Posts
Tech & Innovation Blog
Great Stories: From LEGO® Bricks to Data
Senior Leaders, Innovation, How We Work
ADP is in the enviable position to use our data to continue to make impactful and meaningful changes across organizations.
Great Stories: From LEGO® Bricks to Data
By Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer, ADP
My kids loved LEGO® bricks when they were growing up. They’d play for hours separating the pieces to get the right sizes, analyzing what they had, and then putting them together to build massive cities. I’d watch as they’d use the structures to create stories about different places and events that would happen in the cities they built. It was exciting to see. They knew that individually, each LEGO® was important. They weren’t interesting when looked at as individual pieces. It wasn’t until the pieces were all together that they shined and were able to work together to tell a great story.
As ADP’s Chief Data Officer, I lead data and analytics management in partnership with service, product, and sales operations leaders. In my role, I have a unique lens into how we manage data across our products. ADP has the most comprehensive workforce data anywhere, and we’re able to take that data and help our clients create the stories they need to make real-time and long-term decisions.
Individually, like a single LEGO® piece, each element of data by itself means almost nothing. However, when it’s constructed together, we’re able to build stories, gain insights, take action and make informed decisions. With the right data, insights, and vision, we’re accelerating the use of data as an asset to help our clients.
When we look at our data strategy, we can break it down into four areas for our clients:
- Protect My Data: With a focus on data security and governance, we think like owners and can applaud how we protect our clients’ data. Our clients respect our processes and trust us to keep their sensitive information private. With a culture rooted in integrity, we are all privacy and data evangelists.
- Answer My Questions: ADP’s unmatched data platforms and analytics help clients make better decisions about their people. The amount of data across ADP’s platforms is astronomical. We serve data in meaningful ways for immediate evaluation, understanding, and action. For clients using ADP Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms with capabilities through ADP DataCloud, analytics help our clients explore data, get insights and benchmarks against which to compare themselves in a truly differentiated way. Without insights, it’s just raw data. ADP is committed to helping businesses take reliable insights from the right workforce data in a way they can understand and take action.
- Improve My Experience: Through our data transformation and initiatives, we are paving the way our data is used to proactively respond to client needs, solve problems that keep them up at night and help our clients make real-time decisions. We’re working on developing innovative products that use our workforce data to help organizations gain reliable insights to invoke action and achieve results. However, it’s beyond products. We continue to innovate and strategically centralize client data from their first through current interaction into one system, resulting in a better client experience.
- Guide My Future: We will expand our solutions to help shape business decisions and investments. We can identify new ways for businesses to tap into the massive ADP data set, including new use cases and user personas. For example, geographic income data may provide insights to help companies figure out where to build their next location, or this data could enrich valuation models for the investment community. The potential is endless, especially built with our commitment to data privacy at the foundation.
We’re continuously proving ADP is the undisputed leader in data. With solutions such as our award-winning ADP DataCloud, we can take our information and offer clients something no one else can. Recently, our ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity and Inclusion dashboards won the Top HR Product from Human Resource Executive, marking the seventh consecutive year ADP earned this award. ADP DataCloud was additionally a recipient of the AI Breakthrough Awards, Data Breakthrough Awards, and Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing, owing to its powerful capabilities and latest enhancements.
The past 20 months have changed the world of work, and people’s data has never been as important as it is now. Businesses of all sizes across every industry are using (and asking for) people data at rates we’ve never seen before. There’s a massive global shift in hiring needs, patterns, and retention. Businesses need information about industry trends and their ability to match or exceed where the global workforce is shifting. Real-time people data is what drives clients’ decisions, product innovation, and the global economy. ADP is in the enviable position to use our data to continue to make impactful and meaningful changes across organizations.
I’ve never been more excited to work in this space than I am at this moment. I’m enthusiastic and focused on where we’re headed. It’s about taking data to tell a story, and it’s exciting. It’s not unlike the excitement my kids experienced when I brought them years ago to LEGOLAND® (both in California and the U.K.), where creations they made in their imaginations came to life in real-time.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Life @ ADP EP 3: Tips for Interviewing, How to Make Lasting Impressions, and Helpful Hints
Life @ ADP, Career Advice, What We Do
Hiring Managers want to better understand how candidates overcome challenges.
Life @ ADP EP 3: Tips for Interviewing, How to Make Lasting Impressions, and Helpful Hints
How long should your resumé be? How do you make a good impression? What to prepare for a phone interview?
Life @ ADP, our monthly podcast, answers them in the third episode! In this interview, hosts Kate and Ingrid sit down with Dave Demchik, one of our senior tech recruiters, to discuss what attributes make a top candidate. For those who are interested in a career at ADP, you won’t want to miss it! You will hear Dave discuss helpful tips for interviewing both remotely and in-person and how to make a good impression during and after the interview.
“Recruiters look for candidates who are knowledgeable in the field they are hiring. Be prepared to answer technical questions and have your tool kits ready,” Dave says. “Hiring Managers want to better understand how candidates overcome challenges.”
Dave has been recruiting for about five and a half years and shares the qualities he looks for in candidates. He believes researching and preparing are the first step to a successful interview. Candidates are encouraged to speak with ADP associates on LinkedIn to better understand ADP’s culture before entering the discussion or visit tech.adp.com, our tech careers site and tech blog. Another tip to make a lasting impression is attention to detail, including crafting relevant points on résumés. The conversation dives deeper into tailoring, formatting, and fitting résumés to specific jobs.
The discussion in episode three allows both current associates and future talents to understand what values they bring to ADP, contributing to the community.
“It’s a great time to be a part of ADP!” Dave supports the cybersecurity team, a global security organization at ADP. He is happy to answer any questions and provides his contact information in the podcast episode.
Life @ ADP is available on iTunes, Spotify, Google, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music. Coming up next, we are going to interview one of our veterans and talk about transitioning from the military to civilian life. Stay tuned! Don’t forget to subscribe to both the show and the blog.
What are you waiting for?
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
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
Podcast Launch: Life @ ADP
Life @ ADP, What We Do, Voice of Our People
Always Designing for People.
Life @ ADP will give you a look into our associates’ stories, our culture, and our company.
Podcast Launch: Life @ ADP
ADP is proud to launch its monthly podcast Life @ ADP, sharing with you our associates’ stories, featured interviews, and working culture. Season One is scheduled to have six episodes with content from technologists, talent acquisition, and industry leaders.
We released Episode One – Life @ ADP on September 22, introducing hosts Kate and Ingrid with their ideas behind launching the podcast. Episode Two celebrates Grace Hopper and Hispanic Heritage Month, featuring Giselle Mota. As the Principal of ADP’s Future of Work, Giselle shares with us her journey to ADP, experience with the company, and impacts on the community.
Our podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Google, and Amazon Music. Don’t forget to subscribe to both the show and the blog!
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Lifion, Innovation, Award
Jesse joined ADP just over a year ago, and his work on the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team for Lifion had already created an impact. He shared insights on how ADP is pursuing new technologies to benefit the world around us.
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Jesse W., the Senior Director System Reliability Management, recently won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award, honoring visionaries in tech space and making significant contributions to the world of tech.
Jesse helped created a Global Reliability Operating Model that gives developers clearer direction, more agency, and improved job satisfaction while allowing them to deliver more innovative codes to customers faster and with fewer mistakes. His contribution to ADP represents a new culture of ownership-driven outcomes rooted in document-driven engineering, self-service onboarding, and human-centered designing.
Jesse focused on his team, “I want to give credits to the teams we work with. Without them, we would not be able to execute this larger strategy.” He worked with engineering leaders from product-minded approaches to backend engineering, connecting technology capabilities to business goals. Together, they build faster and safer software.
What are some fun facts about you?
I am an innovation leader, a prop plane pilot-in-training, and a vintage Japanese watch collector.
Could you tell us about the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team?
The EREL team is a platform engineering group that builds tools and infrastructure with a vision to help enable an outstanding developer experience at Lifion. It offers capabilities for feature teams to manage their security and develop their cloud-native infrastructure. My team works with them to provide self-service incident and change management.
A vital part of this success is the Global Reliability Operating Model (GROM), a holistic approach to building complex software in the cloud. GROM has allowed software teams to work autonomously, pushing collaboration to the max and minimizing complexity within Lifion’s systems. EREL is constantly building upon its systems, focused on feedback to understand what tools and pipelines can evolve to improve the user experience.
What words would you use to describe engineers at work?
Simplify, Innovate and Grow. EREL actively measures its impact based on real data available to them within the systems. Utilizing real-time data makes this possible and provides a creative space for all engineers at work.
Jesse (right) with his family
What advice do you have for those with a focus on innovation?
Separate the ideation and inspiration from the execution allows your leadership and individual contributors to devote their full intellectual capacity towards solving problems in the most innovative way.
Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible. Look out three, four, five, or even twenty steps ahead of what can be done right now, then figure out the north start you need and inspire your teams to meet the larger business goals.
Congratulations, Jesse and the EREL team!
Learn more about working at Lifion and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
Engineering, Innovation, What We Do
Leo Meirelles first worked at ADP for more than six years as a lead technical analyst and senior software programmer. Then he left for stints at Google and The New York Times, where he had the opportunity to learn new environments, improve his knowledge, and refresh his tech stack—all benefits he brought with him when he returned to ADP in 2016. Below, Leo discusses the continuous integration and development (CI/CD) process he implemented with his team and the company-wide plans for adopting it.
As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
By Leo Meirelles, Principal Software Engineer and Principal Architect
As a principal software engineer and principal architect at ADP, I work on multiple projects and provide support as needed. Since ADP has a lot of products, one of our biggest challenges is streamlining our processes. Our engineers work on payroll systems, retirement services, and pension services, to name some, for both small and large companies—and that’s just in the United States. Each country we support has different portfolio options for companies that integrate ADP products. Since we continue to evolve our technology, we’re never short on opportunities.
I worked at ADP for close to seven years the first time. When I returned in 2016, I got involved with a great project to aggregate multi-country payroll; we integrated with in-country providers, with internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y) support. I’d spent a few years at The New York Times and then eighteen months at Google, and I was excited to bring that skillset back to ADP. At ADP, I’d always liked the people I worked alongside, and with ADP’s pivot to a technology-first company, I knew I could have a real impact here. In particular, I had the opportunity to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), first with one group, then two, and now we’re looking at global implementation throughout the company.
CI/CD combines continuous integration and delivery practices, relying on automation to guarantee that code changes are efficient and that application deployments are reliable. With the project I was initially working on, we had teams in multiple countries and multiple time zones, and when you have such a large amount of people spread out like that, you need to stay efficient.
Before this project, to deploy in a QA environment, we needed a UI Development Lead and a Backend Development Lead to approve a deployment release request since they were the most likely to be aware of any issues that could hinder QA work. They had to give the green light and say, “Hey, this code is good to go.” But when you have 30 developers, things get more complicated since you have to merge multiple pull requests. On top of that, we have eight microservices in the backend and three micro frontends—the login, the old application, and the new application, because we’re migrating a few things toward a new Angular version. This level of complexity underscores why ADP needed a global, automated solution that can work for everyone—and why we started the CI/CD implementation via our GitOps project.
GitOps is an evolution of infrastructure as code, where you build the whole environment from a configuration/definition file, and it stays together with the application source code. Later, it can be run by machines and build new environments without human intervention. The idea of GitOps is to use tools that you already use every day, which makes things easier since you don’t have to add new tools to your stack or change how you get work done. Instead of emailing, messaging, or calling someone to say, “Hey, can you deploy that version for me?” now you do that using Bitbucket and make a pull request, make a commit, and merge your code. After that, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes, and you can skip trying to find people for approvals. Because both the infrastructure and your code go into Bitbucket—in fact, the whole process for a new release—we’re able to have a new deployment in 10 minutes for the local environment using GitOps once the code review is finished, approved, and merged. From that point onward, QA owns the release management for their environment; they control what goes into the environment without involving DevOps and managers, giving more autonomy for the team to manage releases.
We knew that having GitOps would make life easier for DevOps and allow them to focus on other things, like maintaining production and improving monitoring and availability. Also, engineers deserved to oversee their code. But we had to figure out the best way to introduce the new process. So, we started slowly to minimize disruptions with the current software development process and give people time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
We had to get developers over the fear of breaking something. Everybody wanted to be either first or last. If they were first, they wouldn’t have to merge their code, and if they were last, they could make sure everything was working before adding theirs. Until we got into a rhythm, it was a stressful time. But once the teams started adopting the new process, things changed dramatically in a positive way. Instead of making considerable changes in the last few days of a sprint, we slowly transitioned to making several small changes every day. And if something didn’t work, it was a straightforward process to revert changes. Since everything is on Bitbucket, we can see the previous versions, making the long-term management much easier.
I talk to team members often, and we’re in a sweet spot right now. What really helped adoption was implementing a process when everyone was ready and open to trying a new process. I prefer to lead by example rather than trying to force people to do something. But as time passed, we built trust when it became obvious the new system worked. Now people have the flexibility to start working in whatever time zone they’re in and look at our online chats to see what’s changed since they last looked. We even have a bot that judges the quality of a pull request. We have twenty to thirty deployments in our development environment every day, and no one even notices. And if we need to make a production fix, we can do it in 20 minutes using GitOps and our other automation tools.
I’m looking forward to the full adoption of GitOps globally. We have a lot of products on a lot of platforms, so that will take time. But there are a lot of exciting things happening right now at ADP. We’re an evolving tech company and developing a cohesive development engineering team. Since I’ve been back, I’ve seen the environment grow stronger. We communicate and share between teams, do a lot of cross-team collaboration, and help drive innovation and ideas through events like global hackathons. As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Roll Forward: How breakthrough products are redefining ADP as a tech innovator
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Future of Work
For ADP as a tech innovator, this is just the beginning of the journey.
Roll Forward: How breakthrough products are redefining ADP as a tech innovator
Roberto Masiero, SVP Innovation Labs
From my long tenure at ADP, I’ve learned that when a company gives you the latitude to move around—either within the technology space or from technology to business or sales—you get plenty of chances to reinvent yourself. And reinvention on the individual level influences the reinvention of the company as a whole, which I think we really see now with Roll™.
Roll™ is a mobile chatbot platform that uses AI and natural language processing technologies to anticipate users’ payroll needs intelligently. It’s the first-ever DIY payroll technology, and it’s so intuitive that our clients just download it and go; a lot of them never even talk to a customer service rep. But while we designed Roll™ to seem effortless, it’s the product of years of creative work with a unified team. The idea for Roll™ was to simplify payroll and HR using a novel UX and platform. I run the Innovation Labs at ADP, where we develop new products as quickly as possible. We’re a relatively small team, around 30 people from diverse backgrounds and with no hierarchy, allowing us to pull together tightly as a group. It’s important to me to have a flat organization because the moment you create hierarchies, you create ways to point fingers. In the way we work, everyone shares responsibility.
We came up with the product idea for Roll™ about four years ago when we were finishing up ADP Marketplace and wondering what to do next. At the time, most of our lab projects were satellite projects, adjacent offerings to our existing core services. I thought, “What if we reinvented the core?” We saw an opportunity to improve multiple facets of our payroll platform—the architecture, the design, the user experience. We had a chance to envision a whole new system.
We fixated on this idea of events—that everything done as an action within the system should be recorded as an event. In fact, we initially named the product “E” for “events.” For example, if you hire someone, pay someone, or terminate someone, we record each action as an event. This way, we know who did what, where they did it, what time of day, and from what device. All that information taken together feeds a machine learning engine where the system gets better the more it gets used. Instead of a system with a bunch of menus, forms, and reports, we imagined a vector of events where events cause other events. We basically built the software as a workflow.
But we didn’t stop there. We also wanted to transform the UI into something much simpler and more direct. People tend to design user experiences with a sense of engagement in mind, but that’s not what we needed here. We didn’t want people engaged; we wanted them to get the job done and exit the software. So with Roll™, the user goes straight to chat and tells the system what they need, and the software understands. If it’s to hire someone, change someone’s W-4, change a payroll schedule, the user asks, and the software guides them through the process using conversational UI.
We also built Roll™ to function 100% on mobile. We decided the UX would use a simple chronological timeline, similar to Facebook or Twitter. Clients love having one place to go to see their activity: “Yes, I ran payroll yesterday evening,” or, “Great, that new W-4 went through.” In addition to optimizing for mobile, we also wanted a strong desktop presence. We noticed our desktop users liked to grab info from the system and transfer it to Excel spreadsheets, so we decided to give them an Excel-like UX.
We finished Roll™ in July 2019 and got a pilot client in August. That fall, we presented the software to ADP’s executive leadership team. We got the feedback that we were sitting on something big that works for small to large corporations. But they encouraged us to focus on the smaller markets, those with one to ten employees. So we spent a couple of months designing an additional layer of software to cater to small businesses. In March 2020, we piloted Roll™ with about 50 smaller companies who all liked what we were offering, and then the executive committee told us to put Roll™ on the market and sell it as soon as possible. So we went from pilot program to full rollout in under a year, and today we’re getting dozens of new clients a day signing up for Roll.
A big part of what makes Roll™ stand out is integrating natural language processing with machine learning. We designed Roll™ to understand the mental model of our user’s meaning. We wanted the chatbot AI to talk the way people talk.
We brought in ADP’s business anthropologist, Martha Bird, and copywriters to advocate for the user, helping us to shape the Roll™ voice. We didn’t simply want AI to predict what our clients needed for payroll purposes––though that ability was definitely important. We wanted the voice of Roll™ to demonstrate human understanding. For example, Roll™ learned to respond more positively when addressing a new hire or giving someone a raise in pay, whereas it is more subdued when discussing termination. It’s that empathetic understanding that gives Roll™ an edge in human interaction.
On the backend, we decided that we didn’t want to run servers, or even containers, like Docker or Kubernetes. Instead, we made every event a function. The beauty of functions is that they only exist while that function is running. So our cost of running Roll™ is extremely low. Using cloud services and this idea of functions is another way Roll™ sets itself apart.
Of course, Roll™ didn’t come without its challenges during the development process. Fraud is something we have to consider whenever we engineer or develop a new product. But this is what I love about the Lab: We think of our challenges as opportunities to make our products better. How can we improve? How can we automate? How can we reduce the amount of burden on the system from someone trying to commit fraud? And when we meet a challenge, everyone jumps in to help. We either fail as a team, or we succeed as a team.
I’d say we’re succeeding right now, and the beautiful thing about Roll™ is that it’s always running. We change our models to pick up on new ways clients ask for things, and every new question pulls into Roll’s knowledge and experience. So the more clients we have, the better the software becomes. It’s an unprecedented level of automation.
A program like Roll™ can help further ADP’s digital transformation from merely a payroll company into a competitive tech company. What makes Roll™ exciting is that it almost creates its own category; it’s a technological solution no one else has. We can dominate this market and apply some of the same breakthroughs—machine learning, using functions—with other ADP products. For ADP as a tech innovator, this is just the beginning of the journey.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Podcast: HRExaminer Executive Conversations w/ Don Weinstein, ADP
HRx Radio – Executive Conversations
Guest: Don Weinstein, Corporate VP, Global Product and Technology, ADP
Episode: 371
Air Date: June 26, 2020
Guest Bio
Don Weinstein, leads ADP’s Global Product and Technology team, overseeing client-facing product development and internal technology (CIO/CTO) operations. In this role, Don is responsible for ensuring that the GPT organization is aligned with ADP’s strategic goal of becoming the world’s leading provider of Human Capital Management solutions.
Don joined ADP in 2006 as VP of Corporate Strategy and has held a variety of roles in strategy, product management and business development.
Most recently, Don served as Chief Strategy Officer of ADP, where he stood up the ADP Ventures group that built organic, net-new revenue-generating businesses for ADP and also led the Global Strategy team in completing numerous strategic acquisitions. Previously, he had been Senior Vice President of Product Management, where he was responsible for managing ADP’s portfolio of HCM products as well as directing the company’s annual product innovation investments. He also led the Global Product Management team through its transition to an Agile organization.
In addition to helping enhance ADP’s brand as an innovation thought leader, Don has been instrumental in introducing key new products that have delivered rapid success in terms of new product sales. These include ADP Mobile, ADP Analytics and the ADP Marketplace.
He also has served as Division Vice President of Strategy and Product for ADP’s Small Business Services and Major Account Services divisions, where he led numerous successful new product introductions including RUN Powered by ADP®, ADP Workforce Now®, and ADP Talent Management.
Prior to joining ADP, Don held senior strategy roles within IBM Corporate Strategy and PriceWaterhouseCoopers Strategy and Change Consulting. He began his career in 1990 with General Electric as an Edison Engineer.
Don received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rutgers University, an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Transcript
Important: Our transcripts at HRExaminer are AI-powered (and fairly accurate) but there are still instances where the robots get confused and make errors. Please expect some inaccuracies as you read through the text of this conversation. Thank you for your understanding.
Full Transcript with timecode
[00:00:00] John Sumser: Good morning and welcome to HR Examiner’s Executive Conversations. I’m your host, John Sumser and today we’re going to be talking with Don Weinstein, who leads ADPs global product and technology team. Don’s been a guest many times over the years and it’s great to have you back. How are you Don?
[00:00:31] Don Weinstein: I’m doing great, John. Great to be back. How are you?
[00:00:35] John Sumser: Well you know, outside of the fact that I’ve been in prison for a hundred days I’m doing great. I have a good roomate in solitary confinement. But man, I was not prepared for this. How about you?
[00:00:49] Don Weinstein: Yeah, no, likewise. I think you and I are both are in the same boat. I now have more roommates than when I started the year with some of my college kids moving back in with us and, you know, we’re all adjusting and we’re all adapting to the new realities.
[00:01:01] And even the bandwidth constraints, you never find out how strong your wifi signal is until you’ve got five teenagers or three teenagers and five people on it. But. Everybody’s healthy thankfully. And we’ll see, hopefully, you know, here I’m in New Jersey, uh, you know, the trend lines have been positive and we’re, we’re back on to phase two of our reopening and hopefully getting to phase three, just watching out to make sure we don’t have that dreaded the second wave.
[00:01:26] John Sumser: Yeah well, I’m here in California and we’re seeing the second wave.
[00:01:30] Listen, would you take a moment before we get too far down the conversation would you introduce yourself? So the few people in the audience who haven’t run across you before will know who you are.
[00:01:42] Sure I’d be glad to. So Don Weinstein, I’m corporate vice president of global product and technology for ADP.
[00:01:49] And what that means is I basically am responsible for anything and everything technology and product related, and it’s a little bit, it’s actually a somewhat unusual role. In that it combines all of our external facing, you know, client facing product work with also all of our internal technology function.
[00:02:07] So think about it as the traditional CIO role and CTO role all wrapped up into one. So if anything goes wrong, it’s all my fault is how I like to say it.
[00:02:16] John Sumser: But your influence in ADP is vaster than that. When I think about ADP, I think there’s Carlos who is the jovial CEO and then when he has any questions about anything he turns to you to get the answer. So, it’s bigger than you describe I think.
[00:02:33] Don Weinstein: I’m sure Carlos would appreciate being described as jovial. And he’s an amazing CEO. And I think the thing about Carlos that everybody says the most is a very high integrity person in his case, which is critical. If you think about what we do in terms of handling so much of the nations and the economy’s payroll, you want a really, really high integrity person running the show, but I’m glad that his external persona is jovial. I’ll let them know that. I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.
[00:02:58] John Sumser: Oh you know, he’s just easy to like, he’s just really easy to like. He creates a sense of trust in every interaction that I’ve ever seen him in.
[00:03:13] Don Weinstein: I agree. That’s the integrity dimension in particular, right. Because you know, we talk about the speed of trust and all that, and you know it when you have somebody that you’ve worked for that you trust, it does create that safety environment to be able to do your best.
[00:03:27] John Sumser: Yeah, just to keep dwelling on this a little bit of my sense is the way he builds trust is by giving it. Right, that’s the trick that I think most people don’t understand is, trust engenders trust. And so if you lead with trust, you get trust back.
[00:03:43] Don Weinstein: That was really well said. You know I hadn’t heard it put that way before, but as you describe it, now, that’s exactly the way it’s experienced on the team.
[00:03:51] So I have to quote you on that.
[00:03:52] John Sumser: Well, you know, add that to your long book of John Sumser quotes. It’s probably hundreds of pages long by now.
[00:04:00] So, you’re an engineer by trade. There are not great quantities of engineers who have a highly visible positions in HR and HR Tech. Well, how do you see the relationship between those two disciplines?
[00:04:15] Don Weinstein: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think engineering engineers at their core are problem solvers, very pragmatic people. You see a problem or you see a process or there’s no process or problems that can’t be fixed or improved.
[00:04:28] You know, in my world, we talk about how do we eliminate friction or pain in every single process or interaction between a worker and the client. And really just try and take an extensive. Do you, with that to say, not only looking at the pain that people complain about. But also sometimes there’s pain that people don’t complain about because they’ve just learned to accept it will to live with it as a way of life.
[00:04:52] But, you know, engineers, we were trained not to accept anything for what it is, but to always assume that there’s a better way and constantly be on the search for that better way of doing things. But at the same time, you know, I think the discipline of HR and human capital management reminds us that, well, there’s a human side to this and that the people who are engaging, that they’re not just bits and bytes, they’re actual people on the other side of the product and the technology.
[00:05:19] And we really have to humanize our approach to optimization problems and also recognize that people don’t always respond in the ways that you might expect on your spreadsheet or your prototyping process. So. No, I think to that end, we’ve got a couple of interesting things at ADP in terms of roles that we’ve added to the team.
[00:05:39] So we have both behavioral psychologists. I have a couple of PhD, behavioral psychologists on the team who help us try and understand and even communicate with emotion to the clients and the, and the workers. Ultimately you’re on the receiving end of everything we do. And we have a corporate anthropologist who likewise.
[00:05:57] Is trained more than the art of observation, not almost to recede in the background and see things for how they are. And then the engineering side can come back and say, here’s how they could be. But recognizing that we are dealing with people here and people can be emotional beings and you have to handle the psychological aspects, not just the operational side.
[00:06:20] So I’ve spent some time with Martha Burns. She’s pretty amazing. She’s your corporate there. This leads me in a weird way to the next question, which is there’s a lot of unrest in the country right now. Um, diversity and inclusion have become important things for corporate executives to talk about, but in general, talking doesn’t get much.
[00:06:44] And the unrest is about the fact that people have been talking about stuff for years. ADP as the biggest player in the HR tech space by law leaving here. So would you talk a little bit about how you guys were thinking about and what you’re doing in Georgia?
[00:07:01] Yeah, it’s a great point, John. And I think you’re right.
[00:07:05] Fundamentally, that’s been a lot of talk for a long time, but maybe not as much action. And that’s what you, one of the factors, obviously, a lot of factors, but one of the factors contributing to the general sense of frustration. This has always been important to us. This is not like something new, both internally within ADP.
[00:07:21] I think if you look at any of the, kind of the external reference bodies, like diversity and core, that human rights council that generally speaking ADP scores pretty highly on them. What types of things, because we do care. But I think point about being the largest provider in the human capital technology space, you know, we not only have to lead by example, but we have to also help others.
[00:07:43] So along those lines of few things that we’ve done and are continuing to do is, you know, we launched, uh, our pay equity explore part of our data cloud, which was analytics and insights to help clients, companies identify where they might have discrepancies pay discrepancies by race, by gender or by ethnicity.
[00:08:03] Somewhere in their organization and do it in a way that action orient. Well, it’s not just to say, look, you’ve got these pay discrepancies, but here’s the, the individual here’s where they work. Here’s what the market benchmark says. It should be click here to take action on it. We try and make it much, much more action oriented did around it.
[00:08:21] Not just analysis, but rectifying some of those disparities. Similar on the recruiting side, we’ve gone out with our candidate relevancy algorithms, which are really, we’ve been out there for a few years now have attempted to strip biases out of the talent acquisition process by removing things like race or gender or other ethnic identifiers from a candidates background, and really zero in and focus on just pure skills.
[00:08:47] And I think we’ve seen good examples of that. I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and. No. So I read in the book outliers about the experience that had with the orchestra is I forget which one it was, where they had a very low penetration of, you know, very small number of females in the orchestra relative to the total population of musicians.
[00:09:08] And when they went to blind audition, it instantly jumped up in a normal, I still about 50 50, which is where you would expect it to be versus I don’t remember the number, but it was far below 50% of their orchestra. So it just kind of bore out this point, the point that if you could strip out that there was some unconscious bias in the selection process.
[00:09:25] And to the extent that you could strip that out, things could follow a more natural. Sequence. And so we’ve had some of these things in the market for a while now with some success, I would say my hope is that I think we’ll get more traction with them going forward, by the way, just one thing to point out when we’ve introduced these types.
[00:09:43] So capabilities, we haven’t charged for them. We haven’t tried to monetize them. It’s like if you’re a client of ADP, you know, if you’re using our recruiting solution, We’re we’re going to give you that candidate relevancy album for free, essentially, because we think it’s important for you to have it and use it.
[00:09:58] We’re not trying to make a buck off of helping fix what I think is an important problem. And then, you know, in addition to that, I think one of the things we’ve really, and looking at going forward as we started an AI ethics board, because this topic about algorithms in the workplace and machine learning, you know, if you do have biases that are already present in the workplace, you know, if you put algorithms around that, are they going to correct for the biases or if implemented poorly, there’s always the risk that they could just reinforce them.
[00:10:26] We could be more efficient at implementing your biases. So. We started an AI ethics board. And it was important that we had a mix of not only internal, but also external participants, you know, from outside the company. So from inside, we have our chief privacy officer. We had our head of corporate diversity as well as our chief audit officer, but then we also got some external counsel from the world of HR practices and employment practices, legal counsel, to be part of our AI ethics board.
[00:10:56] John Sumser: Other than today, we should have a long conversation about the things that I’ve been learning about ethics, that you have to have a fairly rapid turnover with people on the other score, or they will tend to become a rubber stamp, but that’s not on the list for today. Thanks for talking about it a little bit.
[00:11:15] I’ve been curious about what you’re doing there. You run this big global development. What are the hard parts of your job is that you’ve got a huge ADP software development project with major developments all over the world. And I was always blown away by how complicated that is and gracefully executing.
[00:11:36] That was my question is help me a little bit more about that. And then having that broadly distributed workforce. Does that prepare you for the crisis when you had to move everybody in the company from their offices have been working from home seven.
[00:11:54] Don Weinstein: Yeah, let me tackle the second part first then I think in a sense it did a little bit in that due to our breadth, we felt with a multitude of regional issues in the past, mostly natural disasters like hurricanes in Texas and Florida, or flooding in Chennai or the yellow vest strikes in Paris where the transportation system was shut down.
[00:12:15] All of which caused us to close offices temporarily. And so doing our business continuity plans into practice. Every organization has a business continuity plan, but you never know how good it is until you actually have to put it in and see how it works. But I think what was unique about this time was that this was our first global, well, everything else was regional, like, okay, well, we’ll send the folks from this office into a remote setting and then we’ll distribute the workload around.
[00:12:42] But mission is truly global, which put a tremendous amount of load on our internal network. In particular, you know, our VPN capacity was never sized past 60,000 associates logged in at the same time. And whereas economies like North America and two events in Europe had a little bit more, more of a history and a practice of working from home.
[00:13:02] In other areas of the world, but in India, it was never really a work from home environment. People didn’t even have laptops and trying to procure laptops in those locations right now, almost impossible. And we in fact, went out and we bought wireless cards and had associates plug the wireless cards into their desktops, bring their desktops home because they might not have even had good infrastructure at home.
[00:13:24] We created our own internal geek squad that would go out to the associates houses and check in on their setups and make sure that they could operate. It was quite a logistical undertaking, but, you know, we managed to, to get that all done and not really miss a beat. I think it’s always, for us, it’s been an advantage having that global footprint in part, because we provide services to clients in almost 140 different countries go through ourselves and through our partner network.
[00:13:51] And so. Being able to have engineers in the markets, software developers in the markets where we’re doing business just important to stay close to our clients, our global clients, and, uh, make sure that we’re also close to the local regulatory environment. Again, part of this change that’s happened in light of the pandemic governments around the world are all passive legislation to try and sustain their economies.
[00:14:17] Here in the U S obviously we’ve talked a lot about the cares act and the paycheck protection program, which we’ve been on the front line. And I do use a military battle analogy of frontline to describe the response to the PTP program, which keeps changing. But globally, we’ve had almost 2000 legislative changes that we’ve had to implement in a multitude of countries around the world.
[00:14:42] John Sumser: Yeah, one of the times seven for you. So you moved all these people probably are opposites to remote work settings that now every one of those 60,000 people is competing with three teenagers in the house. What are you learning? You start to get your balance in this new work environment. Yeah, well, look, working from home has been a hot topic and it’s been at the forefront ever since.
[00:15:07] I think it was Marissa Meyer, a Yahoo called all the Yahoo engineers back in from working from home. And there was this hot debate out there. Lots of folks they’re being even more productive now that they’re working from home. I do see a greater blurring of work, you know, for instance, as I mentioned now that we have our global workforce on the VPN and we were monitoring VPN activity, just to make sure we have capacity, you could actually see the patterns of work around the world.
[00:15:34] The biggest thing I saw was how many hours people were logging and it seemed like that was up. And that folks are always connected and not just connected, but being active. But, you know, on the productivity side. And I think this debate is not going to quiet down. It’s only going to ramped back up again on is working from home, more productive or less productive.
[00:15:52] My personal experiences. We have a hundred percent of everybody working remote. I think we’ve had some pretty good, good productivity. As we start to look now at organizations doing a partial return to office. I think that’s going to be hard. If you’ve got 50% of the folks in the office, 50% remote to sustain that same level of productivity and that type of environment.
[00:16:14] There’s more sensitivity to making sure everybody who’s remote is heard when a hundred percent of the group is remote, but I’ve experienced it myself firsthand. If we have a meeting and, you know, a majority of people are in the office and a minority are on the video call, making sure that we’re balanced and everybody has a chance to be heard and participate equally.
[00:16:32] It can be a challenge. And I do wonder how that’s going to evolve. As people start to slowly open back up and return to their offices. Cool.
[00:16:41] John Sumser: So you’ve got 810,000 customers extraordinary, but you’re watching what’s happening as those 810,000 customers. What is she? How’s the world really reacted to this.
[00:16:57] Don Weinstein: Yeah, it’s a great question. We’re able to walk that very closely. You know, I think we talked about it even a little bit when the national underemployment report that we put out and Carlos did mention some of this at the analyst day, but she liked you’re in the U S the economy hit rock bottom, kind of around the end of April or the beginning of may.
[00:17:14] Certainly our may employment report was pretty rough. And then the one that just came out in early June, which went through the middle of may, it was still down, but it was down much, much less than the April report. Or if I could throw an engineering term at two with a second order, derivative turned positive, which is the change in the rate of decline.
[00:17:34] That decline much, much, much less. And so we’re starting to see green shoots across the board in terms of how many hours are being clocked or logged by the workforce. What’s the dollar wage that’s getting paid. So we definitely, I feel like we bottomed out and things are ticking up true V-shape recovery, so to speak.
[00:17:54] I still haven’t gotten back to where we were prior to the start of the pandemic, but it’s definitely trending in a positive direction. I think now what we’re all on the lookout for is that second way, you know, things continue on the current course and trajectory. You know, you could see us in the second half of the calendar year, almost getting back to where we were before, but nobody knows what’s going to happen with the virus and what’s going to happen with the related economic expansion.
[00:18:20] But right now, at least it feels like we’re on a positive trajectory, albeit off of a very low bottom.
[00:18:26] John Sumser: [00:18:26] So to jump, you are now one of the largest providers of machine learning in the industry and the heart of machine learning is history. I wonder how your views of machine learning have changed over the last 90 days, because we’ve heard this play place where history may not be as relevant as it was 90 days ago.
[00:18:52] Don Weinstein: The great question. I think we. I’ll go back to kind of the national employment report example for a second. You know, we track it. Relatives could be BLS, the Bureau of labor statistics. And in a normal month, we might be looking at deviations. I mean our employment report and the BLS report that might be on the order of tens of thousands of jobs.
[00:19:13] And, you know, in our may report, we were down two and a half million. Everybody thought that was crazy until the BLS came out and said, well, no, the economy added two and a half million shots, which is really cool.
[00:19:28] But the deviation between the two numbers, as I said, we’d go into panic attack. If the deviation, you know, was in the tens of thousands, that was a deviation of 5 million. And nobody even batted denied because everything was just a volatile at the time. I think it’s important to recognize to your point then, which of those?
[00:19:47] So you’re right. The machine learning is learning on the data it’s learning on history. And I think the key thing is to understand what data sets are materially impacted or impaired because of the volatility of the environment and which ones aren’t. Because not everyone is, as I mentioned, you know, we were looking at our skills, taxonomy and running a machine learning algorithm against that to try and help identify the best candidates, regardless of race, gender, and ethnicity, that doesn’t change.
[00:20:16] I don’t know that that has changed necessarily in this at the same time. I have to be mindful of those, because for instance, you may have had a preference for candidates who were closer to your office. And now that you know, maybe there’s more flexibility to working from home. You don’t want to start screening out those remote candidates as much.
[00:20:36] So I think the most important thing to your point, what have we learned about machine learning is you just can’t put it on autopilot. And let it run and the algorithms will tune themselves, but I think they benefit in our own hands. If you actually understand what’s inside them, what are the factors that they’re keying off of?
[00:20:54] What are the waiting and just recap those assumptions and say, does that still make sense? And definitely materially impacted based on what’s happening. There’ll be some cases where that hasn’t changed. There may be others that have, you know, compensation factors may be interesting to look at because you know, we’ve been chugging along on our market.
[00:21:12] They pay rating was talked about before and the good news is, you know, we have a lot of data in general. I find when you have a volatile environment, having too much history in the, in the algorithm can be problematic because you might overweight the history accidentally. So I think that, you know, do we tighten down those time periods now and try and understand a little bit better?
[00:21:34] Is there a material turn going? Yeah, but I think the question, the big picture question that you raised there is, you know, what have we changed in our view about machine learning? Or I would say evolve. It’s really just understanding that this isn’t something that can run on autopilot, that us as the provider of the algorithms, in some cases, and for sure, a client company or organization as the consumer, you really want to know what’s in there.
[00:22:00] Yeah. You can’t assume that it’s operating as usual, but at least make that proactive chalk and say. Hmm. Is this going to give me a credible result or should I be mindful of the underlying factors? Cause I don’t want to stay. We’ll just roll them all out now because it history has changed because some of them are still going to be very, very useful, but you have to make that kind of conscious deliberate assessment and not just allow things to operate as is.
[00:22:25] If that makes sense.
[00:22:26] John Sumser: That makes perfect sense. If you’ve got a couple of extra minutes, I wanted to ask you about innovation, right? You have a remarkable innovation program, ADP. Um, I’ve been leaving with it for years and now we’ve got everybody Christmas. How’s innovation going in this environment. And how are your innovation centers doing?
[00:22:48] Don Weinstein: Yeah. So the innovation centers are cranking along as I’ve shared before. I think folks believe that their productivity is up getting really good metrics about knowledge worker productivity is a hard challenge for us, but we look at the throughput of the delivery and they’re cranking along. You know, one of the things we do as well, we’ve been doing some engagement pulses as the workforce has transitioned to a working from home.
[00:23:11] You know, we acquired Marcus Buckingham’s company a few years back and we’ve adopted his engagement pulse and the engagement framework. I mean, it’s quite remarkable. And one of the beauties of it is that it’s kind of manager empowering, so I can run an engagement pulse for my organization whenever I want to.
[00:23:27] So we actually ran one right in the middle of the downturn and we had had a baseline just beforehand and we actually saw engagement went up five points, which was remarkable and it gives you that adrenaline rush. So, you know I believe that we’re continuing to execute. And in fact, in some cases, a little bit of an adrenaline rush happening where folks are working even harder because there’s this blending now of, you know, work like the work home separation, which never was really there to be begin with is even tougher right now, but works fermenting with some new tools to help us do kind of virtual event storming and brainstorming on virtual yellow stickers and user journeys.
[00:24:04] But I think as we moved off site. I think that innovation culture has stayed intact and just transferred to digital. But one of the reasons I think that was the case is that we already had established those centers. And the programs and the teams and they were already mature. I would not be as confident about starting something brand new, like, hey, would I start up a brand new innovation center or team right now?
[00:24:31] Especially because we’ve hired a lot from the outside. I wouldn’t be as confident in that at the moment. I think we’d have to think through that one a little bit harder. But taking the existing kind of, you know, more mature team that had been working together and had already kind of moved into that performing phase and then going virtually, I think that’s been a smoother transition than we feared.
[00:24:52] John Sumser: That’s fantastic. So we’ve run through our half hour. It’s been a great conversation. Anything you want to add before we go?
[00:24:58] Don Weinstein: You know, I think it’s been, as you said, the pandemic has been all encompassing. You know, we’ve had to focus on business continuity. We’ve had to focus on compliance and now we’re turning our attention to, okay, some clients are looking to return to office. Others are trying to figure out how do they navigate their new digital future. And we just kind of keep progressing this thing in waves. You know, we’re sort of on wave three of our pandemic response and nobody knows what wave four is going to look like, but we’re committed to staying out in front of it.
[00:25:27] And you know, it’s been a challenging time. It’s been a crazy time, but it’s also been one where I think at least within my organization, you know, I look at the engagement scores. I look at the productivity, it feels like in many spaces, people like rising to the challenge and rising to the occasion. You know, that’s really gratifying to see.
[00:25:44] So, hopefully you guys are staying safe and sane over there and we’ll try to do likewise.
[00:25:49] John Sumser: We are. So would you take a moment and reintroduce yourself, tell people how they might get ahold of you?
[00:25:55] Don Weinstein: Yeah. Don Weinstein, corporate vice president of global product and technology for ADP. The easiest way to find me is to look me up either on LinkedIn or message me on Twitter, DonWeinstein1.
[00:26:07] John Sumser: Thanks Don. It’s been great having you. You’ve been listening to HR Examiner’s Executive Conversations, and we’ve been talking with Don Weinstein who is ADP’s lead for global product and technology.
[00:26:19] Thanks for tuning in today and thanks again Don. We will talk to you back here next week. Bye bye now.
Tech & Innovation Blog
A Veteran Spotlight in Technology at ADP
Veterans, Technology
Accessible Video Controls
[avia_codeblock_placeholder uid="0"]
ADP is on a mission to give Veterans and military spouses a career they can be proud of. Whether it’s solving business challenges for our clients, keeping our data secure, or adding to our growing client list. Meet Fred, a former Marine, has been at ADP for 22 years, where he currently works in end-user computing, where he makes an impact every day. Hear what he loves about ADP and why he stays.
