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Tech & Innovation Blog
Time clocks in the age of COVID-19: How ADP developed a (mostly) touchless solution in just a few weeks
Pandemic, Innovation, Voice of Our People
In early March 2020, as the COVID-19 outbreak started to expand throughout the U.S. and Canada, the team working on ADP’s new Time Kiosk system started getting the same question from many of our clients: “Is there a way to use this without touching it?”
By Jonathon Gumbiner, Senior Product Manager
In early March 2020, as the COVID-19 outbreak started to expand throughout the U.S. and Canada, the team working on ADP’s new Time Kiosk system started getting the same question from many of our clients: “Is there a way to use this without touching it?” At the time, we were several months into a pilot program for the tablet-based timecard management app with more than 1,000 clients.” But most of them hadn’t adopted the app’s facial recognition feature, instead opting to tap in their badge number. And even for those who did use facial recognition, Time Kiosk still required each worker to tap the screen—a suddenly dangerous proposition during a global pandemic.
For companies that had essential workers on-site, we suggested an immediate but imperfect solution: low-cost touch pencils each employee could use to navigate the app. But we knew we’d ultimately need an integrated, turnkey option—and we’d need it as soon as possible.
After a quick brainstorm, we narrowed in on the fix that seemed most promising: First, we’d reconfigure the app to perform facial recognition by default, whenever someone was in front of the camera. Then, we’d use the tablet’s built-in virtual assistant, which powered features like Siri and Google Assistant, to respond to voice commands within Time Kiosk. If we were successful, employees would be able to start a workday, take lunch and other breaks, and clock out, all without touching the screen.
Within a couple of days, our developers were able to build a rough proof-of-concept. It was clunky and far from intuitive—to clock in, for example, you had to say “tap clock in” instead of simply “clock in.” But it was enough to help our senior leaders understand our vision for a more-refined solution—one that would meet the high standards we’d set for the original Time Kiosk experience. We got their buy-in and started to build.
Voice recognition was the first challenge. For one thing, as anyone who’s used a virtual assistant knows all too well, there are phrases it just won’t recognize. Also, in order to release the touchless features as part of Time Kiosk’s formal launch in both the U.S. and Canada, which was just a few weeks away, we needed to develop voice recognition for not only English but Spanish and French, as well—languages no one on the team speaks. Thankfully, as a global company, our partners from other ADP teams came to our rescue, helping us quickly create a repository of words to which the tablets would reliably respond.
Of course, we couldn’t make every action completely touchless. Switching between an employer’s custom job or department codes, for example, would require an employee to scroll through options that voice recognition likely wouldn’t cover. But what we could do was keep people informed. With the help of our UI team, we developed a treatment to add an icon for every touchless function, so employees could see at a glance whether they’d need to touch the screen. If so, they could wash their hands or take other precautions before they acted.
Once we’d finished the first phase, though, we came to a larger challenge: quality assurance. We spent twice as much time testing the new touchless features as we’d spent building them, going through every single action a user could take to make sure we’d identified everything properly. Because voice recognition touched the entire product, we had to review it all—and quickly, requiring a true team effort from QA. What’s more, we happened to be in the middle of transitioning to a new UI, so we needed to test both the current and the incoming interfaces, making the process twice as long.
Yet perhaps the biggest challenge of all was the pandemic’s impact on how it got done. To make sure the new features worked well in all three languages, we needed service reps and tech partners to help us with testing. But most of ADP’s 58,000-person team was working from home. I couldn’t simply walk upstairs, hand someone my tablet loaded with the latest version of our work and ask them to play around with it for a while and bring it back at the end of the day. Instead, we had to find a way to get it on their tablets remotely—no easy task given the tablet’s security restrictions. Luckily, our team was able to build a package and set of instructions that I could share, allowing partners to offer live feedback via an embedded diagnostic tool. They were invaluable in helping us fine-tune, especially our translations.
In the end, thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Time Kiosk team and many of our colleagues, we were able to meet our goal, transforming the app into an intuitive, mostly touchless experience in a few short weeks. Like any quick-turn project, it wasn’t without a few bugs. But the team’s rapid response to client questions and weekly Q&A calls have helped us not only serve their needs and build stronger relationships with them. Time Kiosk has now officially launched, and our sales teams tell us the touchless technology has been a conversation driver with both clients and prospects.
Even after the COVID-19 outbreak has passed, we see great potential in what we’ve learned about voice and facial recognition, whether it’s better accessibility for employees with disabilities or voice biometrics for authenticating service calls. In the meantime, we’re proud to say that when our clients had an urgent need, we were able to quickly deliver a solution that works—and that’s helping keep thousands of their people safe.
Jonathon Gumbiner is a Senior Product Manager at ADP in New Jersey.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Innovating from Within: Leaders from ADP’s Studio 55 on Taking Chances and the Power of Shared Values
HR Technology, Innovation, Pasadena
Imagine transforming a decades-old services company into a technology company ready to serve 1 in 6 Americans. Chris Lavender, Senior Director of Application Development, and Mike Ruangutai, VP, Product Development, had a chance to do just that as part of ADP’s innovation center, Studio 55.
The small, dynamic team powers every part of ADP’s offerings—from payroll to compliance—and is ushering in a new technology platform to serve more than 800,000 ADP customers across the globe. The teammates discuss the impact of their work, their shared love of music, and how strong collaboration will power the future.
*****
When Chris Lavender first got a call about joining ADP, back in 2017, it didn’t seem like the obvious choice. After starting his career in music, he’d spent six years as a developer, engineering manager, and CTO at small and medium-sized startups—a far cry from a 70-year-old company with more than 59,000 employees.
“The stakes were really interesting to me,” he remembers. “I get excited about solving problems that have a massive impact. When you’re that big, though, transitioning from a service company to a technology company is like trying to turn a giant ship. You definitely can’t do it alone.”
Chris considered the opportunity at ADP because he already knew several people on the team—including Mike Ruangutai, who first reached out. The two had worked together several years prior, at a medical billing startup called Kareo, and had stayed in touch ever since. Now, Mike is VP of Product Development at ADP and one of several former Kareo employees working for Studio 55, ADP Pasadena’s in-house innovation incubator helping support the company’s transition to tech. Mike had joined the company a few months earlier, and, like Chris, he’d been well aware of both the challenges and the opportunities facing the team.
“From an engineering perspective, ADP is the perfect petri dish. We have enough resources to experiment with new technologies and build our ideal ecosystem without worrying that any decision we make could be a company-killer,” Mike explains. “And because it didn’t start as a tech company, there’s plenty of fertile ground. There are lots of decisions yet to be made.”
As for the challenges? “Inertia,” Mike says. “Everyone has agreed this is the right move, but that doesn’t make it easy.” When he and Chris started talking, some of the team’s technology was decades old, and many of its practices and processes were in dire need of updating. To make the transition, they needed more people like Chris. “Chris is a unicorn. He’s a great technologist, but also a great leader,” Mike says. “To build an exceptional technology company, that’s who you want on your team.”
Leap of faith
Months earlier, when Mike was deciding to join ADP, he’d asked former Kareo colleagues who’d already done so for their unvarnished view of the company. “I asked them, ‘What are you seeing?’ ‘What do you hope to achieve?’” Now, he set out to answer the same questions for Chris.
“Mike and I have always had a really open, frank relationship, so I knew I could trust him to give me the full picture,” Chris says. “There was no sugarcoating whatsoever.”
And the same was true when Chris met with Mike Plonski, ADP’s SVP of Product Development and the head of Studio 55. “We spent more than an hour together, and he was not messing around—it was almost like he was trying to convince me not to take the job,” Chris laughs. “He wanted to make sure I didn’t have some glossy view of things. That transparency was super attractive.”
So with a clear view of the work he’d be doing—and the support he’d have in the process—Chris decided to accept the position.
“It was a leap of faith. I lived really far away at the time, so I had a serious commute at first,” he says. “But I knew Mike and I worked well together, the footprint was huge, and the problems were really interesting to me. From a technical perspective alone, government compliance is a famously tough nut to crack. On top of that, we needed to change the processes, the flows, the culture. We needed a complete mindset shift.”
Playing in tune
Nearly three years later, Mike says Chris has helped lead the Studio 55 team through just such a shift. “The energy is palpable. There’s a ton of collaboration,” he says. “Teams walk across the aisle to talk with one another; they have lunch together; they problem-solve together.”
One key component has been a shared set of values. “I’ll say it until the cows come home, but it’s really important to me: The team comes first,” Mike says. “We have to help each other be successful—and that includes leaders. It’s our job to set the context, support our team, and then get out of the way.”
For Chris and Mike, that leadership style is informed, in part, by another shared value: their love of making music. Mike studied studio jazz guitar in college; Chris holds a master’s degree in composition, improvisation, and technology, and he also spent a year performing with the Blue Man Group. “Composition and software engineering have so much in common,” Chris says. “You’re creating in the abstract and bringing that into the real world. It’s the same muscle.”
Mike, too, sees the parallels. “An engineering sprint or scrum is like the drumbeat, the tempo. Then everything else layers on top of that—our product ideas are the licks and motifs we experiment with; the technologies we use are the notes. And just like you need brass here and strings there, you need different groups of engineers. Watching a team come together on a project is like watching a group of musicians adapting, feeling the groove.”
They’ve found some other kindred spirits on the Studio 55 team, as well—enough to put together a weekly after-work jam session. “We’re super informal, no audition,” says Chris. “It’s just a good way to exercise our brains and use them in a different way.”
Moving the needle
That brainpower will no doubt come in handy over the months and years ahead, as Mike, Chris, and their colleagues continue to work through the challenges that face their team and the rest of ADP. “There’s still some work that needs to be done across the company—we watch carefully for any evidence of silos forming, for example, and strive to get ahead of that,” Mike says. “But Chris and the rest of the leadership team have really moved the needle. Now it’s about nurturing that headway and leveling it up even further.”
Chris agrees. “We’re still turning the ship, but it’s definitely happening. We’ve made insane progress in just a couple of years,” he says. “We have teams working cross-functionally, communicating, getting problems solved—and doing it efficiently, without staying up all night or working on weekends. It’s been really gratifying to see.”
Learn more about ADP’s Studio55 in Pasadena.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Our Next-Gen Platform
HR Technology, Innovation, Lifion Team
We’re building the next generation of ADP’s Human Capital Management software solutions.
It’s an ambitious goal, but we’re focused and committed. If we do it right, we’ll completely upend the HCM tech scene.
We want to enable companies of all types to unlock the full potential of their people and become wildly successful. To do that, we’re building a pretty amazing platform with killer apps — from payroll and benefits to performance management and career growth — that will work seamlessly with a company’s unique culture. Instead of HR getting in the way, it’s just the right amount of HR for each company.
The best part? The work we do here will impact millions of people globally.
Cool, right?
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What is the Lifion platform?
Our platform allows developers to build business-facing applications without the overhead of using conventional development languages.
The design tools enabled by our platform allow for rapid application development, so developers can work quickly by leveraging drag-and-drop UIs to define data sources, data types, constraints, display rules, UI actions, and more. They can even deploy the application and define access and authorization permissions — all with a minimum amount of traditional ‘hand-coding’ techniques.
But how does this accelerate innovation?
Simple: businesses’ need for software is being outpaced by traditional developers’ ability to build it, and our developers can build applications in days, rather than weeks or months.
Not only that, but Lifion developers are also able to refine and continuously improve on applications — a major competitive advantage over organizations that are still using more conventional methods of development.
Visualizing application logic is simple with the Lifion platform.
How do we develop at Lifion?
We built the Lifion platform to allow our devs to generate ideas and execute on them immediately. Since the platform allows us to bypass some of the typical bottlenecks in the software development process, we can continuously iterate on and improve our applications — which means our clients get the latest and greatest from us.
These iterations and improvements are possible because our platform and its powerful design tools allow our developers to seamlessly bind together a lot of things, like:
- application logic
- user interfaces
- data models
- data security & authorization
- unit tests
- ETL processes
This results in complex, custom application suites — all developed at rapid speed.
Interest piqued?
Learn more about how you can help build the future of HCM software — read more about our careers.
Driving Innovation with Ethnography
Humans are typically curious by nature, but there’s a deep resource around human behavior that can be tremendously valuable as we design our strategies in business and life in general.
Cultural anthropologists combine curiosity and empirical science to deliver sustained value. They are trained to interpret and translate why people do the things they do and how unconscious and overlapping motivations influence their actions, their attitudes, their approach to the myriad people, products, politics and places of everyday life. We do this by spending time in the places where people make meaning, a method of inquiry known as ethnography. It’s what gets us excited, and it’s where we impact academia and industry.
Part of our work focuses on challenging the things we take for granted and, in so doing, encouraging new ways of looking at ideas, interactions and people we may have overlooked in the forgetfulness of the routine. Curiosity is our “rocket fuel.”
My colleague, Jay Hasbrouck, captures the spirit of the anthropological mindset when he writes, “When used as more than a research tool to expose consumer needs, ethnographic thinking helps companies and organizations build on the cultural meanings and contexts of their offerings, develop the flexibility to embrace cultural change, focus their strategies at critical cultural phenomena, and test and develop business model changes.”1
Where Ethnography Comes In
For those of us in the tech sector, in particular, the focus is quite aggressively on questions around data biases, including how algorithms are constructed and, ultimately, who they advantage and who they don’t. It’s a much bigger issue than simply “feeding the machine” and imagining that the outputs are somehow free of judgment. They’re not.
But, who should be responsible for exploring the roots of these biases? Biases that pre-exist “the machine learning” and biases that are already deeply embedded in culture. We hear a lot of blaming in the popular press about this or that platform creating unfair advantages. Nevertheless, should we leave it to data analysts and computer scientists to untangle these social inequalities? It seems a more appropriate area of investigation for those of us who study culture and the power flows that animate it.
So we begin to ask questions. What’s fair in a data-mediated world? What role does empathy play in communicating evidence and big data? What constitutes evidence in a global context, among others?
Placing blame on “flawed” algorithms and the companies on which data-driven services depend is really missing the critical point. We need to look outside the tech and start to get serious about the very non-technical realities that contribute to an unequal present and, consequently, an inevitably unequal future.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the admittedly broad subject of AI viewed from an anthropological perspective. My main goal in doing so is to further challenge the cultural category “AI” (big and small), while also exploring how ethnographic methodology (direct observation/active-listening) might help advance our understanding of the human and machine relationships forming here and now and tomorrow.
Specifically, I’m thinking about two main question areas. First, a definitional focus: How might we begin to articulate an ethnography of AI, what role might AI technologies play in the service of ethnographic practice, and how might (and does) ethnographic inquiry inform AI technologies? Second, a philosophical focus: Who is responsible for bias in data, in algorithms and in outcomes to include discussion around how work related to AI is currently organized within tech companies today?
As companies become increasingly reliant on data-driven insights to build their offerings, market their products and guide scope for future projects, we need to get serious about the reality that data isn’t “raw” or “clean” — but rather deeply reflective of the social and political circumstances from which they are pulled and to which they contribute. It’s an exciting time to be an anthropologist working in technology where the human is deeply enmeshed with the machine.
Martha Bird is a Business Anthropologist working in ADP’s Roseland Innovation Lab. She was selected to co-moderate a session at the premiere international ethnography event 2018 EPIC Conference October 9-12, 2018 in Honolulu.
Why ADP’s Next-Gen HCM Is A Disruptive Force In HR Technology
A year ago I wrote a controversial article about ADP’s new core HCM system, code-named Lifion. Well here it is a year later, and it looks like ADP has done it. The company’s next-generation HCM and payroll system is now available, and could become one of the more disruptive systems on the market. While the system is still young, it sets a technical direction for Workday, SAP, Oracle, and others.
How The HR Software Market Has Changed
Let me briefly discuss how the HR software market has changed. Core Human Capital systems are a large, growing and important market. Once considered the “system of record” for employees, they are now used by every company as a way to keep track of people’s jobs and work, plan and facilitate careers, and make sure people are paid correctly.
Now, they are changing again.
Today’s HCM platforms are no longer just systems of record, they are systems to make employees’ work lives better. They have to support many organization models (hierarchy, teams, projects, contractors, gig workers); they have to address many forms of reward and pay (salary, hourly, by the project, by output); and they have to be open to many third-party applications.
Organizations now function as talent networks, not hierarchies. 34% of companies tell us they operate as a network (up from 6% in 2016), and more than 88% of companies tell me they want a better technology to manage gig and contract work. Zappos, Schneider Electric, Unilever and many others now manage themselves as “talent marketplaces,” encouraging people to play roles in multiple teams around the world.
And these new HCM platforms are not just “applications,” but rather micro-services platforms where applications run. Some of the most innovative apps in HR now come from third parties. HCM vendors simply cannot build everything themselves. I now think of core HCM as “application ecosystems,” more like the i-Phone than like Quickbooks.
Moreover, these systems have be designed around “experiences” not “processes.” The word Experience is now the biggest buzzword in HR, and it is profoundly changing the way software is developed. It’s no longer sufficient to build forms, tabs, and buttons for users: now we have to build systems that adapt to our needs, listen to our voice, change based on our data, and can be configured in many ways.
(Both SuccessFactors and Workday are just launching Experience Layers on top of their systems to address this.)
Finally, the HCM system of the future has to be an employee productivity tool, not jus an HR tool. It isn’t designed for HR anymore, it must be designed for employees and managers. The system should be useful, simple to use, and must interface with Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, and all the other various collaboration tools we use at work.
In short, this is a whole new world – and it requires a new architecture, new user experience, and new technology stack.
ADP, An Unexpected Tech Leader
This industry is not for the faint of heart. Building an enterprise platform takes years, and once you start you’re stuck with the architecture you start with.
Workday’s architecture is fourteen years old and quite innovative, it feels proprietary. SuccessFactors is similar in age and is now being re-engineered around SAP Hana and a new Experience interface. Oracle recently re-engineered its HCM platform and it took almost five years. So when a company like ADP starts from scratch, it can upset the apple cart.
While many customers rushed to buy cloud-based HCM systems, their satisfaction has been mixed. The platforms are highly complex, they don’t accommodate new organization and performance models, and buyers want more innovation. HR departments want a stable, reliable HCM platform but they also want to be able to mix and match the best of breed on top.
Today, using what is called “cloud-native” systems, vendors can build modern applications faster than ever. And technologies like AI, cognitive interfaces, natural language processing, and graph database are readily available from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft.
Enter ADP.
ADP you say? Aren’t they a 70-year-old payroll company? What are they doing in the cloud architecture business?
Well yes, ADP does pay more than 40 million people in the US (one in six). But behind the scenes, the company is filled with technologists, and its new Lifion group has assembled some of the most senior tech architects in the world.
As Carlos Rodriguez the CEO and Don Weinstein the head of Global Product and Technology put it, ADP used to be a “services company fueled by technology.” Now it is becoming “a technology company with great services.” In other words, the company has heavily invested in its platform.
The new platform, today called ADP Next Gen HCM (a real name will come), has the architecture other vendors only talk about, and as it picks up speed it could become a major disruptor in the market.
What Is ADP Next Gen HCM?
Let me explain what ADP has done.
Through a skunk-works development team in Chelsea, NY, the company has been rewriting its payroll engine and HCM platform for several years. The project, originally called Lifion, is a “cloud-native” platform which embraces the latest technology stack needed to scale for the future.
“Cloud-native” simply means it’s built on the newest, containerized services, leveraging the latest technology in the cloud. This means the system is made up of many micro-apps, it uses low-code development, it leverages graph and SQL databases, and it never goes down for maintenance.
Let me give you some specifics.
ADP’s new architecture is designed around teams, not hierarchies, so it has capabilities to manage the future of work. You can create teams of any type in the system, and then include any type of worker in a team (full time, part-time, contingent). Teams inherit the hierarchical attributes of people (ie. who they report to) but also attribute them to the team. (Imagine a project team working on a new product, a safety team, and even an employee resource group.)
Unlike other HCM systems, each Team is an entity in itself, with its own business rules, apps, and measurement systems. You could have one team that uses an OKR goal application, another that uses a different survey tool. Teams are essentially the “grain” of the architecture, not the hierarchy. This is only possible because the system uses a Graph Database. Graph database technology models data as relationships, not rows and columns. (It’s the tech under Facebook and Google.) It has immense potential in organizations today.
The system is designed for “micro-apps and micro-services.” This means ADP can quickly build new applications easily, plug third party applications into the system, and open up the system for users and consultants to build apps. Think of the ADP Platform as a giant i-Phone: you can plug in any app and inherit all the data and security you’ve already built. You can assign apps to teams, so some teams can use one type of goal setting, another can use other features, and so on.
The development environment is “low-code,” meaning you can build apps in a visual tool. This means ADP and partners can extend the system easily, creating a flexible non-proprietary model to grow and expand.
ADP’s system is mobile-first and visually simple. The system uses a consumer-like interface (similar to Google), and seems very easy to use. Workday, which originally built a very innovative user interface, is feeling its age, and plans a major upgrade this Fall. SuccessFactors new HXM interface (Human Experience Management) is also a major push in this direction.
ADP’s AI engine is useful out of the box. And that’s not just because it uses AI, it’s because ADP has so much data. ADP houses more data about workers and jobs than any other company in the world, so if you want to know if your people are underpaid or if your retention is out of line, ADP has benchmarks you can use. The AI-based intelligence application delivers suggestions and recommendations on hundreds of talent issues, all in a “narrative intelligence” interface.
Just to let you know how much data the company has, ADP has more than 800,000 customers and a skills-cloud with more than 30 million employees’ job descriptions embedded.
ADP’s talent applications are also coming along. Clients sometimes complain about various parts of ADP’s recruitment or learning software, but StandOut, ADP’s next-generation engagement, goal, performance management, and team coaching system is a very competitive product. It is integrated into Next Gen HCM so it can be deployed immediately to any or all teams. The product has been highly successful in ADP, driving a 6% improvement in engagement and a 12% increase in sales productivity. 97% of ADP associates have completed the StandOut assessment, an aspiration most companies would dream of. (Cisco is also a big fan.)
ADP’s Next Gen Payroll engine, coupled with the company’s acquisition of Celegro, uses a reusable rules engine to greatly reduce the complexity of payroll. Payroll is a complex business operation filled with lots of special rules. The Next Gen payroll system is designed to be “rules driven.” Microsoft uses ADP’s Global Payroll and has reduced the number of global payroll administrators from 400 to a handful of payroll SMEs across the globe.
ADP’s new payment system is redesigned for real-time pay (the payroll engine computes all gross-to-net and deductions in real-time). This lets companies pay employees and contractors more frequently.
ADP’s Wisely system, the company’s smart payment app, is gaining more than 250,000 new members per month, making it one of the fastest-growing payment systems in the market. (Wisely lets you allocate pay to different categories, automatically create various forms of savings accounts, and use credit/debit and other pay methods right from your payroll.)
Through ADP’s application marketplace, the company is now one of the leading “platform as a service” vendors in the market (SAP is #2). As I mentioned above, HR departments need an “ecosystem of HR apps.” The average HR organization now has 11 systems of record and most companies have more. ADP’s app marketplace has more than 400 apps and sees more than 780 million hits annually. So if you use ADP for HR, you’re likely to find almost any add-on app you need.
Finally, ADP’s mobile HR app is highly competitive ADP has more users on its mobile app than any other vendor, and it includes a configurable onboarding and process design tool, so you can use it as an employee experience platform too. (It is the fifth most highly rated app in the Apple App store with a 4.7 rating and millions of reviews).
Is All This Really Ready?
Years ago an IBM Fellow made a funny statement to me: new software platforms are like babies, they make a lot of noise and they don’t always do what you want them to do. But over time they grow up, and eventually, they become responsible adults.
ADP Next Gen HCM is a fast-growing pre-teen. Today more than 20 pilot customers are using the system, and it’s working well. (Gold’s Gym is a customer and successfully manages many locations, many types of workers, with many pay models). It’s not going into full production until 2020 or 2021, but momentum will grow.
In the US, more than 60% of large companies have moved to cloud-based HCM already, but that still leads a lot of market opportunity. And I know some early cloud buyers are becoming itchy, so they may want to switch.
Can ADP Pull This Off?
One more point: can and will ADP sell and market this well?
In every market I’ve studied the “best product” does not always win. It’s the combination of product, marketing, sales, and service that wins. This is ADP’s next challenge. Now that the company has an advanced new HCM platform to sell, will they market, sell, and evolve it effectively?
I’m not saying you should short Workday, Ultimate, or any of the other successful HCM systems in the market, but this new ADP platform will be a force to be reckoned with. Let’s watch it closely.
Tech & Innovation Blog
ADP Talks Trends at Fast Company Innovation Day
Innovation, Tech News, Trends
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Video: Trends Influencing the Future of Work
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[TEXT: Trends Influencing the Future of Work]
[LOGO: ADP, Always Designing for People]
[TEXT: Don Weinstein, Corporate Vice President, Global Product and Technology] Thank you, everybody, for coming out in here. It’s our Fast Company Innovation Festival. Going to be talking about innovation in the world of work.
[TEXT: Roberto Masiero, SVP of ADP Innovation Labs] Innovation, to me, is just thinking different. It’s just trying to find better outcomes.
[TEXT: Doug Politi, President, Compliance Solutions] My view is everything has to serve a business function and ultimately for us to drive growth.
[TEXT: Martha Bird, ADP Business Anthropologist] For me, it’s about asking questions differently, and it’s not so much forward facing, but it’s actually looking back. And so what are the difficult and messy challenges that we’re trying to solve for? The problem may not change, but the technology changes to address it.
[DON WEINSTEIN] You really have to think about, you know, who are the people that you’re putting into that process?[MARTHA BIRD] It’s really about putting together people who are really different. When I’ve come up with a change or done something different, I’ve had friction.
[ROBERTO MASIERO] It’s just really like putting the right team together with a good vision in front of it.
[DOUG POLITI] But it can’t stay in the lab. So it’s got to be–
[ROBERTO MASIERO] It can’t stay in the lab, no.
[DOUG POLITI] It’s got to– it’s got to ripple its way through the organization as a whole.
[DON WEINSTEIN] Space and time are the oxygen that innovation needs to breathe to fuel the fire.
[LOGO: ADP, Always Designing for People]
ADP understands the trends driving the evolving workplace, allowing us to build adaptive tools that help our clients work better. Hear from our panel of ADP Technology Leaders about what innovation means to them, how they look at key trends and how, as a collective whole, they are pushing the evolution of work.