ADP held its 26^th annual Meeting of the Minds (MOTM) client conference recently, celebrating its 70 years in business. ADP is helping change the way employees work by continuously introducing new and enhanced products and services, and here I focus on three key areas: mobile, how pay is accessed, and recruiting.

ADP Mobile: growth & new developments

ADP has 20 million registered mobile users, with an average growth rate of 500,000 new users per month. Users use the mobile app on average ~10 times per month. There are 413,000 clients globally, with 20m notifications pushed to the mobile app per month, and in Google Pay it has a satisfaction rating of 88% (4.4 out of 5) with 500k 5-star ratings. ADP Mobile is available in 46 countries, in 27 languages.

ADP Mobile usage includes the ability to view and print pay and W2 statements and categorized pay reports, set up direct deposit of checks, view balances, and clock in and out (which is the most widely used feature).

Recently released features include:

• ADP Watch was released in November 2018, and has had 688k app sessions. Notifications can be received on a smart watch, and soon workers will have the ability to punch in and out with their watch
• Siri shortcuts, including ‘show me my pay and benefits’
• Managing notifications by grouping them however you would like
• Mobile federated single sign-on for users to use their own company credentials, so they don’t have to remember new login information
• Employees and manager dashboards to access lists of responsibilities of all the things they need to do. 95k policy approvals were made within 2 weeks of release
• Direct deposit check image capture – the ability to take a picture of your check to make a deposit so you don’t have to go to a bank
• Profile updating, including view/edit business title, preferred name, pay information
• Ability to do group texting to your team
• Wage garnishments and receipt of email notifications, reducing call center calls by 50%
• Viewing benefits, opening enrollment, updating life events, and uploading documents pertaining to your benefits
• Paycard self-enrollment and the ability to transfer money between cards
• Employee scheduling and the ability to swap work shifts via the requestor to the receiver and approval by the manager
• Via ADP DataCloud managers can obtain absence rate information, pin-point where problems are, and act right away by sending an email with a visual depicting data to be discussed.

Future enhancements will include:

• Notification where OT is highest
• Pay on ADP Watch
• Notifications sent to workers forgetting to clock in
• Chat feature, beginning with wage garnishments and benefits
• Learning, including courses you need to take
• Electronic signatures.

In sum, mobile is a game changer as it improves employee satisfaction via ease of use. As evidence, I sat in on several client presentations of ADP products, e.g. Vantage, and three clients specifically stated that adoption of mobile was much easier than deployment of equivalent desktop applications. The clients said that initial adoption was ~70%, 87% and 90% respectively.

New mobile features are released every three weeks by ADP.

Accessing pay

How workers want to get paid is changing, including lower income workers who may require more immediate access to pay. Thus, ADP is offering quicker access and more flexible choices to receive wages.

In May 2018, ADP Launched Wisely Pay following its acquisition of Global Cash Card. Wisely Pay provides individuals with multiple ways to receive, spend and manage money, including fully electronic options such as peer-to-peer transfers, instant pay, and mobile digital wallets by Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay.

In addition to Wisely Pay, employees can receive pay via options including direct deposit, Venmo digital wallet, Amazon, and Walmart money card. Employees can watch a short video to view the different options and benefits of each. Employees can split their choices of how they want to be paid across all options available with any percentage split. Employees can also track spending patterns and receive alerts on how much they spend and save. Employees can also have early access to pay for the current pay period. If they are short on available money to pay a bill, they can click on the amount needed from their current pay period and deposit into their account. Emergency funds can also be set up.

ADP recruiting (RPO)

This will be a big growth area for both standalone RPO clients and multi-process HR clients, as currently ~10% of its newest clients are existing ADP clients and there are thousands of current clients that can be targeted. A couple of immediate areas that will benefit clients are:

• Use of ADP DataCloud, including via mobile, to obtain insights on flight risks to retain talent
• Candidate chat. Since I have been involved in recruiting for ~25 years, candidates consistently complain about the time and difficulty to submit for jobs and then not hearing back on status, with a historic ~70% dissatisfaction rate across all companies/industries. Candidate chat will allow candidates to answer a few basic questions via chat that contain knockout questions; and if the candidate is qualified, they will receive immediate feedback and be able to continue job submission.

As I wrote this blog, I happened to see ADP’s latest TV ad, with a voiceover that says ‘At ADP, we’re designing a better way to work so you can achieve what you’re working for’, which is a neat summary of the ADP approach. Competitors will be sure to follow suit with similar initiatives, but by continuously innovating and improving its products and services, ADP is laying the groundwork for its next 70 years in business.