HR Vision Podcast #45 – Payroll technology with ADP ft. Raquel Ek

Ivo:
Hey there, welcome to episode 45 on the HR Vision Podcast. Today we're going to talk about an HR related topic that every single business organization in the world knows something about payroll. Yes indeed. And for that we thought we should have some sort of authority air quotes in this area. So without further ado, let me say hello to our guest Raquel Ek. Hi Raquel, how are you doing today?

Raquel:
Hi, Ivo. I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

Ivo:
Thank you for being here. So Raquel is a channel sales consultant at ADP. So ADP is the industry and globally during payroll technology with more than 1,000,000 clients worldwide. So now you get the sort of authority mentioned at the intro, right? Well, I'm very happy to have her here with us today to talk about a role, the leading role that ADP has been having in this field and how it helps companies globally. So, Raquel, shall we start?

Raquel:
Let's start.

Ivo:
Let's begin. Alright, good. Let's start with you. First, please give us a small introduction about yourself and your professional background.

Raquel:
Yes, of course. So my name is Raquel Ek. I am from Los Angeles. This is what and help all of my partners and customers from a national and global level. I've been with ADP for almost six years, specializing in a few different areas at ADP. I've been in direct sales consulting with customers and various markets, developing new partnerships with accountants, brokers and now for a year and a half been working with the ERP channel team to be able to help maximize the integrations as well as the two softwares bringing together the payroll and HR rules as well as including that with the ERP software as well.

So as I mentioned, I've been. Working with customers and partners from a United States and a global level FourVision being one of them over the last year and so far it's been great.

Ivo:
All right, all right. How did you land in ADP? What what attracted you there? How did that happen?

Raquel:
So ADP recruited me pretty well out of college and how I landed into this job, really as I was kind of doing my search, there was a few things that really attracted me to ADP. So as you mentioned, we are a leader in our industry. So we have a very strong hold in our history in the market as well as where we're going. So that really attracted me is all the innovation that ADP really tries to do on a quarterly, as well as an annual basis to really see how can we get ahead in the market and get ahead of the different challenges that are coming.

So from a very innovative standpoint, that was pretty interesting. Only ADP is a very client versus mindset. So a lot of our enhancements that we bring to our services as well as our products comes from client feedback. So I actually find that really great because a lot of times there might be products out there that industries or vendors are bringing to the market, but it's not necessary directly to the customers needs. And then some other things just like how the people at the organization as well. So you know I find leadership as well as the people I work with a huge part of our jobs on a daily basis. You know where the people we talked to the most. So we spend majority of our weeks in our months in our years at work and I've been surrounded by a really great people from a culture perspective as well as just development and learning and constantly. Trying to see what we can do that's new and help you know the people around us grow in their.

Ivo:
Interesting. You said something that the really big my attention which was the the importance of feedback from customers, which leads me a bit to the next question, which is also the feedback from partners because you've been working with partners recently, of course you are the main contact for us and we've been in constant communication, which I find really nice in a partnership and I think it means a lot to both sides in in my personal opinion.

So in that sense what what do you think you know FourVision customers and new incoming customers know should know about our partnership because we announced it recently. But tell us a bit more about that.

Raquel:
Yeah. So I would love to have your customers and any incoming customers just think of me as an extension. Of your team and know that when I am introduced and I come and talk to them, it's really a client first mindset. You know what are your challenges that you're currently having? What are the gaps in your processes and how can I help navigate you to the correct solution that's going to work best for your organization.

So I want them to know it's OK to be transparent. I'm completely transparent and and I work side by side with the FourVision team to really combine the solution between 365 HR, their ERP maybe if they have any other ancillary HCM apps out there as well. How can all of this come together? So that way it's a really true, you know, one ecosystem solution. So I want them to know I have the best intentions at heart and working with the FourVision team, we're here to work with you together, not only from a service perspective, a product perspective, but also we keep it of what's important.

So if that's cost, if that is service and implementation, if that is future growth and how can you expand upon the products that you already have and look like really trying to map out that, you know, good business plan for your organization. You know, payroll sometimes feels like it's a necessary thing, but it might be one small thing. Amongst all the other softwares that you have. But it does make a huge impact on your day-to-day.

Ivo:
It does, yeah.

Let's go over ADB a bit more. Let's talk about the offering, but first with an overview, for people that don't know ADP, I'm sure that people in the business world probably heard about it or went through a company that uses ADP as their main payroll system. But how did ADP get started and what is what is ADP most known for today?

Raquel:
Yes, so ADP started over 70 years ago, so a very long time ago. A lot has changed from seventy years ago. I remember even just about 30 years ago, I was - Before I obviously worked at ADP, I have some people that I work with that have been at the company that long ago and they were like I remember using to sell you know the payroll solution on a CD-ROM or on a hard drive. It really started with payroll. That's where we started is how can a software technology or even like from a long time ago very manual process of being able to have to fill it on a spreadsheet and how can that transform to meet with the times, right.

So that's what ADP has done over some of the years is as time has gone on, how can they keep conforming to the needs of the customer updating their technology. So really within the last, I would say 20 years, ADP has tried to become more and more a technology company, not so much a payroll company. We specialized in payroll would be great with payroll, but how can we be a better technology company and in the most I would say in the recent decade, especially after hearing United States after the 08 recession, there was a lot of changes from a compliance standpoint where we had to really update our technology to meet those compliance demands.

So we really tried to take an innovation mindset and really pay attention to what was going on from a compliance standpoint in a market standpoint. To update our technology and create a full suite of services and not just be payroll. So payrolls are like 18% of our business, but ADP is. Now when I say technology, we're really honing in on the data that we have as well. So since we are the largest provider and we have so much data, I think here in the United States we pay one in five. I want to stay in Canada, I think we pay one in six workers, so we're able to really use this technology, this data set well to be able to put in the R&D that we need for our own technology to see what we need to improve.

But also offer it to our customers so they can use it and be able to use it as a benchmarking tool for their workforce amongst various metrics from an HR standpoint. So whether that's time and labor, whether that's pay equity, whether that's overtime, any type of HR metric that you can. Think of. ADP is being able to give that back to our customers to use to make more strategic decisions for themselves.

Ivo:
Wow. Yeah, that seems. Because you have this amount of experience that you're just using it to actually to your to your advantage and to help customers in that sense way more than payroll. Indeed from from the start, what are the other areas that you think are really? You know, interesting about ADP. Besides, besides payroll that you you're working. Besides the data that you just mentioned, are there any others?

Raquel:
Yeah. I would say one thing that's really unique that I honestly just learned this year is that ADP's R&D spend is 2 to three times the amount that our competitors actually spend in. So when we looked at this graph and we saw ADP's you know number was way up here and billions of dollars and you know all of our other competitors were below that. I just blew my mind of how much actual innovation that we're able to bring to the table.

So just to give you an example of how we're able to keep you know satisfaction I would say amongst pretty high with our clients is on a quarterly basis we're actually updating our technology. So that way we have new enhancements, new features, new rollouts of maybe modules or services within the software that our clients can automatically take advantage of, which I find pretty unique because a lot of times vendors today, this might be more of an annual thing or maybe every two to three years. Are they doing those updates.

And then I would say some other things that are pretty interesting is: We actually have people that sit on the Capitol Hill. So when I think of payroll compliance comes into play, right. You know we always have to stay up to date of what's going on from a from a federal and global level here in the United States. We actually have representatives at ADP that sit on Capitol Hill to make sure they know all the changes from the legislation of what's going through. So that way not only our software and our sales force and our consultants he updated within 24 hours.

And also our customers have that information and they can use it for their organizations right away. A perfect example of this is, you know during COVID we had here in the United States, PPP loans come out and part of PPP loans for customers to be able to apply for is they had to have reports to produce to their banks to be able to apply for these loans. ADP was able to provide these reports that were all based on payroll information. Within 24 hours. So that way customers were able to go in, get these reports so they can start applying for these loans during COVID.

So that's one really good example. And then also from a global standpoint, so our global payroll product, we're in 140 countries. There's no other vendor out there that can say that. And we are able to manage all the compliance regulations not only from a country but each individual local level of those. Countries as well. So that's a lot to handle for any organization, any HR department. So being able to have all that together and not have to worry that that's being taken care of I think is a is a huge strength.

Ivo:
Indeed, I didn't realize the extension of all this with ADP. Amazing, alright, let's move on to your general thoughts on HR tech with specific focus on payroll. Of course it was the main thing about ADP. Now it's way more, about technology overall as you just explained. But going a bit back to payroll or the payroll of today, right now, how can I secure and user-friendly solution as a payroll help an organization from your perspective?

Raquel:
Yeah. So when I think of benefits, there's a few things that stick out to me. So one is reducing risk for the organization and reducing the room for manual error because you know when you're thinking about payroll or even global payroll, there's a lot of. Manual labor that can go into that if you're not using a streamlined solution. Being able to maximize your time on non revenue revenue generating tasks like payroll is not making the organization any money. So if you're spending hours and weeks on producing payroll and submitting payroll like there's probably better things that you can do with that time. Um, yeah. And they're just creating efficiency across your workforce and other HR tasks to really create a more satisfying culture, not just for the HR administrators and payroll administrators, but for all of the employees as well. Because we have seen you know having an easy to use solution and also employee self-service that goes into it and that makes the employees a lot happier because they have a little bit more transparency with their pay.

You know, so when we're talking about risk, for example, minimizing risk from a state and federal and local compliance level or of a national or global level as I mentioned before, is an enormous. Feet to really overcome for any organization that's doing it in-house, yeah, you know it's going to be very disconnected for our organization trying to handle all of that themselves. Produce financial reporting because all of that's based on a lot of that's based on payroll as well. So having to put all that together. Also decreases security risk. You know, that's a huge thing that is coming up nowadays, you know, and and not having systems that are protected. Um, maybe. If you're you're trying to work up your financial statements on an Excel spreadsheet and try to take everything from your payroll reports, it's probably not very secure to have all of that be moving around and open for any type of security risk there.

So ADP, a lot of people don't know this, but we actually are in the top five and security magazine amongst Apple, Google and Amazon. We have like military grade security, which I know it can be very important for a lot of organizations these days.

Ivo:
Definitely, I think. I think security is one of the main. It's one of the main things. You said something there at the start of the adventure, that. It's also. It's the fact that payroll is actually now. Making any money to the company and it's important that it's streamlined as much as possible and it doesn't take a lot of time to do. And for that it comes also like the integration of the payroll system with the actual HR database, or at least the data that you have inside the company referring to each to each person inside the company to each employee, so. Is this a DB integration of the payroll solution? Integration that ADP provides with other HR platforms? I guess it's a major thing for you, or at least you try to make sure that your platform actually can integrate with basically everything. So many issues with that. Is that true? And if so, why is that important?

Raquel:
Yeah, we definitely try our hardest. We have over 400 partners on our marketplace today. So different web apps, creating integrations, API, connectors, things of that nature with other top industry vendors as well as other maybe other products and solutions that ADP doesn't even touch on. So because we understand that we can't do everything and sometimes a customer has a solution. They really, really like and they don't wanna have to replace it if they're moving to another vendor. So let's just create that integration so that way it keeps a happier, stickier client and that way data can also be moving back and forth. And the reason why that's important is because that takes a lot of time out of what they normally would have to do. And having to manually re enter information into several different databases, making sure all the numbers are correct, all the names are correct because the last thing you want to do is. Let's just say you're inputting deductions in for our employees payroll and you're taking that from their retirement account or benefits account and you accidentally enter 1000 instead of 100 and they're missing the good $900.00 from their paycheck, right? So that's the last thing that you want to do. But yeah, it's very important because not only is it for an efficiency, efficiency thing, but as I mentioned earlier, it's it reduces risk from security. Um, any issues with security as well because it's automatically going to be able to have that data flow back and forth and it just saves a lot of time. You know, payroll and a lot of HR tasks aren't revenue generating very important. It's crucial to our organization. But how can we reallocate that time that maybe used to be spent on payroll and counting up hours and be able to put it into something in the organization that's really going to be able to start creating revenue? Alright, your approach with other vendors or every time that you meet a client that has a situation that you know they have a vendor or a software they use that they really like but you never saw before, your approach is. It's been always to let's see if we can figure out a solution or your approach is sometimes like. No, we can't. We can't really change this as your approach always been this open to. Let's find a solution together 100%.

Yes, I think it's important. You don't wanna pigeonhole any customer, right? You don't want to tell them. This is the only thing that you can do. It's the only thing that we offer and this is the only way we can help you. I think it's important to have an open mindset and that's part of also transparency and being able to have an open line of communication with your customer and so during the implementation, you know, asking them all the questions. So if they tell me, no, I really love this performance management tool.

Let's just say I'm like, tell me about it. Like what is it doing for you today? What are the different processes you're working through it on? How does it integrate with your current solution? If it does, and try to get a really good understanding of what that solution is and if that's something that they really do not want to give up and it makes sense for them, let's definitely keep it in place we do not need to worry about another thing to change for them because they're going to be changing a chunk of their payroll and HR task as it is.

So let's just see how we can integrate with this solution. Are they on our marketplace, yes or no? If they're not, OK, let's look at different ways we can do integrations, whether that's file based or whether that's a custom integration. You know, we have ways that we can work with the customer just so we can really create a custom solution that fits exactly to their needs because at the end of the day, like no one's ever going to be able to fit on A1 size. It's all product and they shouldn't have to.

Raquel:
Yeah, especially with HR and companies, there's so many different types of cultures and where your ways of working so that that makes a lot of sense. All right, let's look a bit into the future. I think we're approaching the end of this episode, so I would like to ask you. What what do you think are the upcoming trends in, in terms of payroll technology that ADP can be involved and what can we, if you can reveal anything? what can we expect from ADP looking into the future?

Ivo:
Yes, of course. So I think as we already see in the market some trends that are really picking up speed over the last year or two, I think a lot has to do with COVID is creating a happier workforce. So whether that is. Being able to more flexible work hours, you know, we're already seeing that companies either doing a four day week, doing maybe hybrid operations work from home situations, companies are really going to have to tailor to employees requests because if they're not, they're not going to be able to get that top talent. And as we've already seen for more than 3-4 years now, it's really hard to find. You know the talent that has the skill set as well as the right culture fit to bring into an organization. So it's going to be something that the organizations are going to have to take on is being able to put the employees 1st and what they're asking for and that's just going to create a happier workforce.

I think another thing is DE and I diversity, equity and inclusion that's becoming very big. So making sure that. Companies have the right tools, whether that's software that's included in your payroll or that they're just having a consulting somebody that can come in and make sure that they're doing the check, the correct checks and balances to make sure that they're really have a an inclusion and inclusion workforce that's really paying attention to all areas. And I would say another thing from a technology standpoint is we're seeing a lot of mass migrations off of old in-house solutions, you know on premise solutions on to the cloud. So if you're not on the cloud already with your financial system, payroll, HR system, you better get going. We saw, we already saw during COVID how much of that technology has been expedited just because of Cody working. From home, they saw a huge need to push for that. So we're going to continue seeing that. You know, people moving on to the cloud and also with technology there's going to be.

Software, payroll software, HR software that's going to be moved towards AI as well. So this is something interesting about ADP that I'm not sure if a lot of people might know, but in the last couple of years we have developed a new product for mid market solution called ADP Workforce Now next generation. So our current we have a product called ADP Workforce now, but ADP workforce now next Gen is built off of AI so. What this means for our customer is the implementation timelines are cut down half the time. So we can get customers up from three to six weeks now and being able to have a smarter solution that's listening to the changes in your system recommendations based off of your changes and being able to have smarter pay options as well. So not only is this just affecting the administrators, but it's also affecting the the their employees in a positive way.

So ADP is going to continue growing this solution from the smaller mid market space and growing it into a larger mid market space. And then eventually I think other organizations, other vendors out there are though kind of start moving to that to that same type of solution because it's quicker, it's making our our clients more happy and it's also providing just a better output. I think you know I think from a longevity standpoint of keeping those customers happy like they're just going to stay longer with us if they have a better solution.

Ivo:
Definitely, while that R&D money is being well placed, it seems.

Raquel:
Yes, yes, indeed.

Ivo:
All right. Before I let you go, I wanna ask you something. It's a curious question. Maybe you don't know how to reply to this, but I'm gonna make it anyway. Being the hybrid situation than the remote working, remote working something that is it's happening, it's here and it's not going away. I think we all agree to that. Besides the technology that ADP provides, do you, for example, if you have a company that you work with that is trying to hire talent on a remote basis in other countries that they are not there yet? Do you provide some sort of consultancy or some sort of some sort of information about how do you start a payroll? Environment there or or like a like a payroll strategy in that country to to hire that talent. Do you provide any kind of that or not really? You know what I'm asking you.?

Raquel:
Yes I think I know what you're asking me. Is this an organization that is looking to start a new entity and still has not hired their workforce. So they do have a workforce there. They don't, they don't. So we do have a partner for a country for sorry for an organization that needs to hire people still has not and needs to realize OK what type of benefit to offer you know what are the compliance challenges. How can I recruit talent? Where do I go to recruit that talent? So we do have a partner called globalization Partners actually specializes in all that and actually offers a complete benefits solution for international employees as well. So that's one thing that we can provide from that standpoint.

If a company is already established in another country but maybe need some support from the payroll's perspective and compliance perspective, that's when ADP salary. So it can actually come into play. It's a managed payroll solution. So we really take care of all of the compliance and payroll processing to make sure everything runs smoothly for customer. And then I would rely on you guys at FourVision to help bring in the HR piece and provide any other consultancy that might be needed for that customer.

Ivo:
All right. Great, great placement. Thank you. You're welcome. But indeed but indeed ADP select with something that we also have on our website and and we talked about from coming from our partnership with ADP. So, yeah, this was great. Raquel, thank you so much.

Raquel:
Thank you. I really appreciate it. I really had some fun. Not as bad as I thought!

Ivo:
Not as bad as your thought. That's great to hear. Well, I learned a lot today and it's amazing how. A company that is 70 years keeps innovating so much and being like ahead of the market for so long as well, which is remarkable I think and. Despite everything, ADP is a reference and should be for for a lot of companies out there. So I just, I just wanted to say that thank you so much for your time Raquel. I really appreciate it. This was this was great. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Raquel:
You're so welcome. Thank you so much, Ivo. and I look forward to maybe doing this another time in the future.

Ivo:
Yeah. Why not? Alright. Thank you so much Raquel. Once more and for people out there listening, thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

Raquel:
Alright, bye.