Tech & Innovation Blog
How ADP is Using Data to Make Our Clients—And Ourselves—More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Future of Work
ADP has a culture where you can raise your hand and suggest something new no matter your role or background.
How ADP is Using Data to Make Our Clients—And Ourselves—More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive
By Giselle Mota, Principal, Future of Work
With more than 900,000 clients around the globe, we at ADP often notice shifts in the working world relatively early on—and that was certainly the case with the increase in corporate attention toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. To help our clients and internal teams track DEI, we launched the DEI Dashboard in December 2020, which offers insights and actionable recommendations to form more substantial teams.
Giselle speaking on TED Talk.
Getting Started: Data-driven insights
The ADP team tackles the DEI with a natural approach from a metrics point of view; we have always been a data-driven organization. By gathering time and attendance information, we can give clients helpful insights into things like managing overtime costs so they can make operational decisions. Our human resources platforms contain a wealth of demographics, including team members’ races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and disability statuses. What’s more is we help our clients understand the employee experience throughout their entire lifecycle, from interviewing, onboarding, leadership development to compensation and retirement.
Going Deeper: A push for accountability
Our team added filtering options that allow clients to get more granular with their newfound insights. One such resource is our new Candidate Relevancy app, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to help recruiters organize the thousands of résumés they receive. This tool has become critical for helping mitigate unconscious biases. We train the model to eliminate discrimination by focusing only on the skills and competencies needed for the roles. At the same time, we’ve made sure all hiring managers have access to make human decisions on pursuing candidates. The same is true with our AI-driven Chatbots that provide pre-screening functions for recruiters.
Giselle M.
Looking Inward: ADP’s journey
Our team recognized the DEI Dashboard project as transformative for both our clients and for ourselves. Like many organizations, we have long championed diversity, equity, and inclusion. But we knew there was room for a renewed and enhanced approach—and it had to begin with the people creating the DEI Dashboard.
While our Data Science team took the lead on the initial build of the platform, we brought in experts from each of our products to help us understand how we could reimagine through a DEI lens. Our goal was to expand on EEOC requirements and consider anything relevant to our clients and their employees, creating more equity across the recruiting space.
With our goals in mind, the insights we gathered from the DEI Dashboard on ADP have led to several new initiatives and processes, including surveys, mentorship, leadership development programs for underrepresented groups, and the job auditing process for discriminatory languages. Not only did we hire recruiters who specialize in finding diverse talents, but we also focused on disability inclusion, from raising standards for vendor products to rebuilding product features. ADP is committed to achieving a fully accessible user experience across our products.
What’s Next: The inclusive future of work
Giselle M.
We have continued to evolve the DEI Dashboard since it launched, and a long roadmap still lies ahead. One upcoming project is benchmarking—leveraging the unparalleled scale of ADP’s data and insights to help our clients understand how they stack up against other companies in their demographics.
My colleagues and I continue to ask questions, regularly creating new projects for ourselves. For example: Should remote and hybrid workers be paid differently apart from their in-office counterparts? How can we move beyond pay equity to true financial inclusion by giving employees the guidance they need to build wealth? We should have a lot to keep us busy!
With global and social changes happening during the last year and a half, I have seen our team move quickly and respond with solutions. ADP has a culture where you can raise your hand and suggest something new no matter your role or background. My Future of Work teammates and I are living proofs. With this mindset and institutional support in place, I believe we lead the way to a more inclusive future of work.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science, creates impact with data automation and transformation
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, Innovation
Dr. Raji, one of the pioneers bringing AI/ML to Pi-Payroll innovation products at ADP, shares her career journey and the different automated processes her team creates.
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science
Dr. Raji came from a lower-middle-class family in which both of her parents did not receive high school diplomas. “I saw their struggles, and as a girl growing up, I also faced different social pressures. Then I soon realized my love for math at school.” As she says: “That was when I made the connection in my mind, and I believed a STEM career could make a difference.”
From Bioinformatics to Automotive Industry
Before joining ADP, Dr. Raji has worked in various industries, including three years in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she worked on H1N1 Vaccine strain selection models. Her team took serology, sequence, protein structure, and phylogenetic data; they compared whether the current vaccine strain covered the virus’s dominant circulating strain. Dr. Raji took a break from Bioinformatics and later joined a Cox Automotive company called Manheim to help roll out OVE, a product providing car recommendations for online users. She also worked at a healthcare fraud prevention company called Cotiviti that focused on claim overpayment, fraud predictions, and prevention.
“When I first came to ADP, I was surprised to see the amount of data. We can produce so many innovative products from these. Every data scientist would love to work for ADP,” she says. “The second thing that surprised me was the freedom I got. The amount of support I got from the leadership teams was terrific. I got to be myself at work, knowing they welcomed innovative ideas.”
Dr. Raji and her family
Coming to ADP
When Dr. Raji joined ADP a few years ago, the company didn’t have many data scientists. She built a team of full-stack Automation Intelligence Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologists from scratch. “We call ourselves PiBrain, and we solve use cases across different business units through an advanced state of innovative AI/ML products and solutions,” she says. “I built three notable products through Digital Transformation, using AI/ML algorithms and APIs.”
“The first product involved automating digital implementation for some of our products, which eliminated manual processes and increased our net promoter scores, gave a better user experience, and increased client satisfaction,” she says. This process gave her team a more accurate data conversion process and saved costs for the clients. Dr. Raji introduced another automated compliance checkup product for pay statements, which eliminated the laborious process of scanning pay statements one by one and automating the process. The last project involved form digitization with a feedback loop that continuously learns from overrides.
Deep Learning
Dr. Raji’s team focuses on several key areas in their current work. The first product is Deep Learning, an authentication stack that identifies, extracts, and connects the documents. Another one is a Natural Language Processing stack that demonstrates transformation translation.
Her team helped build API services that take company handbooks as inputs. They used Natural Language Understanding models and elucidated answers for questions such as “What holidays are offered?” and “What is the holiday pay for full-time/temporary employees?” The responses were automatically sent back to implementation systems as callbacks to fill out the guided interview process.
Dr. Raji and her team at the Southern Data Science Conference
Giving Back to Community
Dr. Raji and her team attended last year’s GPT Connect and gave three presentations. The first presentation was open-source tools for AI/ML. Another one was Computer Vision and Deep Learning for naïve to advanced data extraction. “We also showed our Associates how to interpret Vendor Language and map those in ADP constructs,” she says.
“My team and I looked for outside opportunities to create an impact. We attended the Southern Data Science Conference in 2019, where we used data to predict human trafficking.” Her team successfully visualized and built models to predict trafficking. They identified “hubs,” where children were trafficked to and who trafficked them. An FBI director attended the presentation ceremony and found Intel helpful in targeting criminals. “The project gave me satisfaction because we worked for a cause. We wanted to make sure our knowledge continues to help others and give back to the communities,” Dr. Raji says.
One STEM Education at Innovation Academy
“People say it could be engineering, science, or math. But to me, STEM is a combination of all! It is an application of each field coming together to solve a business problem,” Dr. Raji says. She believes STEM is an applied field where interdisciplinary work is valued.
This is especially important in Dr. Raji’s involvement with Innovation Academy, a STEM school ADP sponsored in Alpharetta. “The goal is One Stem Education. I was one of the ambassadors who helped set up the syllabi and influenced the type of education students received,” she says. Dr. Raji’s love for children and STEM made this a perfect opportunity for her to have conversations about STEM opportunities. She is looking forward to planning and creating lab spaces for more talents who are interested.
Dr. Raji is also a painter. This is her work: Serene morning sunrise at St. Simon Island.
Best Advice
“We talked a lot about my background and where I came from. My life is a lesson itself. If you have a dream, don’t give up,” she says. Dr. Raji believes the secret of life is to fall seven times and get up on the eighth. For those pursuing data science, she recommends thinking outside the box and approaching problems from different perspectives. “Keep in mind being a data scientist means spending substantial time in data prep, data cleaning, deployment, and data quality checking. Patience is critical as each of the tasks is essential in building a complete model,” she says. “There will be challenges and disappointments, but don’t lose faith. Keep learning and chase your dreams.”
Dr. Raji is looking forward to inspiring more people and attracting more talents to ADP. To her, #ADPTech is innovative, supportive, and welcoming. Her team wants to mentor more women technologists and have more of them in leadership positions!
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
AnitaB.org Named ADP the Top Large Company for Women Technologists
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The nonprofit social enterprise AnitaB.org, host of GHC, names ADP to be 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category.
The nonprofit social enterprise AnitaB.org has named ADP the 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category. The national program from AnitaB.org is the only benchmarking program that looks specifically at technical employees and awards companies that are embracing accountability and making the most progress toward the equity of women. Read the full press release here.
AnitaB.org recognized ADP for providing opportunities for women in tech, driving better representation of women in the industry. We value diversity in the organization and are proud of supporting women in technology.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
We met up with four ADP women in tech attending this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration. They shared their inspiration and what it means to be a part of this incredible community. Read the full story here.
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
ADP’s Martha Bird on the ground at CES 2020 to talk about NLP/ML and AI, plus the top 5 themes for 2020
https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2020/01/the-word-on-ces-whats-really-driving-nextgen-technology.aspx
ADP’s business anthropologist, Martha Bird, reports on the top five themes at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show that are important for today’s industry leaders.
With over 4,000 exhibiting companies, 2.9 million square feet of exhibit space, attracting more than 180,000 attendees and 307 Fortune 500 companies, there was a lot to take in at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. Some of the most innovative technologies to come included a flying taxi (Hyundai), electric multi-modal transportation, electric vertical take-off and landing craft (Uber), cool and creepy robotics, green and sustainability tech, 8K bezel-less TVs (Samsung), AI attended drive thru (McDonald’s lab), 150 digital health exhibitors and so much more. Within this tech frenzy, it was my great pleasure to represent ADP on stage and in studio where I discussed how natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence (NLP/ML and AI), in general, is impacting the workplace – the tools, the processes and the people.
While it was impossible to see everything given the sheer magnitude of the event, there are some high-level reflections on what I consider to be the pervasive themes from this year’s event that industry leaders should keep their eyes and ears open for moving into 2020. These are my top five:
1. 5G: Data, data, and more data
On the CES floor, data was the common denominator across products and services on display and those demoed. Given the explosion of data contingent technologies, online privacy and security was a central talking point. How different regions address security concerns around data and privacy was less explicitly articulated although a continuum of highly private to blatantly public could be surmised. Along with a definite trend toward the true consumerization of AI.
Which brings me to 5G. In the next two to three years, networks will expand out exponentially. The first commercial deployments are already being seen but 5G is still in its infancy so it won’t be a matter of simply “flipping a switch” from 4G to 5G.
Along with 5G – increased speed, greater capacity and lower latency – comes huge possibilities for disruptive innovations. There was no limit to 5G talk and imagination at CES 2020. And, of course, there were both pronouncements and announcements on the topic around the coming of 5G handsets. AT&T and Verizon are aggressively developing the infrastructure in an attempt to get out ahead of competition across the globe.
5G will be the “central nervous system of the data age,” according to Steve Koenig, VP, Research at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).
Martha Bird and others and CES 2020
[Inset above] ADP’s Business Anthropologist Martha Bird (right) took the stage at CES 2020. Bird’s panel “Emerging Technologies Enabling Enterprise” was moderated by Michael Miller, Editor-in-Chief at PC Magazine (middle) joined by fellow panelist Yonatan Wexler, Executive VP of R&D at OrCam Technologies (left).
2. IoI (Internet of Intelligence): The Decade of Connected Intelligence
Just as we were getting accustomed to the term IoT (Internet of Things) the talk this year was around IoI or “Internet of Intelligence.” This new way of thinking is a direct response to the way AI is being integrated into all facets of our technology and consumer culture.
We were told in the plenary keynote that as networks grow, we can expect 5G to unlock more opportunities for enterprise. Building upon what we’ve seen with IoT technologies (think smart home apps that rely on little bits of discrete data), the expansion of 5G and AI capabilities will provide multiple nodes of data informing a much more complex and inter-dependent data landscape. Enterprise applications are expected to lead in IoI in part because of massive data resources and the ability to form mutually beneficial partnerships between OEM, software and engineering. IoI covers things like remote robotic surgery and smart cities. Activities with a heavy data lift and, generally speaking, much higher stakes than let’s say a voice activated light in your home.
3. XR: The New Reality Training Our Future Workforce
XR – the latest technology encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. Think virtual world up, down, left, or right, and experienced in 360 degrees. Form factors delivering this technology ranged from 5K gaming chairs to sleek eye glasses very much unlike the early Google glasses. Again, enterprise will have a big stake in this area with many use cases including B2B workforce training, safety inspections, AR glasses used by an architect to design a room, training surgeons across geographies, and in travel and tourism where you are able to take a trip to a tropical island right from your living room. Frankly, I prefer the actual trip but foregoing the lines at the airport and customs does sound appealing. Regardless of my preference, there was a lot of excitement for XR in commercial and industrial settings. Not to mention eSports which realized $1 billion in net revenue last year alone.
4. Culture: Pragmatics of Technological Innovation
While attending a panel discussion on “Future Cities” I was struck by a similarity between re-architecting an existing urban space to accommodate new technologies and the work we do at ADP.
A former secretary of transportation listed one of the greatest challenges to innovating cities as the pre-existing roadway infrastructure. He went on to say that between the legacy streets and traffic patterns it was actually the inability to imagine new ways of mobility that was the major barrier.
People get accustomed to “how things are done here” and find it difficult to adapt to changes in the system. This is a cultural and technical matter. Culture, at the most basic level, is the collection of practices and beliefs we take for granted. These habits are slow to change. New technical opportunities can catalyze innovation and cultural change, but this process is never a one-to-one.
Which brings me to humans.
5. Humans: Agency in a Data-driven Era
Humans (people like you and me) when faced with the explosion of new technologies – tech that augments our vision, our speech, our bodies and, even, our memory – begin to question their own reason for being. The existential ponderings around what it means to be human are concomitant with those group of technologies loosely described as “AI”.
Talk of “machine-human partnership” was pervasive on the CES exhibition floor and in panels and keynotes. For my part, I welcome the question as it points to a shared humanity that we often overlook. Yes, partnerships between people and technology will continue to evolve. Who has agency over the relationship will remain a critical point of personal reflection and public debate.
