Tech & Innovation Blog
Innovating Retirement: How ADP Uses Machine Learning to Plan for the Future
How We Work, Culture, Team Collaboration
At ADP, people don’t have to be a leader by title. If there is an idea, and you can think big and innovate, that’s all you need.
Innovating Retirement: How ADP Uses Machine Learning to Plan for the Future
As one of the country’s leading HR technology companies, ADP uses its unmatched data in exciting and new ways. We had an opportunity to catch up with two people critical in recognizing the opportunity to innovate and create a machine learning product for Retirement Services.
Hemlata R., Director of Product Development, oversees the entire product development process. In addition to managing scrum masters, architects, developers, and tech leads, she also heads web development, mobile development, and the machine learning strategy for the entire Retirement Services team.
Sanjay V.R. is the Lead Application Developer and oversees the machine learning practice within Retirement Services.
We asked them how their small team creates cutting-edge technology to build data-driven solutions for their customers, and here’s what they said:
First, let’s hear a bit of what brought you to ADP.
Sanjay V.R.
Sanjay: I started at ADP as an intern while I was attending school in upstate New York. Once I completed my internship, I actually had multiple offers to join other companies. I chose to stay at ADP because getting good opportunities is one of the most challenging obstacles in today’s job market, and at ADP, if you put in the work, getting rewarded is the easiest thing.
Hemlata has been my director for 80% of my career, and I’ve been able to turn to her if I have an idea or if I want to pick up a new role or responsibility. She’s always encouraged me. My senior leaders make sure to recognize me for my hard work. I’ve been promoted three times in my three years at Retirement Services, and that speaks volumes.
Hemlata: I also had several offers when I was looking for a change after my last job. I was attracted to ADP because I’d heard that it was moving toward being more of a technology company that valued innovation—and that its leaders prioritized diversity and inclusion. I’ve seen first-hand that you don’t have to have an impressive title to be a leader here. You can be a leader at any level. You can innovate at any level, and ADP supports and invests on that front. I’m so happy and thrilled that everything I had heard about ADP turned out to be more than true.
Speaking of innovation, tell us about the Retirement Services product you built.
Sanjay: People Like You is a new feature based on machine learning algorithms; it helps participants better prepare for their retirement by offering benchmarks on how people similar to them are planning their retirements. For example, we can show you what percentage of your coworkers are contributing to their 401(k)s and how much of their income they’re contributing. Maybe you contribute 5%, and when you see that your peers contribute 8%, you have the confidence to invest more.
In the retirement industry, advisors usually group people by age or salary and then start giving advice. We wanted to answer the question better and offer advice based on what others in similar socioeconomic situations are actually doing.
Hemlata: ADP pays one out of six Americans; the amount of data we possess is unparalleled. When I joined the company, we discovered that many of our clients’ employees do not contribute to 401(k)s. Since we work for Retirement Services, we saw this as a problem. People often look at their peers and follow them, so we asked ourselves how our data could help create a solution.
How did you go about building People Like You?
Hemlata: We tried to combine the mind and the machine by leveraging our experts’ expertise at ADP and machine learning.
Sanjay: We have folks at ADP who have over 20 and 30 years of experience in Human Resources and Retirement Services. As much as data is our strength, our people and their expertise are equally valuable. So first, we talked extensively with our internal stakeholders since they already know the ins and outs of the industry intimately. Then we conducted market research to understand people’s motivations and concerns better about retirement investing.
After that, we went back to our data sets—everything we have from our payroll and retirement resources—and we started looking at this socioeconomic information to see any relevance between multiple parameters. For example, does age or compensation influence your retirement decisions? What if you’re married, single, or have kids? Based on our internal and external research, we were able to identify somewhere around 30 factors that make an impact; we then narrowed those factors based on the extent of their influence on an individual’s decision. Once we started analyzing that data and built models to create the personas, we realized that we had something worth integrating with our existing retirement products.
When we began this project, it started on a small scale. It was just one other data scientist and me. The two of us created the machine learning part of it, but as we built specific pieces of code for the APIs, we pulled in engineers as we needed them.
Were there any complications you had to work through?
Hemlata R.
Hemlata: The tricky part for me was to make sure that we were compliant with all the security olicies. People trust ADP. It’s our brand. That’s why they come to us for payroll, compliance, workforce management, legal, and security solutions. ADP knows what to do and takes excellent care of its customers, and we take this to heart and always obtain the consent of our clients and employees before we include their data. We’re extremely careful to keep all the data anonymous and not look into any specific client or individual employee data.
Sanjay: Yes, ADP is very sensitive toward privacy laws, so we were very specific about reading only as much data as people were comfortable with. One of the biggest advantages we had was that we partnered with ADP’s DataCloud team. They acted like a data custodian in the project and were responsible for making the data anonymous. They also made it possible to identify an employee—only with their consent—if I needed to access that data to connect specific pieces of information.
I’m a millennial, and I’m one of those people who always clicks on “Do Not Sell My Info” on websites. So, I’m particular about my data, and I think I always had that in the back of my mind. DataCloud made my job easy in that regard.
How do you think machine learning will affect your future work?
Hemlata: We are looking at leveraging this concept of combining the mind and the machine on other aspects of our business, such as compliance processes. As of now, we have used descriptive and prescriptive analytics. Next, we are planning to use predictive analytics to help our clients predict the upcoming required actions. ADP and our clients can solve any predicted problems upfront. We’re always trying to see how we can take our ideas and solutions to the next level.
Sanjay: This is the beginning of an entirely new way of thinking about improving our clients’ experience. We want to look beyond traditional solutions to ensure our clients and their employees feel empowered by our products. ADP also has a general excitement to identify pain points to be resolved and processes we can enhance using machine learning.
Speaking of your customers, do you see any results from People Like You? Are more people signing up to contribute to their 401(k)s?
Hemlata: The results are way better than what we expected. Employee contributions and new enrollments have definitely increased. We also saw this product gain so much attention internally within ADP that several other teams contacted us to see how they could leverage similar solutions within their departments. It’s been fascinating to see the outcomes and the interest from all the other teams.
Sanjay: It’s funny because a bunch of my peers was like, “Oh, I don’t really need a 401(k). I’m too young for that.” Then, two or three months after we released People Like You, someone remarked during lunch, “Hey, did you know that I just signed up for my 401(k)?” Then others joined in—four people also signed up. It’s just a wonderful experience when you hear people say your solution impacts their lives.
After we launched, Don Weinstein pinged me on Webex Teams and said what a great job I’d done and that he was looking forward to what I’d build next. It was a total fanboy moment for me.
Hemlata: This goes to show you what I was saying earlier. At ADP, people don’t have to be a leader by title. If there is an idea, and you can think big and innovate, that’s all you need. Once you have that, you can take it to any level, and people will be so open to talk to you, encourage you, and help support any of these thoughts. It’s really amazing to see that!
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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.
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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
Roberto Masiero, SVP Innovation, talks about his journey from entrepreneurship to founding ADP’s first Innovation Labs.
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Career Journey
We decided to open the first lab in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with a specific goal: to develop new products as quickly as possible.
After starting his career as an entrepreneur in Brazil, SVP of Innovation, Robert Masiero first came to ADP 20 years ago through an acquisition—and he’s been building new technologies here ever since. Below, he reflects on what led to the founding of the ADP Innovation incubators in Brazil and the U.S., explains the beliefs that shape his leadership style, and shares the cutting-edge challenges the team is taking on next.
First, tell us about your background and what brought you to ADP.
I started working in technology while I was in college as a mainframe operator on the overnight shift. I didn’t get much sleep! After that, I learned to code and became a developer, then did mainframe support. I had this urge to start my own business—and I did a few times. The first two failed, but the third one, a consulting company that transitioned applications from mainframes to open systems like Linux and Unix, did well. Eventually, we decided to create our own software for things our clients needed, things like HR, payroll, and accounts receivable.
That software went through several iterations, from character-based to client-server, Windows-based to the web. That was the mid-90s, and it was unusual to have software that could run in a browser, so large companies started showing interest. We added team members, but eventually, our product outgrew our business—we needed to expand our sales force, distribution support, and ability to do on-site implementations. At the time, there was no venture capital in Brazil; your only options were getting a bank loan or finding a partner. So we started going to trade shows. At one of them, we knew ADP would be two booths down from us, so we made sure to get their attention—we had this big TV screen showing all our client logos, many of which were also ADP clients. That started a conversation, and ADP ended up acquiring the business.
What was it like to integrate into such a large company?
I remember thinking we had a massive opportunity to succeed because, back in those days, ADP had mostly manual processes—people called or faxed in their payroll. So, in our first six months, we took the software we’d built for our clients to use and built a layer on top of it that allowed ADP to run things on a client’s behalf. We were just this tiny new acquisition, and ADP was very conservative at the time, so when we presented the updated software we’d created, I wanted to put on a big show. I rented a hotel ballroom, even though I didn’t have the budget for it, and I invited the entire leadership team.
They gave us a couple of large clients, and that turned out to be transformative. After a while, ADP shut down their mainframes in Brazil and moved those clients to our software—including GPA, which is like the Wal-Mart of Brazil, and the largest single payroll we ran globally. The complete transition took a few years. When we were done, ADP’s U.S. leadership team sent their CTO down to take a look; I think they weren’t quite sure it was real. But he liked what he saw—clients were happier, costs were down—so they invited me to move to the U.S. and adapt the software from a new tax credit services acquisition.
You started the first ADP Innovation Lab around that time. What led to that one—and the second lab?
We decided to open the first lab in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with a specific goal: to develop new products as quickly as possible. At the time, I was more familiar with the talent there than in the U.S. In Brazil, I could build a team of people I already knew, who were already familiar with the technology we wanted to use. So, ADP’s primary development team handled payroll, while we had a small team that focused on the tax credit work.
After the project was over, ADP invited me to run a Shared Services team of 700 people who handle identity management, the enterprise service business, and our internal associate portal. Then I moved over to Enterprise Architecture for a while. But I still had an entrepreneurial drive. About a decade ago, I went to ADP leadership and said I wanted to build an Innovation Lab here in the U.S. to focus on incubating completely new ideas. They said, “Okay, let’s do it,” and they gave me a team of four to get it started.
Tell us about some of the projects that the lab has developed.
We launched around the time the iPhone came out, so our first project was ADP Mobile. We put it together in about a year, and we used modern database tools like MongoDB rather than the Java- and Oracle-based ones that were typical at the time. We also built it for everyone; small businesses and multinational corporations could use it, and it worked in every country and supported 40 different languages. It grew very well—I think we reached a million users in less than a year. But I’d said from the start when we created that lab. I wanted to keep it small and flat, never more than 30 people, which meant when a project reached a certain level of maturity, it would “graduate” from the lab and get a dedicated R&D team. That’s what we did with mobile, which now has something like 25 million users.
After that, we worked on the tablet application and then built out semantic search, which we now use across ADP’s core products. The most recent project that graduated from the lab is ADP Marketplace, a collection of HR solutions that clients can customize and integrate with our software. The latest product we developed is called Roll™, which required an entirely different way of thinking about our services. Roll™ is a 100% mobile chatbot platform that simplifies payroll using state-of-the-art AI and natural language processing technologies. It can intelligently alert a client when something needs their attention—it’s an unprecedented level of automation.
What do you think makes a good leader?
In part, I think it’s about completely understanding the work your team is doing. When you’re running a large organization, of course, it’s also about who you put in charge—you have to trust your direct reports to make the right decisions. But even when I was leading hundreds of people in Shared Services, I still wanted to be familiar with the processes and skills they needed to do their jobs.
I never want to micromanage, but I do want to be hands-on and in the know. It’s leading by example—if there’s a production issue, for instance, I’ll be on a late call with the team. People appreciate it when you’re committed to their ideas, and they can trust you to have an educated conversation about the decisions that need to be made, whether that’s around technology or go-to-market strategy.
A good leader also ensures everyone on the team has a voice, whether they have ten days of tenure or ten years. In fact, the untrained eye of someone who’s starting their career can be a phenomenal asset to the rest of us. If you have an opinion or see something we could do differently, it’s so important that your input be heard and considered. Ultimately, we have to be pragmatic in our decision-making, but I love debate. I love being challenged and being proven wrong. The push and pull from many different perspectives makes this work fun.
What’s challenging about your work?
The toughest thing for any leader is making difficult decisions that affect other people. If you’re letting someone go, for example, even if it will be healthier for everyone involved, that’s very hard.
ADP’s size can also be a challenge because change is difficult for any big company. But I see that as an opportunity: If something has been done the same way for decades, let’s ask why. How could we change that process to make it more efficient? ADP is exceptionally open to challenging the status quo. Our people have the incentive to challenge existing ideas and revisit how things are done to find opportunities to improve or design for better outcomes. Just as I like my team members to challenge my assumptions, we get the same message from the very top of the company: If you see a better way, a chance to transform the way you work, you should be able to do that.
What’s exciting to you about ADP’s future?
I’m excited for us to continue investing in new ideas to make the lives of our clients and ADP associates better. We’re going through a period of significant change, and that’s never without challenges. But the level of commitment I’ve seen keeps me hopeful. We’re doing our small part in the lab with products like Roll™, and that’s just a portion of a company-wide effort to deliver on new technologies and innovations. All of us are committed to success and meeting our clients’ and associates’ expectations with innovative products and technologies that will have a phenomenal payoff and carry us through many years to come.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Tashina, VP of Operations & Digital Transformation, shares her journey and why it’s an exciting time to work for ADP.
Women In STEM, Senior Leaders, Career Journey
When I joined ADP, they were in the midst of investing in next-generation products…it was a transition period, which I thought would be a great time to join the company and lead through that exciting change.
ADP’s Global Employer Brand Editorial Team, Liz + Kate, catch up with one of our Senior Leaders on the Global Product & Technology Leadership Team, Tashina Charagi, our VP, Operations & Digital Transformation. She shares her career journey, some of the exciting projects she’s worked on, and why it’s such an exciting time to work for ADP.
Welcome, Tashina! Tell us a little about the career path that brought you to ADP. 
Sure, so I’m originally a technologist by training with a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I worked as a software developer before going back to school for an MBA. I worked on a Windows Mobile phone (if you remember, the thing that looked like a Blackberry). That was around the time Apple introduced the iPhone, and the competition pretty much crushed us. I realized that in my role as an engineer, I didn’t have a full view of what was going on in the market, what customer preferences were, or how strategically we make some decisions. I took that as the impetus to go and broaden my business education.
After getting my MBA, I ended up consulting, again with the same desire to broaden my education and learn about different industries.
As I reached mid-career in consulting, even though I enjoyed the work I did with technology applications and the impact I was driving, I realized the amount of travel wasn’t feasible anymore. The second thing I realized was that I couldn’t see the final impact of my work. I couldn’t see the actual human impact or benefit to clients. That’s what I wanted more of, so I ended up looking at ADP.
At the time, I knew the reputation of ADP and the kind of work they were doing. Most importantly, I knew that they were going through a transition, and they were at a critical point in time. Our CEO liked to say we were a “75-mile-march” company. We’ve been around for a long time, but at every single phase of our life at ADP, we have made significant changes required to serve our clients in the best possible way.
When I joined ADP, they were in the midst of investing in next-generation products and divesting non-core areas of focus like Dealer Services. So it was a transition period, which I thought would be a great time to join the company and lead through that exciting change.
Wow, that’s a fabulous answer. What has your journey been since you got here?
Yeah, I joined the Corporate Strategy group. I was fortunate that I got to work on some big and exciting projects. One of the first projects I worked on—the one I’m the proudest of—was under the Obama administration when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released new guidelines for how a company needs to report pay equity, which had become a very important issue.
At ADP, we started discussing how to enable our clients to comply with these changes in regulations. But really, what we needed to do was take a step back to make sure all our business units approached this cohesively. An interesting conversation came up about how ADP pays 1 out of 6 people in the United States, which meant we had a treasure trove of data regarding pay equity. Across a worker’s lifetime, we touch 90% of US workers in some way. We realized we had an opportunity to go further than meeting minimum compliance. We could offer our clients something above and beyond that.
An example of how a client could use that data would be if they wanted to expand into a new geography or enable a new kind of role for the first time. Often clients have questions like, “What do people make in this city for this role?” or, “Where are pay scales rising – both by geography and by roles?”
We had that data. We just needed to aggregate it and eliminate identifiable information.
Taking that data, we built analytics on top using AI and machine learning and provided dashboards for our clients to look at equity in a more comprehensive manner. So, not just like, “Hey, I need to fill out these forms,” but we looked at it with a feature focus: “In this geography, am I being competitive to the geography and this role?” What about diversity? “Am I being competitive across every diversity element?”
The product we developed was so different from anything that was on the market at that point. For two years, we won product awards for that offering. And what excited me was that this wasn’t a client “ask” of ADP. We took the initiative to serve our clients in a way they hadn’t thought of or expected. Those are the type of opportunities that I’m excited about here at ADP.
Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to lead a couple of high-impact projects that are cross-functional and span multiple business units. That really excites me, too.
What roles have mentors and or sponsors played in your career as you’ve navigated your journey here at ADP?
Yeah, I would say a couple of things. One was pretty early in my journey here, when I worked on some of these massive cross-business unit opportunities. There’s no way I would have been successful or have a successful team without having these mentors and sponsors who could get me deeper into the requirements for each of the different business units. They helped me understand how the business units were structured and how I could best use the resources we have here at ADP. Mentors, specifically, have played a significant role in my ability to succeed in these huge projects.
I’ll use my current role in digital transformation as an example in terms of having a sponsor. I was coming back from my second maternity leave and trying to figure out my future at ADP. Don Weinstein, who was my manager in my strategy role, was the one who brought up the GPT role where I ended up. I’ve been in this role for the last two and a half years. Sponsors have played an important role in making me aware of various opportunities, or in this case, creating an opportunity for me. So that’s been quite good, I’d say.
Have you ever been a mentor for someone else?
Yes, definitely. I’ll give one specific example. There was an associate who worked with me on a couple of different projects. I thought she was fantastic. She wanted to get broader experience outside of the United States. I was able to talk her through her options and give her some feedback on how to think about positioning and opportunities. Now, she’s in Europe in her next role, which she loves, and with a team who absolutely loves her too. So, that’s one example of mentoring, but I have had a couple of other opportunities. Each of them has been very exciting.
With most organizations still working remotely due to the pandemic, how are you staying connected with your teams and keeping everyone motivated?
Obviously, 2020 and 2021 have been very challenging. What’s resonated well, silly maybe, but we’ve exchanged a lot of memes and jokes. Our WebEx Teams rollout helped us keep in touch through instant messaging and made that easier.
On the serious side, our Senior leadership team has always had monthly check-ins. We’ve made them more robust. So, it’s not just about updates on specific products. We added more white space to focus on the “water cooler” talk. Things like casual problem solving, “Hey, we have these dependencies, what do you think?” or, “Hey, I’m kind of stuck on this one thing. Have you guys solved this before?”
I think we’ve also done a pretty good job of including some social aspects during these meetings. We’ve had happy hours, and that’s been pretty great…and enjoyable. There have been happy hours where we’re looking out over a waterfront in Brazil in the background. Another positive, as weird as ’20-’21 has been, there’s been this sense of closeness. You’ve seen inside people’s homes. You’ve seen their pets and kids in the background. I feel that made us feel more connected and human, more so now than ever before.
Why do you think it’s a great time for people to join and a tech career?
If you think about all the different things going on right now in human capital management, supporting workers is an essential piece. Besides the pandemic and working remotely, base labor force changes make HCM an interesting and impactful place to be. We are truly impacting people’s lives in a positive way. That’s one big reason why being at ADP is exciting.
Then, within ADP, I would say that the transition that made me join is continuing and going into the next phase of that transition. We’re still doing work on our next-gen products, but we are also doing more work around analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), and such things as rolling out chatbots. As I keep working on these technologies, I try to reach out to the industry to understand the best practices. In some cases, I’ve come to realize that we are on the cutting edge with these technologies, pushing the boundaries and defining the best practices. I’m excited to come to work every day. I hope anybody joining would feel the same way.
How do you incorporate culture into your everyday work?
One of the biggest things that I’ve taken away from seeing how our CEO Carlos Rodrigues and the rest of the executive team works has been humility. That, and a feeling of equality, ensuring everybody’s voice is heard. That resonates with me a lot. I think that feeds through into our culture. Those things have always been a part of every team I’ve worked on.
It’s not only about a leader’s voice here. There’s no dictatorship. It has always been about listening to everybody’s voice and coming to a consensus. So, those qualities: humility and that feeling of equality, carry forward in all the work we do.
What’s your advice for anyone looking to pursue a career with ADP?
LOL, apply at tech.adp.com? Kidding aside, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love our experiences at ADP, and I would love to have more people engaged.
So, what does work-life balance mean to you? And how are you able to achieve that working here?
What work-life balance means to me is that you get your work done in the time that you have during the day without necessarily having to work 9 to 5 on somebody else’s schedule. As a mom of two young kids, I’ll give you an example that happened to me today. My child’s daycare had some heating problems, so they had to cancel daycare, and my daughter is at home. So, my husband and I traded off on the responsibility to watch her around our meeting schedules. I don’t know any other company where I could tell my team and my manager, “Hey, guys, I just need to be flexible for the next couple of hours,” and have an outpouring of support with things like: “What we can do?”, “Yes, absolutely,” “Happy to move things.”
Managing my schedule and having flexibility means a lot to me. It’s not to say you don’t get things done that need to get done. You still do that. It means when things come up, there is an understanding and the ability to be flexible. That’s really important to me.
I think that’s super important for many people right now, just based on what’s happening globally. Great story. Do you belong to any Business Resource Groups (BRGs)? Which ones?
I belong to several BRGs. One I’d love to talk about is Women in Leadership (WIL) and the access it gives me. When I was doing this pay equity work, I reached out to a bunch of folks through the WIL network to get some feedback on specific user screens that we were putting inside our product.
The BRG gave me exposure to senior leaders, who manage hundreds, if not thousands, of people at a time. To get feedback from them as users and hear them answer the question, “What would you do as a manager?” was really powerful. That’s a tactical example of where a BRG was helpful in my work. More broadly, especially in today’s world, BRGs are an excellent resource for making connections. They organize all kinds of events, virtual for now, to keep people connected. Recently, our Women in Leadership BRG had a virtual event focused on resilience. They brought in a Peloton trainer (Robin Arzon) who was a motivational speaker. Super inspiring. I find it energizing to learn from people I might not work with every day.
What’s your favorite thing about where you work?
It’s definitely the people. In today’s world, I miss walking into someone’s office when I have a question. That’s changed in the virtual world, but we still do it, just in a different way. The thing I love is still the people that I work with and the trust we have. We’re there for one another—and that’s special.
Explore tech careers at ADP on tech.adp.com.
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
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
Meet (some of) the Women of ADP DevOps
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, DevOps
One group of women within our DevOps team share their story of camaraderie and making a difference at ADP. Every day, they work in close support of one another to tackle exciting technical challenges and to drive data-centric development across the company.
ADP is a 2020 Grace Hopper Award recipient for our commitment to diverse teams and the overall development of women, no matter where they are in their careers. One group of women within our DevOps team share their story of camaraderie and making a difference at ADP. Every day, they work in close support of one another to tackle exciting technical challenges and to drive data-centric development across the company. We recently caught up with Monica Bansal (Application Developer), Natalia Ermolayeva (Senior Application Developer), Tao Hu (Principal Application Developer), and Stella Jia (Senior Director, Application Development). It was clear from our chat and how they complement each other’s work why they’ve become such a tight-knit group. Below, they share what makes their collaboration work so well, their recent wins, and what they’re excited to learn—and build—in the months and years to come.
What do each of you do at ADP, and why did you join the team?
Monica: My job is a blend of application development and data analytics—I assist ADP’s data scientists with experiments and then build out the APIs. I’ve been with the company full-time for about a year now; I started as a summer intern while getting my master’s in data science and computer science. I knew I wanted to continue my career in this field, and I liked getting to work with real data and implement it in the real world. I did another part-time internship last spring while finishing my degree, and then I joined Stella’s team.
Tao: I’m a principal application developer, which means I build many of the libraries and components that allow our work to scale—they become the blueprint other teams implemented. I’ve been with ADP since 2013. Before that, I worked in finance as a Java developer. A friend of mine recommended ADP after my company moved farther from my home. I have two young boys, and I wanted to make sure I had time to take care of them. I knew ADP had a reputation for being a family-friendly employer.
When I started at ADP, my work focused on producing reports. But once Stella joined, our team shifted to more machine learning. I love problem-solving and simplifying processes, so it’s been really fun for me.
Natalia: I’m a senior application developer, and I see my role as keeping data safe and available—I handle testing and operations. I’m very new to ADP; I joined about four months ago. One big attraction was the level of collaboration between departments. I was very impressed with the people who interviewed me. Everyone was very professional, and they mentioned many modern tools that I was excited to use. I knew ADP would be a good place to broaden my skills across a lot of different areas.
Stella: I’m a senior director for application development. My job is to lead the Application Development team and make sure we’re delivering insights that will help ADP build better products. As Tao mentioned, that involves a lot of machine learning work and other statistical analysis, as well as data mining and visualization techniques. An intrinsic strength of this team is connecting the data to the real people we serve. When we look for patterns and anomalies, we’re trying to figure out how we can make people’s jobs easier as we ADP innovate and grow.
I joined ADP about four years ago; a mentor and friend I’d previously worked for recommended I apply. He had great things to say about the leadership and the vision for transformation from a service company to a technology company. The people were great, too, and I liked that I’d get to learn about a lot of domains I hadn’t worked in before. I think it’s an excellent environment for anyone who wants to grow by adding value and helping others.
How do you support each other’s work?
Tao: We’re helping each other every day, sharing results and ideas for new approaches. For example, we’ve been using a new data analysis tool to build some reports, and now we’re looking at other projects that might benefit from those same functionalities. Because of our roles, Monica and I work especially closely, but I feel like I can pick up the phone or message anyone on the team when I have something to figure out, and I’ll get help right away.
Natalia: Yes—I like that my teammates are always just a call or text away. Knowing each other as people, chatting and joking around makes it so much easier to communicate and work together. We’re comfortable sharing ideas freely and collaborating, even when we’re not in the same room.
Stella: Definitely. We’d love to hang out in person more, but even with everyone virtual, it’s turned out really well. And that collaboration is so important. I think of the team as a set of pillars—if any of them aren’t there, none of it works. Monica is doing the analytics and research, slicing and dicing the data. Once we’ve found something we want to build upon, Tao steps in to create that foundation. And then Natalia is there to make sure we’re not only maintaining privacy but keeping things sustainable from an operations perspective. We all need each other, and we’re all working toward the same goal and figuring out how to measure success, which could be a product’s stickiness, preventing errors, or saving people time.
Monica: I think everyone on the team is naturally very passionate about working toward what we all want to achieve. You can always go to someone with a question, and everyone pitches in when someone needs help to make sure we’re hitting our targets. Stella is great about making sure we’re all happy and doing the kind of work we want to be doing.
Tell us about some of the ways you’ve made an impact at ADP.
Tao: We recently started using a new workflow manager tool, which has been a big win. Before, if we had a lot of ETL (extract, transform, load) jobs, we’d get files from other teams and load them into the database. With all the pieces and feeds, it wasn’t easy to see the status of any particular piece. That was frustrating. Stella recommended a workflow tool, which I hadn’t heard of at the time. After I got up to speed, we started building things out, adapting the data monitor and using the workflow manager to grab all the outputs, sending them to the monitor, and building the dashboards there. Now we have an accessible overview to see what’s working and what isn’t. It’s been so helpful.
Natalia: Due to the nature of my work, success isn’t always obvious. If things run smoothly, no one notices what happens in the background, which means I’ve done my job. As I get more familiar with how things work at ADP, I’ll have some opportunities to automate more daily, repetitive tasks. That’s a big priority.
Monica: We did an error-detection project recently where we built a model to help us flag problems on the back-end when a client runs their payroll and how users respond when they get those warnings. If we have a proper pipeline of data to run the model regularly, clients can see predictions for the entire week, and we can see whether they’re using or ignoring the information, which tells us whether we need to make some corrections.
More broadly, our team helps others understand the importance and potential of data, especially here at ADP, where we have such rich data. We want to drive data-centric development, which starts with data collection. Before we can do the analytics, our data needs to be clean. So we work with a lot of other teams, helping them understand how to use the tools and making sure they’re comfortable and up-to-date on everything they need.
Stella: We are part of a data-informed culture. Technology evolves quickly. At ADP, we want to stay ahead and be proactive rather than reactive. Data is a huge asset in that effort. It gives us much faster feedback loops and insights into our clients. We can quickly see when and whether a client’s hitting a milestone.
But to leverage that asset, as Monica mentioned, we need a certain level of data literacy throughout the business. If developers understand how data can help them build a better product, it will be much easier to scale. Part of our team’s job is to encourage data literacy. We also help establish standards, offer training, and get development teams running on an autonomous path to adopt a canonical format every team can follow. We find that it is contagious. Once a few teams embrace the data, other teams understand the benefits more quickly and have more colleagues to help them learn.
What are you excited to learn next?
Natalia: There are a lot of tools I’m excited to learn more about, including the ones my colleagues have mentioned. I’m looking forward to using new technologies in general, particularly machine learning tools. I think I’ll have many opportunities to code for our team’s internal purposes, for affirmation and monitoring, too. Because I’m new to the team, I’m also learning the big picture and how everything’s connected. ADP is great with documentation, so I can find almost everything I need on my own. But I can always ask my colleagues or get up to speed through a learning session with one of our senior team members.
Tao: I’m excited to keep learning new technologies, too. I’ll often jump over to educational resources to get a quick sense of something, then I come back and try to use it. The machine learning side of things is especially exciting. Besides learning new languages, I love new concepts for how to approach our work.
Monica: I feel like I’ve grown so much already! From the start of my first internship to now, I’ve been able to work on many different services and projects, from machine learning models to APIs to analytics. Whenever Stella says, “I have an idea,” we get excited. The technologies are always changing, and that helps us grow.
Stella: One thing I’m thinking about is how to give developers more visibility into what we do. As Natalia mentioned, most of our foundational work tends to happen behind the scenes. We look forward to building stronger connections with our frontend partners, which will provide even more opportunities to enjoy the results and get recognition for our work.
At ADP, our talent pipeline is so important. It’s about getting the right people and building a strong culture. We want the goal, in everything my team does, to be a better developer experience. We strive to make people happy, make their jobs easier, make their days more efficient. If we provide them with a platform that allows them to test and measure their ideas more quickly, they’ll have more time to explore new ideas and innovate.
Tech & Innovation Blog
“Building a World of Truly Inclusive Technology,” AnitaB.org Names ADP a Top Company for Women Technologists.
Women in STEM, Recognition, Grace Hopper
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward the equity of women 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. Hear from Krupali who describes her recruiting experience with ADP at Grace Hopper.
At this year’s virtual Grace Hopper Celebration hosted by the nonprofit social enterprise AnitaB.org, they announced ADP earned the distinction as a 2020 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category. Read the full press release here.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for making the most progress toward the equity of women 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 to 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.
Since we are celebrating Grace Hopper, let’s check out a post about one of our attendees and hear from Krupali as she describes her recruiting experience with ADP & Grace Hopper.
#WomenInTech #ADPLife
To learn more about our Campus Programs, visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Race Against Time: How ADP’s Product Team Helped Thousands of Businesses Secure Critical Paycheck Protections Loans
Pandemic, Innovation, Voice of Our People
Bill and Terri look back on a whirlwind weekend in April, when the Small Business Administration (SBA) had launched an unprecedented new loan program established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). Here’s their story.
In the wake of COVID-19, ADP’s product teams have worked tirelessly to ensure our clients weather the storm. We wanted to catch up with two of the people who’ve made this possible. Bill Leonard, Director of Product Management, was once the payroll director for ADP. He advises early-in-career colleagues to say yes to new opportunities—it’s brought him to where he is today. Terri Thomas, Senior Director of Product Management, says that she owes her 35-year career at ADP to outstanding mentors and the advice she received from day one: Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.
Below, Bill and Terri look back on a whirlwind weekend in April, when the Small Business Administration (SBA) had launched an unprecedented new loan program established by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act). Tens of thousands of companies applied in the first hour alone. Thanks in part to our team’s hard work, many loans went to ADP clients in the first funding round.
Take us back a few months when you first got involved in this project. How did it start?
Terri: I remember I got a phone call the day the CARES Act passed, the last Friday in March. The SBA would start accepting loan applications under the new Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) the following Friday. We wanted to be there for the thousands of ADP’s clients we expected to apply for the loans and give them the tools they would need to help their employees. That meant they needed information from us as soon as possible. I was asked to take the lead on the product side.
We had already been working on the provisions of the FFCRA, or Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which had passed the week before and potentially affected all 600,000 companies who use ADP. But the impact of CARES was massive, too, and we had far less time to take action. So, there was no debate, no red tape. We just got on a call and started working.
Bill: Absolutely. There was limited funding, especially in that first round, so our clients all wanted to be ready the minute the application period opened. We wanted to have their payroll cost reports and other supporting documents ready by Monday.
There were a couple of factors that made that difficult. For example, loan amounts were based on each employee’s annual payroll cost but capped at $100,000 per person per year. We couldn’t just pull data and run a report. The number of moving pieces was pretty astounding due to the rapid shifts in the regulatory environment with unnaturally compressed timelines. We had to respond just as quickly to ensure our clients could keep up and continue to thrive. We had a clear objective; we knew what we needed to do. I think ADP is at its best when we have a dragon to slay.
What were those first couple of days like before the project went live?
Bill: First, we needed to interpret the regulations. We received excellent internal guidance from ADP’s Legal and Compliance teams. They were fantastic in helping us navigate the regulatory language to figure out exactly what it all meant. We couldn’t make any assumptions—for example, defining full-time equivalent hours for employees. In the Affordable Care Act, that meant 30 hours per week, but in this legislation, it was 40.
Since ADP serves so much of the market, we had support at the federal level to ask questions and get answers quickly—and in some cases, we even made recommendations that helped shape the SBA’s guidance.
Terri: Agreed; our Legal and Compliance teams were amazing. The government would release something at 1 a.m. that we’d have to translate the logic of it, to see whether it changed what we were doing, and Legal was right there with us. FTE and lookback periods were big ones, and we also had to figure out what costs qualified, in terms of retirement and health care, and wages. Plus, there was a whole other set of guidance to interpret when it came to loan forgiveness.
ADP has such a large, diverse group of clients—everything from multinational corporations to pizza shops—we offer many different products to our client base. We had to find a way to produce reports that accommodated all those differences but were still consistent enough that a lender’s API could pull out the information they needed. So there were many conversations regarding which fields to “lockdown” and which to let clients edit. For example, if an employee doesn’t come back to work because their job is eliminated, the portion of a PPP loan based on their payroll cost usually isn’t forgivable. However, if an employee has the option to come back to work and refuses, it is. So, we had to build options for clients based on their unique situation.
What happened once the reports were posted—and what’s happened since?
Terri: In the first couple of days after we launched, clients relied on us to help them navigate the calculations. We explained why the numbers on our reports were different from the gross wages they saw on their regular payroll reports—and why they were supposed to be.
One thing that helped, though, was that we’d been able to quickly create not just the reports but some FAQs and other collateral. We shared that with our clients and our Service teams. I think those resources were a big key to our success. We got so much positive feedback from people saying how relieved they were to log on Monday morning and see that we were already on this. They didn’t have to go searching for answers.
Bill: Yes, I think from the client’s point of view, the most valuable thing we gave them, especially in that first week, was assurance. Many business owners were really scared—imagine your company’s entire existence is in question, and here’s this possible lifeline, but you don’t know how or whether you can actually use it. We were able to say, “We’ve got it; we’ll help you through this..”
Terri: Also, while we’d had to make some executive decisions internally to get through the initial launch, we immediately shifted into getting external input. We were pulling everyone into working sessions—clients, CPAs, banks—to find out what they thought about every aspect of the project and how we could do things even better. We kept iterating based on that feedback coupled with the government guidance that continued coming in. We’re still tweaking things even today.
What did you learn from this project that will help you going forward?
Bill: I think this project was an excellent example of keeping things simple. As Terri mentioned, ADP has lots of different products and tools, and for a good reason—we have many different clients. When we simplify, the easier it is to deploy new features and enable innovation. When things like this happen, it needs to be easy, innovative, and quick to market. Most of all, it needs to be right for our clients.
I also learned a lot about—and from—our team. There were many times when Terri and I and the rest of the people leading this project would talk something through, and then a developer would come back to us with a question that was complete gold and entirely changed the way we’d been thinking.
Terri: I couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t matter what your role is; if you have an idea or a suggestion, we want your voice to be heard. Innovation happens here at all levels, and the feedback is immensely powerful in moving the company forward. I’ve already seen numerous examples, and I’ve only been in this role for a few months. My goal as a leader is to encourage that as much as I can.
In true ADP style, the collaboration we saw between teams was amazing. Nothing was about titles or who was attached to what product. The difference this time was that people who don’t ordinarily work together teamed up to make this happen, and having all of those unique perspectives at the table was incredible. Our shared purpose is something I really love about ADP. We’re all working toward the same goal of making an impact for our clients.
In closing, Terri and Bill, you’ve been here 35 and 27 years, respectively. Would you share how you’ve seen ADP change and what advice you would give new people starting with ADP?
Terri: I had some fantastic mentors, and they pushed and made me think about the different opportunities. The advice given to me from day one was don’t be afraid of things you don’t know. That stuck with me for 35 years, and I leaped into things that I never thought I’d even consider. You control your own destiny. Nothing is just handed to you. I got myself in the door and continued to drive my career into different areas. It took a lot of hard work, but I was dedicated to doing it and have had many supporters. So, to me, the sky is the limit at ADP. You don’t have to be stuck in one area. You can go anywhere. It’s like taking a new job when you transition to your next role.
Bill: There is a lot of runway for people on the technology side these days. If you wanted to go into management, there has always been plenty of room there. Today, there’s been much more opportunity to stay on the technology side without having to move into people management to grow your career. As an example, this year, we named our first Distinguished Engineer.
