hour has taught me to be more empathetic and understanding. I’d check in with my coworker from the other side of the country who caught the flu and adjust the calendar priorities accordingly.
I imagine reaching out can be a challenge for those more reserved in a new environment when they first start in a full-time remote position. This is when turning on video cameras can be helpful during online meetings. We recognize facial expressions during conversations that help us understand the tone of voice without saying too much, and smiling is always a plus!
Challenge Two – Time Management
Another challenge comes in time management, which is especially important for those who work with teams from different time zones. I recommend productivity and time tracking tools such as Toggl and DeskTime that allow you to log the time you spend on each project. The key is to build a schedule for yourself and stick to it. It’s easier to have a routine despite having scheduled meetings on the day or not.
Knowing when to start and pause working is the key for ambitious individuals. Since there’s no hard stop or visually seeing your coworkers packing up to leave at five in the afternoon, give yourself the reminder and permission to finish tasks during your working hours.
Challenge Three – Work Motivation
For those who enjoy the office atmosphere, I recommend joining coworking spaces such as WeWork and Galvanize. You could find a variety of office layouts and meeting spaces, using them to focus on your business. The community can also be an excellent opportunity to network and increase motivation at work.
I work from home and dedicate a space for work only. Having the habit motivates me and sets me in business mode every morning. According to a Social Psychological and Personality Science paper, the researchers asked subjects to change into formal and casual clothing before cognitive tests. They found wearing formal business clothing increases abstract thinking. On the days when I need an extra energy boost, I put on business clothing, even off-camera. The formal attire makes me focus better, and I tend to complete my tasks faster with accuracy.
Welcome to Remote Work
Remote working requires self-discipline, communication skills, and an open mind to collaborate. There will be challenges working with time zones and across teams when you are not sitting across from your coworker in the same office. However, the rewarding feeling of accomplishing projects remotely with the team makes the experience valuable. Please grab on to the perfect opportunity to learn organizational skills, independence, and self-motivation!
We are hiring!
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current remote openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
We are Proud to Design and Create a Workplace for Everyone
Impact, Innovation, Award
ADP will continue to strive to be the best place to work, creating a workplace for diverse talents.
We are Proud to Design and Create a Workplace for Everyone
At ADP, we’re constantly working to provide the best possible experience for our clients and associates. We’re proud to announce that we’ve been recognized with various awards! Whether providing outstanding service or creating a great place to work, we always strive to be the best.
iWIN – Business Resource Group
Women Impact Tech 100
When it comes to gender equity in the technology industry, ADP is leading by example. Our technologists are dedicated to developing inclusive products and services, providing a path forward for all our teams.
Women Impact Tech, an organization focused on improving opportunities for women in STEM, has named ADP one of the top 100 Women Impact Tech companies. The recognition criteria measure employee feedback on workplace culture for women, benefits, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
We are excited to see that our work is reshaping the tech space.
“These top 100 companies are doing the right things that make a difference in women’s ability to have meaningful careers, offering a culture for women to thrive,” said Paula Ratliff, the President of Women Impact Tech.
The good news doesn’t end here! We have also earned recognition from Top 50 Employer by Woman Engineering Magazine, Top 50 Best Workplaces for Women in India, and the AnitaB.org 2021 Top Large Company for Women Technologists for the second consecutive year.
“As a leader, I want to create an environment of empowerment with a diversity of thought and perspectives,” said Laurie Liszewski, VP of Product Development at ADP.
Opportunities across ADP include participation in our Women’s Leadership Development Program, Grace Hopper Celebration with AnitaB.org, and our Business Resource Groups such as iWIN (International Women’s Inclusion Network).
“There’s a lot here to be excited about. We’re all working together, and we’re going to be stronger in the long run,” said Amber Abreu, Senior Manager of User Experience (UX) research at ADP.
We can’t wait to see what’s next!
Next Big Things in Tech
ADP DataCloud has been named on Fast Company’s first-ever list of the Next Big Things in Tech list, honoring the technology breakthroughs that promise to shape the future. We have earned this recognition for our powerful people analytics solution, ADP DataCloud, which leverages our vast workforce data to address the most significant challenges businesses face today, including employee retention, pay equity, diversity, equity, and inclusion shift economic policy. Read the press release here.
In addition to this award, ADP DataCloud has also earned a Stratus Award, the Top HR Product of the Year, and the Data Analytics Innovation of the Year.
We are proud of the product enhancements our teams developed:
- The new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Dashboard allow companies to see the makeup of their workforce and address underrepresentation.
- Organizational Benchmarks taps ADP’s workforce data to help companies decide how best to deploy workers.
- When paired with ADP DataCloud’s Pay Equity Storyboard, clients can generate a personalized planner and budget to help them close gaps and measure maturity against peers.
This award further validates our clients and prospects of what’s to come and why they need us. Congratulations to everyone who has been a part of the development!
ADP 2022 Built In Best Places to Work
We are the proudest of our valuable people and the culture here. Built In, a top industry source for tech candidates to research and review companies, has named ADP with seven awards, including 2022 Best Places to Work in LA and New York City, Best Large Companies to Work & Best Benefits in both cities.
“Now more than ever, we’re proud to offer an engaging workplace with a dynamic culture that empowers our associates to foster innovation and develop innovative ideas with limitless possibilities,” said Aaron S., Senior Vice President of Product Development at ADP. “We are thrilled to be recognized in New York City and will continue our relentless focus on growing our technology from the energy of our associates.”
“Our highly engaged associates know we’re committed to providing each person with opportunities to use their diverse expertise to develop great products and technology that help deliver amazing client experiences,” said Leonard K., Senior Vice President of Product Development. “Built In LA’s recognition is an honor and a direct reflection of the innovation and dedication of our associates.
Built In’s Best Places to Work program rates companies based on their compensation, benefits, and culture. This year’s list highlights those employers who have created a culture that supports employees in-office and virtually that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive.
Great Place to Work®
Great Place to Work® (GPTW), a global authority on workplace culture, named ADP Brazil Labs and ADP India one of the best companies to work for 2021. GPTW has a mission to build a better world by helping organizations become a great place to work for all.
Here are the award nominations.
ADP India
ADP India
- India’s Best Workplaces for Women 2021
- India’s Best Workplaces™ in IT & IT-BPM 2021
- India’s Best Companies to Work For 2021
- Commitment to Being a Great Place to Work
ADP Brazil Labs
ADP Brazil Labs
- One of the Best Companies in the Rio Grande do Sul.
- Women Impact Tech 2022 Honoree
The awards recognize ADP India and ADP Brazil Labs not only for their talented associates but also for an environment of technological culture and innovation applied in the workspace.
Our clients, associates, and tech recruiting teams remain focused on cultivating valuable relationships in the challenging times of pandemics. We will continue to strive to be the best place to work, creating a workplace for diverse talents.
Thank you, and Congratulations to all our associates who make ADP one of the best places to work!
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
How AI/ML are Driving Innovation and Opportunities at ADP
Innovation, Voice of Our People, Future of Work
The future of learning will involve more personalization and customization based on learning styles, competencies, and preferences.
How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are Driving Innovation and Opportunities at ADP
Julio Hartmann joined ADP as a software development manager in 2004. Seventeen years later, he is now the Vice President/General Manager, head of ADP’s global software product development center and innovation lab in Porto Alegre, Brazil. His team works across the global product and technology portfolio, always looking for new opportunities. Julio leads product innovation and research, exploring growing technologies and evolving trends. He and his team aim to create the next generation of human capital management applications that drive learning and training in the workforce.
How it Started: Human Capital Management (HCM) Software
Steve Jobs said, “Things happen fairly slowly. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. It takes years.”
People tend to assume technology evolves linearly—growing at the same rate over time—but it develops exponentially instead. Some examples of exponential technologies include 5G networks, 3D printing, robotics, and blockchain. As the speed of technological innovation increases, it creates frustration in product development. People perceive a gap between expectations and performance, then quickly learn the products are not the problem. We inflate our expectations beyond what technology delivers. Despite uncertainties in the environment, the emerging tech follows an exponential growth and improves until it reaches a pivotal moment of breakthroughs.
For many, the pivot point may be challenging to foresee, and companies are caught unprepared. With market research observation, we know breakthroughs happen for a number of reasons. The moment is often tied to technology becoming cheap enough to reach mass consumption. In other words, a breakthrough occurs when a component becomes more viable with a combination of factors, creating the perfect environment to throw the innovation into disrupter status.
The phenomenon played out clearly in smartphone market. When the iPhone arrived, that changed everything. We live in a time when anything and everything is possible. Modern technologies drive the future and bring endless learning opportunities to the next generations. To prepare ADP for the next move in the industry, my team continues to develop, recognizing the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The Future of Learning: HCM Systems
Julio at the Beach
The future of learning will involve more personalization and customization based on learning styles, competencies, and preferences. In other words, artificial intelligence (AI) and adaptive learning are the future. These powerful technologies will affect both humans and machines in the coming years. Our goal at ADP is to develop a combination of tools that harness the power of AI and facilitate learning, ensuring companies and employees grow at a fast, steady pace.
The job market is shifting due to the broad impact of AI, automation, and robotics. There is a reduced demand for specific jobs, such as factory roles that can be automated. On the other hand, there is an increasing demand for particular jobs that belong in the future. According to the report by the Institute for the Future, 85% of the jobs in 2030 do not exist yet. It’s time for leaders to identify skills gaps based on current trends to prepare organizations and professionals.
In fact, we might be heading towards a disruptive breakthrough in artificial intelligence and data usage in human capital management (HCM). We are not far from a pivotal point, meaning we can expect many advancements with the power of AI and data information in HCM for the upcoming years.
As an industry leader, ADP looks forward to the future. My team supports innovation through our mantra — always designing for people. HCM solutions provide opportunities for companies and workers to grapple with the demands of a futuristic workplace. AI helps companies manage their workforce while anticipating changes and preparing their employees for upcoming challenges. Specifically, my team is working on technology that allows companies and employees to navigate a variety of scenarios. It combines traditional training and cutting-edge tools that connect people with mentors and experts in various communities.
We can’t talk about the future without understanding users’ needs. The good news is human capital management systems and training tools have become more predictive with ground-breaking developments in event-based systems, meaning they carry on as usual until they require inputs. For instance, a system can recognize users changing their addresses and further instigating necessary documents and paperwork. Another example is for the system to alert managers of a potential alarming pattern that shows an employee has not filled out a timecard.
AI’s Applications in Real Life
AI’s applications in real life are everywhere. Companies like Walmart hire a significant number of workers every month, experimenting with augmented reality (AR) and other technologies in new hire trainings. Wouldn’t it be more efficient for new employees to see the procedures before joining the company? The new hires at Walmart could see the supermarket’s organization in a virtual environment through a peer-to-peer reality before their first day at work.
Human resources (HR) managers may also benefit from using AI. From recruitment to employee experience and talent management, AI can automate routine HR tasks, deliver personalized experiences, and gain actionable insights from HR data. For example, AI may serve as a helpful tool to help track the workforce and notify managers that they need to hire more data scientists.
Another scenario is using AI as a user interface (UI) through natural language processing for seamless interactions between humans and technology, for example, using chatbots as the user interface. AI can be a powerful ally to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity among employees if leveraged carefully.
These are all opportunities and concepts that will change the future of jobs.
Challenges in AI Technology
Julio and his family
“With greater power comes with greater responsibilities.” There are risks with using the tools. At ADP, we have an ethical committee that looks at privacy issues and built-in biases. The technologies are developing quickly, which makes predicting outcomes challenging. Nevertheless, we always try our best to watch for violations and learn as we go. The teams at ADP are investing in a well-detailed approach to monitor how the machine learns and develops, ensuring all technologies evolve in the direction we expect.
Looking Forward: ADP’s Future
Technology development plays a huge role in ADP’s transformation into a technology company. There is more capital available than ever before, and the cost of building innovative products has become lower. In other words, we have more funding to experiment which leads to more breakthroughs. We are on the cusp of seeing more efficiencies on a massive scale through AL and ML.
The possibilities of using AR and VR during the company’s onboarding training are exciting! I can imagine applying AR and VR in digital workplaces for associates who work from home. The technologies bring efficiencies, save costs, and improve learning. Workers will have the ability to see the office and understand procedures even before joining the team in person. The implications are astronomical for national and global companies.
As we research more possibilities in tech, humans will benefit from using technologies in the workforce. The foundational trends include faster computing power, increasing data volume, low-cost communications for everyone and everywhere. These opportunities are life-changing, and we’ll see this come to fruition soon. I look forward to how the industry creates unique jobs in the workforce and breakthroughs. In the future, technologies at ADP will continue to help companies and workers adjust to changes, improving their job performances and making tasks easier.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Brazil Lab’s Alberto Boa Vista, Principal Technology Architect, Wins ADP’s 2021 President CSR Award
Impact, Innovation, Award
Alberto’s Full Stack Social program focused on web development and behavioral skills, tackling the massive gap of the technology workforce by empowering socially vulnerable youngsters.
Brazil Lab’s Alberto Boa Vista, Principal Technology Architect, Wins ADP’s 2021 President CSR Award
Social responsibility is one of ADP’s core values and is integral to our brand. We recognize two associates each year by presenting the Corporate Social Responsibility Award, acknowledging associates whose commitment to social responsibility has a positive, measurable impact on the communities where we live and work.
President’s Corporate Social Responsibility Award
Bob Lockett, Chief Diversity & Talent Officer, presented the 2021 President’s Award to Alberto Boa Vista, Principal Technology Architect, GPT. “Alberto played a critical role in organizing a course called Full Stack Social, a 14-month theoretical and practical training program to help socially vulnerable children enter the labor market,” Bob said. “He continued to engage other volunteers and presented the project to ADP’s Brazil Lab. The goal of the project is to alleviate poverty by giving software development skills to young people that otherwise would probably never have access to it.”
Alberto (right) with ADP Associates at Award Ceremony
Alberto’s Full Stack Social program focused on web development and behavioral skills, tackling the massive gap of the technology workforce by empowering socially vulnerable youngsters. It is conducted by Marist Social Center (CESMAR), a philanthropic and nonprofit institution with more than 20 years of history dedicated to social responsibility. The center is strategically located in Porto Alegre, Brazil, one of the lowest Human Development Index regions.
Alberto playing the electric guitar
“I play a role in organizing the course’s curriculum, engaging other volunteers, and presenting the project to potential sponsors. I’ve been doing it for almost a year now, and I’m sure it’s just the beginning of this relationship,” Alberto said. “I also believe the market of digital products contribute to this generation’s social and commercial goals.” By volunteering his time and giving back, Alberto feels grateful for every opportunity he gets to share knowledge, collecting beautiful stories from people around him.
Alberto with his family
The recognition was accompanied by a donation, which went to CESMAR, a social center with professionals who focus on education and health. Alberto is confident their well-organized program will continue to transform many more lives. He views the award as a reaffirmation for many people who chose to dedicate their lives to social responsibility. “It’s not easy, and I know it builds on the long history of this institution,” he said. “Thank you, ADP. The donation will surely bring positive changes to the communities.”
Alberto also shared the solid internal communication and a network of contacts he received. “I had no words to describe how proud I am. I received tremendous support from ADP throughout the project. It is inspiring to see people embrace and spread the ideas,” Alberto said. “Every contact I spoke to contributed to actions with inclusion and diversity.”
Congratulations, Alberto!
Thank you for contributing and giving back.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Inside DataCloud: How ADP Shapes the Future of Work
Innovation, What We Do, Future of Work
ADP continues to play a crucial role in shaping the future of work, impacting people’s lives.
Inside DataCloud: How ADP Shapes the Future of Work
By Amin Venjara, General Manager, Data Solutions, ADP DataCloud
Over the past two decades, fields like marketing and finance have seen an explosion in data-driven decision-making. Data informs everything from measuring performance to the microtargeted ads we see in our social media feeds. Data and analytics have even reshaped the world of professional sports as a “Moneyball” approach to building and deploying teams are now deeply integrated into most management teams and coaching staff.
In a similar vein, a data-driven approach to HR and talent decisions, known as people analytics, has grown rapidly over the past decade. As one of the largest providers of human capital management offerings, ADP has the data assets to lead in the people analytics space. Last year, we processed 69M W2s and moved over $2.3T—that’s over 10% of US GDP. With over 920K clients, we pay more than 38M workers worldwide, and just in the US alone, we reach nearly 20% of the private US workforce.
This rich data foundation explains why our monthly National Employment Report is considered a key indicator for the state of the US economy. It is also why economists from the Federal Reserve and leading universities are using ADP data to create more real-time measures on the state of the workforce. In a 2019 speech, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell described the Fed’s partnership with ADP: “We began to collaborate with ADP to construct a measure of payroll employment from their data set, which covers about 20 percent of the nation’s private workforce…. We believe that the new measure may help us better understand job market conditions in real-time.”
Our Data Solutions business unit and the DataCloud product team aim to amplify ADP’s data value, creating a more meaningful work experience for all employees. As one example, organizations are always looking to find and keep their best talent. Similarly, workers are looking for opportunities that best leverage their strengths and create opportunities to grow and thrive.
Skills Graph extracts, aligns, and normalizes key information such as skills, job titles and levels, education, and qualifications from non-structured data and infers missing skills and qualifications from context. Skills Graph powers ADP’s Candidate Profile Relevancy tool to help score, assess, and predict candidates who are the best fit for a job opening. While the model is not an algorithm that tells someone which candidate to pick, it helps identify those who are not the right fit, speeding up the application review process. This way, recruiters and hiring managers can focus more time on the human side of recruiting, having deeper, better conversations with candidates.
We have also used our data and analytics capabilities to help organizations address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) questions. From the earliest days of our analytics journey, we have included metrics that help organizations quantify and baseline their DEI. We have previously won the HR industry’s top technology award with our Pay Equity Explorer, which helps organizations understand pay equity gaps based on gender and race. Over the past year, we have continued to grow our DEI toolset, adding a question-based DEI Dashboard that helps organizations create and maintain turn-key answers to question like “How diverse is your workforce?”, “Which areas of my organization are not diverse?” and “How diverse is my organization’s leadership distribution?” from their HCM systems.
And what’s more – our focus on DEI with our clients has driven real outcomes. We’ve seen over 50% of our DEI solution’s active users act and realize a positive impact on their DEI measures. Active clients have seen pay equity gaps decrease by an average of 25% or more than $700K per client, making this a real investment for our clients based on our insights to enable equal pay for equal work.
The power of our data also extends beyond the world of HR. It is a powerful, real-time signal on the state of consumer demand, demographics, and the broader economy. Using our anonymized and aggregated data, we can construct views of migration patterns at the county level. For example, we found that before the pandemic, less than 3% of San Francisco and New York high earners making $100K or more moved out of the cities during the 12 months that ended in January 2020. After the pandemic, that number leaped to 14%. Those high-wage employees moved to the surrounding suburbs with a manageable commute to job centers. Large retailers and state governments use this data to shape their demand forecasting and to optimize their organizational agility in this rapidly changing world.
By putting our clients first and applying one of the richest data sets in the world to some of the most pressing societal and business issues of our day, our teams make a real impact every day at work. The client-obsessed and data-savvy product managers, engineers, UX designers, and data scientists that fuel our teams are constantly pushing the boundaries of technology to solve problems for our clients. At ADP, we are always designing for people, and in DataCloud and the broader Data Solutions team, data is the beating heart of everything we do.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
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
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
Engineering, Innovation, What We Do
Leo Meirelles first worked at ADP for more than six years as a lead technical analyst and senior software programmer. Then he left for stints at Google and The New York Times, where he had the opportunity to learn new environments, improve his knowledge, and refresh his tech stack—all benefits he brought with him when he returned to ADP in 2016. Below, Leo discusses the continuous integration and development (CI/CD) process he implemented with his team and the company-wide plans for adopting it.
As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
By Leo Meirelles, Principal Software Engineer and Principal Architect
As a principal software engineer and principal architect at ADP, I work on multiple projects and provide support as needed. Since ADP has a lot of products, one of our biggest challenges is streamlining our processes. Our engineers work on payroll systems, retirement services, and pension services, to name some, for both small and large companies—and that’s just in the United States. Each country we support has different portfolio options for companies that integrate ADP products. Since we continue to evolve our technology, we’re never short on opportunities.
I worked at ADP for close to seven years the first time. When I returned in 2016, I got involved with a great project to aggregate multi-country payroll; we integrated with in-country providers, with internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y) support. I’d spent a few years at The New York Times and then eighteen months at Google, and I was excited to bring that skillset back to ADP. At ADP, I’d always liked the people I worked alongside, and with ADP’s pivot to a technology-first company, I knew I could have a real impact here. In particular, I had the opportunity to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), first with one group, then two, and now we’re looking at global implementation throughout the company.
CI/CD combines continuous integration and delivery practices, relying on automation to guarantee that code changes are efficient and that application deployments are reliable. With the project I was initially working on, we had teams in multiple countries and multiple time zones, and when you have such a large amount of people spread out like that, you need to stay efficient.
Before this project, to deploy in a QA environment, we needed a UI Development Lead and a Backend Development Lead to approve a deployment release request since they were the most likely to be aware of any issues that could hinder QA work. They had to give the green light and say, “Hey, this code is good to go.” But when you have 30 developers, things get more complicated since you have to merge multiple pull requests. On top of that, we have eight microservices in the backend and three micro frontends—the login, the old application, and the new application, because we’re migrating a few things toward a new Angular version. This level of complexity underscores why ADP needed a global, automated solution that can work for everyone—and why we started the CI/CD implementation via our GitOps project.
GitOps is an evolution of infrastructure as code, where you build the whole environment from a configuration/definition file, and it stays together with the application source code. Later, it can be run by machines and build new environments without human intervention. The idea of GitOps is to use tools that you already use every day, which makes things easier since you don’t have to add new tools to your stack or change how you get work done. Instead of emailing, messaging, or calling someone to say, “Hey, can you deploy that version for me?” now you do that using Bitbucket and make a pull request, make a commit, and merge your code. After that, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes, and you can skip trying to find people for approvals. Because both the infrastructure and your code go into Bitbucket—in fact, the whole process for a new release—we’re able to have a new deployment in 10 minutes for the local environment using GitOps once the code review is finished, approved, and merged. From that point onward, QA owns the release management for their environment; they control what goes into the environment without involving DevOps and managers, giving more autonomy for the team to manage releases.
We knew that having GitOps would make life easier for DevOps and allow them to focus on other things, like maintaining production and improving monitoring and availability. Also, engineers deserved to oversee their code. But we had to figure out the best way to introduce the new process. So, we started slowly to minimize disruptions with the current software development process and give people time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
We had to get developers over the fear of breaking something. Everybody wanted to be either first or last. If they were first, they wouldn’t have to merge their code, and if they were last, they could make sure everything was working before adding theirs. Until we got into a rhythm, it was a stressful time. But once the teams started adopting the new process, things changed dramatically in a positive way. Instead of making considerable changes in the last few days of a sprint, we slowly transitioned to making several small changes every day. And if something didn’t work, it was a straightforward process to revert changes. Since everything is on Bitbucket, we can see the previous versions, making the long-term management much easier.
I talk to team members often, and we’re in a sweet spot right now. What really helped adoption was implementing a process when everyone was ready and open to trying a new process. I prefer to lead by example rather than trying to force people to do something. But as time passed, we built trust when it became obvious the new system worked. Now people have the flexibility to start working in whatever time zone they’re in and look at our online chats to see what’s changed since they last looked. We even have a bot that judges the quality of a pull request. We have twenty to thirty deployments in our development environment every day, and no one even notices. And if we need to make a production fix, we can do it in 20 minutes using GitOps and our other automation tools.
I’m looking forward to the full adoption of GitOps globally. We have a lot of products on a lot of platforms, so that will take time. But there are a lot of exciting things happening right now at ADP. We’re an evolving tech company and developing a cohesive development engineering team. Since I’ve been back, I’ve seen the environment grow stronger. We communicate and share between teams, do a lot of cross-team collaboration, and help drive innovation and ideas through events like global hackathons. As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Roll Forward: How breakthrough products are redefining ADP as a tech innovator
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Future of Work
For ADP as a tech innovator, this is just the beginning of the journey.
Roll Forward: How breakthrough products are redefining ADP as a tech innovator
Roberto Masiero, SVP Innovation Labs
From my long tenure at ADP, I’ve learned that when a company gives you the latitude to move around—either within the technology space or from technology to business or sales—you get plenty of chances to reinvent yourself. And reinvention on the individual level influences the reinvention of the company as a whole, which I think we really see now with Roll™.
Roll™ is a mobile chatbot platform that uses AI and natural language processing technologies to anticipate users’ payroll needs intelligently. It’s the first-ever DIY payroll technology, and it’s so intuitive that our clients just download it and go; a lot of them never even talk to a customer service rep. But while we designed Roll™ to seem effortless, it’s the product of years of creative work with a unified team. The idea for Roll™ was to simplify payroll and HR using a novel UX and platform. I run the Innovation Labs at ADP, where we develop new products as quickly as possible. We’re a relatively small team, around 30 people from diverse backgrounds and with no hierarchy, allowing us to pull together tightly as a group. It’s important to me to have a flat organization because the moment you create hierarchies, you create ways to point fingers. In the way we work, everyone shares responsibility.
We came up with the product idea for Roll™ about four years ago when we were finishing up ADP Marketplace and wondering what to do next. At the time, most of our lab projects were satellite projects, adjacent offerings to our existing core services. I thought, “What if we reinvented the core?” We saw an opportunity to improve multiple facets of our payroll platform—the architecture, the design, the user experience. We had a chance to envision a whole new system.
We fixated on this idea of events—that everything done as an action within the system should be recorded as an event. In fact, we initially named the product “E” for “events.” For example, if you hire someone, pay someone, or terminate someone, we record each action as an event. This way, we know who did what, where they did it, what time of day, and from what device. All that information taken together feeds a machine learning engine where the system gets better the more it gets used. Instead of a system with a bunch of menus, forms, and reports, we imagined a vector of events where events cause other events. We basically built the software as a workflow.
But we didn’t stop there. We also wanted to transform the UI into something much simpler and more direct. People tend to design user experiences with a sense of engagement in mind, but that’s not what we needed here. We didn’t want people engaged; we wanted them to get the job done and exit the software. So with Roll™, the user goes straight to chat and tells the system what they need, and the software understands. If it’s to hire someone, change someone’s W-4, change a payroll schedule, the user asks, and the software guides them through the process using conversational UI.
We also built Roll™ to function 100% on mobile. We decided the UX would use a simple chronological timeline, similar to Facebook or Twitter. Clients love having one place to go to see their activity: “Yes, I ran payroll yesterday evening,” or, “Great, that new W-4 went through.” In addition to optimizing for mobile, we also wanted a strong desktop presence. We noticed our desktop users liked to grab info from the system and transfer it to Excel spreadsheets, so we decided to give them an Excel-like UX.
We finished Roll™ in July 2019 and got a pilot client in August. That fall, we presented the software to ADP’s executive leadership team. We got the feedback that we were sitting on something big that works for small to large corporations. But they encouraged us to focus on the smaller markets, those with one to ten employees. So we spent a couple of months designing an additional layer of software to cater to small businesses. In March 2020, we piloted Roll™ with about 50 smaller companies who all liked what we were offering, and then the executive committee told us to put Roll™ on the market and sell it as soon as possible. So we went from pilot program to full rollout in under a year, and today we’re getting dozens of new clients a day signing up for Roll.
A big part of what makes Roll™ stand out is integrating natural language processing with machine learning. We designed Roll™ to understand the mental model of our user’s meaning. We wanted the chatbot AI to talk the way people talk.
We brought in ADP’s business anthropologist, Martha Bird, and copywriters to advocate for the user, helping us to shape the Roll™ voice. We didn’t simply want AI to predict what our clients needed for payroll purposes––though that ability was definitely important. We wanted the voice of Roll™ to demonstrate human understanding. For example, Roll™ learned to respond more positively when addressing a new hire or giving someone a raise in pay, whereas it is more subdued when discussing termination. It’s that empathetic understanding that gives Roll™ an edge in human interaction.
On the backend, we decided that we didn’t want to run servers, or even containers, like Docker or Kubernetes. Instead, we made every event a function. The beauty of functions is that they only exist while that function is running. So our cost of running Roll™ is extremely low. Using cloud services and this idea of functions is another way Roll™ sets itself apart.
Of course, Roll™ didn’t come without its challenges during the development process. Fraud is something we have to consider whenever we engineer or develop a new product. But this is what I love about the Lab: We think of our challenges as opportunities to make our products better. How can we improve? How can we automate? How can we reduce the amount of burden on the system from someone trying to commit fraud? And when we meet a challenge, everyone jumps in to help. We either fail as a team, or we succeed as a team.
I’d say we’re succeeding right now, and the beautiful thing about Roll™ is that it’s always running. We change our models to pick up on new ways clients ask for things, and every new question pulls into Roll’s knowledge and experience. So the more clients we have, the better the software becomes. It’s an unprecedented level of automation.
A program like Roll™ can help further ADP’s digital transformation from merely a payroll company into a competitive tech company. What makes Roll™ exciting is that it almost creates its own category; it’s a technological solution no one else has. We can dominate this market and apply some of the same breakthroughs—machine learning, using functions—with other ADP products. For ADP as a tech innovator, this is just the beginning of the journey.
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Women Engineer Magazine Top 50 Company.
Recognition, Awards, Women in STEM
ADP is thrilled to earn a place on this year’s 30th Annual “Top 50 Employers” in Woman Engineer Magazine for a second year in a row.
Readers of Woman Engineer Magazine chose top US companies they would most like to work for and/or whom they believe would provide a positive working environment for women engineers.
They chose ADP as one of the Top 50.
ADP is proud to build diverse teams that represent the diversity of our clients to drive innovation. At ADP, we focus on inclusion and reflect a diversity lens within our products.
Our focus on such programs as our partnership with Girls Who Code and our Women in Technology Leadership Mentoring Program has led to distinctions such as AnitaB.org naming ADP a 2020 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward women’s equity among companies with large technical workforces. We know that having a more diverse organization makes us stronger, and we are proud of supporting women in technology.
Our Global Product and Technology (GPT) organization stays close to industry benchmarks and has adopted measures to continue to drive progress. ADP also supports philanthropic organizations that nurture the career development of girls and women in the technology field, helping them fulfill their potential as future tech leaders.
Our technology leaders are committed to driving diversity, including recruiting and developing women technologists while providing opportunities for them to grow their careers.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
We strive to offer personal development opportunities through self-driven platforms, and our International Women’s Network and our Empower Committee focused on Women in STEM. Regardless of your role, we offer opportunities for women technologists. Meet Some of the Women of ADP DevOps and how they drive data-centric development.
Some recent product examples include the ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Dashboards to help companies see real-time workforce demographics. Some other products to promote a diverse workforce include our Candidate Relevancy tools and the award-winning Pay Equity Explorer.
Visit us at tech.adp.com and learn more about what we do.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Meet Roberto! One of the brilliant ADP Machine Learning developers behind our new payroll app, Roll™ by ADP®
Machine Learning, Brazil Labs, Roll by ADP
We had a chance to catch up with Roberto at ADP’s Brazil Innovation Lab in Porto Alegre. He shares his career journey, why he chose ADP, what keeps him excited, and why it’s a great time to work in machine learning.
On February 25, 2021, ADP unveiled an exciting and groundbreaking new payroll app called Roll™ by ADP® to help small businesses run payroll anywhere, anytime, quickly, and compliantly with no experience needed. The app’s artificial intelligence-backed conversational interface allows users to complete payroll on their mobile phones in less than a minute simply by texting, “Run my payroll.” Full press release. Watch a quick video of the app.
We had a chance to catch up with Roberto, a Machine Learning developer and one of the brilliant minds at ADP’s Brazil Innovation Lab in Porto Alegre.
Congratulations to you and your team on the launch of Roll™ by ADP®! We’d love to learn a bit about you. How long you’ve been at ADP, what brought you here, and what do you do here?
Yeah, sure. I’m working with machine learning here and part of Brazil’s Innovation Lab. I’ve been with ADP for three and a half years, so I started in 2017. I worked previously at HP, you know, the printer company, right? In their research lab.
I came here to start building the chatbot—a product complete within itself. A system where we can leverage the intelligence to make life easier for people that are using it. I’ve used chatbots, and sometimes they can be painful. Our job is to take the pain away. During development, we closely followed what our clients saw in production and what they said. When they are happy, that made us happy. We tried to understand our pre-production clients, make sense of what we learned, and iterate improvements before he launched.
So, our team is global and is split between here, the US, and India. We have about 13 people in Porto Alegre, but only four are working on just machine learning. We have around 32 people in Roseland, New Jersey, and about 20 colleagues in India. Our job here is to take care of the chatbot and help customers when they have questions. It’s kind of like using Alexa or Siri. When users ask questions, the AI is doing other things while trying to reply.
We’re also trying to extract insights from what customers are doing. For example, when you hire someone, we get the information behind the scenes, and then we do some tricky calculations to assist. The bot checks on things like gender and pay equity and offers data-driven insights to the client. For instance, in this location, you should offer a higher salary.
Tell us a bit about your career journey.
Sure. It’s a little bit messy. I’m an electrical engineer and worked a little bit in the automotive industry. I started as a hardware engineer working for Johnson Controls on a project for Fiat. Then I moved to a semiconductor company as an engineer and spent some time there. After that, I decided to move into technical marketing.
From there, I decided to get a master’s degree in Technology Management. I’ve lived with my wife in Lausanne – Switzerland, for two years. That was the initial plan. Then I got a job at Texas Instruments in technical sales. We stayed three more years before moving back to Brazil in 2015 and getting a job with HP. That was a big shift. I went from technical sales to software engineer. I had a colleague there that was working on machine learning. I fell in love with it, and I studied more about it. Then I got this opportunity at ADP to work 100% on machine learning. That’s why I came here. We pay 1 in 6 people in the US. There’s a lot of data here and good stuff we can do with it. So, I’ve been here since 2017.
I’m 41, almost 42, now. I have a daughter (Gabriela), she’s one year old. She is definitely my biggest project!
What still excites you about working here?
The team still energizes me. Before the pandemic, I enjoyed working with people globally and meeting the US teams in person when we still could travel to New York. We are trying to build this culture of applying available technologies and bridge the gap between open source and what folks in academia are doing with practical, real-life applications in our product, Roll™ by ADP®. Using this outside perspective, we filter what makes sense into our products to mature our technology.
I think the dynamics and openness of the machine learning domain are really driving the market right now. There’s a lot available in open source, and it’s our job to be up to date on the latest developments. It’s an exciting time to be working in machine learning.
Tell us a little about your project.
We beta tested with clients for almost two years. Last year, we did many internal demos based on our work with a gourmet ice cream company recommended by our Business Anthropologist, Martha Bird. We expanded and started working with our Small Business Services group and built our client list to 70 before we launched in February.
As we scaled for our GA release, we matured the product using input from a small number of clients. ADP’s executive team was happy with the product, and yeah, we hope people like what they see. As I mentioned, I go into production logs every week and see what customers are saying. Sometimes you get some nice comments, which is lovely, right? People talking to the chatbot and just saying, “Thank you!” I love seeing that. Martha measured pre-release net promoter scores (NPS), and they were really good. But we will keep the ball rolling and bring new features to future releases.
If someone asked you why they should choose ADP over other tech companies, what would you say?
I can say one of the things comparing ADP with the other companies where I’ve worked, and maybe it’s just specific to our product or my leader, but something I value a lot is openness. When I worked at other companies, there were a lot of layers. I think people are pretty open here also in terms of technology choices. I know that engineers like to experiment and test to see if stuff works. We try to do that here, experiment with things.
We are shifting from a service company to a more technology-oriented company. Here in Brazil, we are trying not only to apply technology but also to share ideas across the company. 
We created a machine learning discussion group. There are about 12 of us. We discuss papers, review articles, create challenges to learn new skills. We sometimes do presentations, attend or present at conferences. Everything is online today, which makes it easier. We get to exchange ideas and nurture our learnings across teams. We’ve discussed starting to produce some technical articles, and I’m happy that we can use the tech.adp.com blog to share them in 2021. I wish I had more time to write, but I don’t have as much time with my little one.
We also did our first internal developers conference in 2020, and I presented Uncertainty in Deep Learning. It was an amazing experience, great to share, but also to get feedback.
When I mention that we do these things during interviews and other things we are trying to do, candidates like this. I know in some companies people work in silos, but you cannot do that here in Brazil. We share as much as we can here. The openness I mentioned, it’s important.
Above, you mentioned exploring open-source and academia. Are there any projects outside of ADP that excite you right now?
Great question. Yes, there’s an open-source project called Open Mined and a course I’m interested in related to privacy with machine learning. The program is called “The Private AI Series.” Facebook is one of the course sponsors. They have a framework behind the scenes that helps people take care of customer privacy. In case you are interested, here’s the link: https://courses.openmined.org/.
Our team also continues to study and review new technologies. We are following Harvard CS224W online for graph neural networks and Causal Inference (lots of interesting applications will come out of this domain for sure!). For neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), we follow a vibrant startup and open source community called Huggingface. (https://huggingface.co/).
One last question! If you could advise your younger self or someone starting their career, what would you say?
Be inquisitive. Study. Help others.
Thanks for your time, Roberto!
