Charles Lafferty

All right, everyone. By a show of hands, how many people have got a new job or had a teammate switch jobs in the last two years? Look at that. Look around the room. Look how many people raised their hands there.

So what happened over the last two years? 2022 was the height of the Great Resignation. It's harder than ever to retain talent at your companies. And what keeps you at your job? And my managers out there, how are you going to retain your talent?

At ADP, it's easy to find people who have been there for 10, 20, 30, 40, even 50 years. People joined when they were 18 years old, and I've seen the recognition. So what keeps people there? What keeps me there?

I'm one of those people. I've worked at ADP for 13 years now, and I'll tell you what: I had managers who cared about me. I had growth opportunities, learning opportunities. I had challenging things to work on. I had a team that cared about each other.

And so with that, there was something there that I didn't realize what it was until I became a manager. And that thing is called engagement. It's called employee engagement. I was engaged.

And so with that veil now lifted, I can see it. I want to talk to you all about employee engagement, and I'm going to try to convince you that employee engagement is a secret weapon that's going to help you increase your profitability, your productivity, and your retention for your teams. And I'm going to give you tips about how all of you can use it in your day-to-day jobs.

All right, let's get into it. A little bit about ADP. ADP is coming up on its 75th birthday. It was founded in 1949. As Gene said, we are a human capital management company, so we do everything from hiring to retiring. You can think of payroll, talent, tax, benefits like 401(k)s.

We moved $3.1 trillion through the U.S. economy in client funds in fiscal year 2022. And there's a good chance that some of you out here might see our logo on your pay stub, as we pay one in six private-sector U.S. workers in the U.S.

All right, employee engagement. First, let's define it. Let's get on the same page what engagement means. And this is from Dr. Mary Hayes and Marcus Buckingham in the Definitive Series: Employee Engagement study they did in 2020.

What it is, is they define it as the emotional state of mind that causes people to do their best work sustainably. So I know we talk a lot about sprints. This is more of a marathon here, when you're working at a company for a long time.

I think it's a great definition. What it tells us is you're going to bring your whole self to work every day. You're going to come to your job, you're going to like your job, and you're going to do a great job at it.

So when you love your job and you like what you do, that's a strength. When you don't like what you're doing but you're good at it, that's a task. You can get burned out on that. When you love what you're doing but you're not very good at it, that's called a hobby. People might not pay you for that.

All right, so now we know what employee engagement is. What's the impact of that? How do we measure it?

First, let's talk about what happens when you have really highly engaged teams. The first one, this study has a very long title: “The Business-Unit-Level Relationship Between Employee Satisfaction, Employee Engagement, and Business Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis,” in the Journal of Applied Psychology. This is one of the seminal studies in this field.

There was research done by 7,000 business units in 36 different companies, and they found that the business units in the top quartile, the top 25% of engagement, had a 1 to 4% higher profitability than their peers. Also, companies who had engagement in the top quartile had $80,000 to $120,000 higher monthly revenue.

So what's happening here? This one is about employee engagement and retention. Here, what we found, and this one is from the ADP Research Institute. ADP has a research institute where we actually study employee engagement and employees. Here we found that employee engagement and retention have a correlation.

So what they did was they measured the people who left the company versus the people who stayed at the company for that same period of time. And they found a relative difference of 28% in the people who were fully engaged. So the people who left the company, only 32% of them were fully engaged, versus the people who stayed with the company in that same time period, 41% of them were fully engaged.

So retention and engagement have an impact.

Employee engagement and profits. It's hard to measure developers. It's hard to measure their productivity. But you can measure salespeople, because they're going to sell something. They're going to sell it or they won't. And so we are able to compare: are the salespeople engaged, and how are they performing?

So what the ADP Research Institute found here in the Definitive Series: Employee Engagement is that the teams that were in the bottom quartile of engagement, the lowest engaged folks in the company, failed to meet their performance target by 7%. Meanwhile, the folks who were highly engaged, the top quartile, exceeded their performance targets by 4%.

This proves that your bottom line is impacted by employee engagement.

Finally, performance. How do you do at your job? Turns out that the low performers, so taking the folks who are the lowest performers in the company, 36% of them are fully engaged. Meanwhile, the folks in your top quartile, the best performers in your company, 52% of them are fully engaged.

Definitely a correlation here. And guess what? Your manager is two times more likely to rate you a high performer if you're fully engaged.

So what does that mean? That means that you want a promotion, you want a new task, you want a new thing you want to do in the company, you want to move laterally. What are you going to do? Be fully engaged, because your manager is going to recognize it, and this data proves it.

How do we measure engagement? I talk a lot about being fully engaged. What does that mean, fully engaged? How do we measure engagement?

ADP has a tool called StandOut. It's a tool you can actually buy if you wanted to, and this is how we measure it throughout the company. Every quarter, a survey goes out to the entire company. We ask these eight questions. The questions are broken down into “we” questions and “me” questions.

I talked to Dr. Mary Hayes last week sometime, and she told me that the “we” questions are the reasons why we join the company, and the “me” questions are the reasons why we stay. So these are a great balance between creating a great culture and work environment and also feeling challenged to grow. And they're broken down into purpose, excellence, support, and future.

We don't ask questions like, “What's the strategic direction of my company?” The typical person is not going to know that unless they're talking to the CIO or CEO or reading every single article about it.

But you can answer questions like, “My teammates have my back,” or “I know I'll be recognized for excellent work,” or “In my team, I'm surrounded by people who share my values.”

And I was talking to somebody yesterday, and they were saying, “Well, what about psychological safety?” I was like, “You know, these questions are kind of like psychological safety questions. My teammates have my back.” It kind of fits there.

So this is how we measure it. Now, ADP has a proprietary algorithm to figure out whether or not you're fully engaged, but I encourage you all to check out the tool. It's called StandOut.

So now you know how we measure engagement. Let's talk about teams and developers.

This slide blows my mind. Team leaders matter a lot.

So how are you going to get your developers engaged? How are you going to get the outcomes that I just talked about, in more productivity, more profitability, and higher retention for your company?

Turns out, managers, frontline managers: there's a 99.96% chance that your team will not be fully engaged unless that frontline manager is engaged. This is black and white. This is as good as it gets, because you now know that you need to have fully engaged frontline leaders.

And this was over a three-year period that they did this study. When the team leader is fully engaged, there's a 65% chance that that team will also be fully engaged.

So this is kind of counterintuitive. You think, “Oh, I have to go and make sure all of my employees are fully engaged.” What you should be doing is making sure your frontline managers are fully engaged. Then you can scale that throughout the entire company.

Teams, trust, and leadership. Just being on a team, you're 2.6 times more likely to be fully engaged. So that tells us: build teams.

Trust. When an employee says that they trust their frontline manager, their first manager, they're 14 times more likely to be fully engaged.

So what does that mean? We need to have managers who are fully engaged. They need to be building teams. They need to be building trust.

So how the heck do we build trust with teams?

I like throwing slides like this up here. I know there's a lot of words on it, but what I like to do is plant seeds. I'm planting seeds in all your heads so you can come up later on and ask me questions about some of these.

I have 27 things. Twenty-seven. I call them common-sense engagement tips. I'm going to explain four of them to you.

The first one I call “explain why.” So how do you engage a development team? How do you engage any team, really? Explain why you're making the choices you're making. It's as easy as that.

When you explain the choices you're making, they can go above and beyond. They can go do things that you never thought of yourself when you gave them that task, as long as you're giving them the goal.

Do one-on-ones. One-on-ones are the foundation of a relationship. It's the foundation of trust. So what I want you to do is, if you're a manager out there, or just a team lead, or just a member of the team, build relationships with people. That's going to build trust with people.

What's going to happen here is you want to find out about how their wife's doing, how their kid's doing, what they want to do in their job, how they want to succeed. You're going to be able to build trust and help them out better.

Listen actively, no matter the idea. I always give a little story here. I say, “Come with any idea to me.” What happens is that ideas are a numbers game. There can be a thousand ideas, but only 10 of them are great ideas. But you never want to discourage the idea-giving.

So we listen actively, no matter the idea. I always say, if you came to me and said, “Chuck, I want to use Excel as a database,” I’d say, “All right. Let's listen. Let's talk. Let's figure out how we can use Excel as data. I'm going to build on that with you.”

Turns out Excel might not be the best database, and through the course of that conversation, we're not going to use it. That's fine. But I didn't tell that person no, because I want them to come with the next one, which might be brilliant.

The next one: align opportunities with people's interests. Why is this so important? Because when you give someone the thing that they want to do and the thing that they're most passionate about, they're going to do 10 times more work. Why? Because they're engaged. They want to do it. So align their interests. If they're coming to you and saying, “I want to work on a Rust project,” give them the project. It might blow their minds.

Final last one is just care. Just care about your team.

What happens with caring is it's double-edged, because you could be doing one-on-ones, you can be invested in somebody, and guess what? They might leave your company, and it hurts. It hurts when they leave. And you can say to yourself, “I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to invest in people.”

But guess what? When you care, what happens is we celebrate them when they leave the company, because you might have given them the confidence to do something bigger and better than what they were doing there. And you know what? Karma kicks in. There could be other opportunities for you in the future as you connect.

Listen to your team. I've heard people here talk about tech debt. I don't call it tech debt. I call it innovation ideas. People don't want to be on the tech debt team, but you put them on the innovation team, well, they want to be on that team.

So when you come with innovation ideas, reducing build time is an innovation idea. Making a webpage more performant is an innovation idea. Whenever you hear your team say, “Hey, we talk about it, but we never do anything about it,” that's your signal as a leader or a team lead to go out there, get that thing on the backlog, and do it in the next sprint or the next quarter.

Survey roulette. Survey roulette is fun for the engagement of a development team. We do a lot of surveys at ADP. One thing, we have an open text box with our applications, and we go back to the team. They're not going to read all of the survey comments that come in, but the survey is about our tool and whether or not people like it.

I run internal tools inside ADP. What happens is in the team meeting, we'll spend 15 minutes. We have an architectural meeting. We get together and we say, “Okay, John, would you like a good comment or a negative comment?” And John will say, “Give me a negative,” and we'll pick a random one.

It builds empathy with the team, and they get to solve the problem. Or they say, “Okay, give me a good one.” And maybe it's a feature that somebody worked on, and they get pride in that feature that we talked about inside the survey.

And finally here, when we talk about developer engagement, the one that I'm most proud of here, because I love building teams. That's my favorite thing the most. This quote from Varun B. is about, whenever an issue pops up, as a team, we try to resolve it rather than pointing fingers.

It's so easy to point fingers. So easy to close your laptop, forget about it, and walk away. It's harder to take ownership of it. And that's what these teams do when you're engaged.

Engaging the enterprise. How do you scale this engagement from an individual development team to an entire enterprise? That's a hard thing to do, especially at a big company like ADP.

So what you want to do is create frictionless work. Think about it like this: how do you get happy clients? Well, first you have to have happy employees. How do you have happy employees? You’ve got to give them a tool that doesn't drain their soul.

When you're building internal tools, again, we measure everything in terms of whether or not people like our internal tools. You have to give them frictionless tools. This is going to increase engagement.

Think of a customer service rep calling your company, and they're on the phone with somebody who's having a really bad day because the thing they're trying to solve is not getting solved. Meanwhile, that customer service rep can't use the tool that they're trying to solve the problem with. That's a really hard thing. That person's not going to be engaged. That customer service rep is not going to be highly engaged because the tool that they're using is not very good.

So how do we do this? How do we get this feedback loop going so we can give engagement to the entire company?

What we do is surveys. We send out surveys. We figure out: is this something that's productive for the company?

We do observations. I love user researchers. User researchers are my favorite people, because they do these studies on your product, and you get to see real time whether it's easy to use or how people can actually complete tasks in them.

Seat rides. Seat rides is not flinging John from ops down the hallway in a chair. Seat rides is when you actually meet with the people who do the work on your tool. What happens is we'll go to our customer service reps, or we'll go to the people that use our tools, and we'll watch them use it. Super powerful. Gives you so many good ideas.

Whenever you call a company, they say, “Hey, this call may be monitored for training purposes.” You can watch those recordings, if there's big companies that do that stuff. And finally, internal collaboration tools. Frequently asked questions.

From all this research that we've done in our products, I found four pillars that have come out from this, four common themes. What they are is people will first complain about wanting a stable environment. They want to make sure that the tool that they're using is going to work every single time they click the button.

The next thing they'll complain about, or they'll mention in the surveys, is they'll say they want it easy to use. It wants to be a frictionless environment where they click the button, it works, and also they don't have to do a lot of training.

They want information at their fingertips. The problem is solved as soon as the website pops up. And if all else fails, they want to be trained how to use it. If you do need to build a complex application, you need to teach people how to use it.

And so from that, this is not like in a book or anything. This is my own thing. I call it the product hierarchy of needs.

On the bottom of the pyramid here, I have stability and performance. If you don't have stability and performance, you don't have an application. So stop what you're doing and make sure the thing actually performs well and works.

Above that is usability. You want people to build features, and you want them to be usable. So user researchers, UX designers, those folks are going to really help with the usability.

And then on top of that, we do training at last. That's the last one that we do, is we do training.

And there's other things in here, like smaller, more frequent deployments. This has been discovered. It's true. It works in our company.

And of course, another fun thing we do is, as we do these surveys and send stuff out, we might do a big push right before the survey happens to release a new tool with a feature flag. Or we might wait the week while the survey goes out to release something that might be a little more risky. And that helps increase that engagement with those associates.

So some comments here from some business leaders and some development managers about what happened when we do these types of things and we get into survey feedback.

The first one here is listening to associates' pain points and bridging the gap is exactly what these teams are doing. You're trying to encourage the feedback loop between the development team and the business.

Collaboration between dev teams and business has been phenomenal.

The one that I like the most here is the survey feedback. The survey feedback to me has been positive. I personally have gotten feedback from appreciative associates that the teams are listening to their concerns and making improvements.

What we do is, I call it closing the loop. We close the loop. When someone comes to us with whatever challenge they're facing or a bug in the application, what we do is we'll reach back out to that person.

So they say, “This application was slow.” “We got that fixed for you. We're going to send it to you tomorrow.”

“I want this feature.” “All right, guess what? We got the feature. Here's a screenshot. I'm going to send it back to that person.”

That increases engagement for us with the actual users of the application. They appreciate it.

All right, in conclusion, here's a quote for you: “To win in the marketplace, you must first win in the workplace,” by Doug Conant. He's the former CEO of Campbell Soup, and also he runs his own leadership consulting firm right now.

What does this mean to me? What does this mean, to win in the workplace? To me, it means a couple of things. It means I'm achieving my goals. I'm achieving my OKRs. It means that I'm delivering things on time. It also means that I have a happy, healthy, collaborative work environment. People who want to work there. People who have jobs that feel fulfilled.

How do we get there? A manager's job really is results and retention. So you have to balance having people stay while also still producing great results, challenging them to work harder or work smarter or do things for themselves.

So what did we learn here? We learned that you need to build your frontline leaders up and get them engaged. And you need to be engaged yourself. We’ve learned that you need to build teams. We've also learned that you need to build trust and discover how to do these things. And I gave you some great engagement tips of how you can do that.

And if you do all these things in your organization, what I want you to do is I want you to be the leader. I want you to be the person that's going to be the change agent that's going to do this stuff at your company.

And when you do that, I don't want you to just be the leader that just helps your one individual team, or helps your one individual organization, or helps your one individual company. I want you to help everybody.

I want you to be the best leader in the world, because that's what it's going to take if you want to be number one. So get out there, find ways to engage your employees, and let that unleash in your company.

And with that, I thank you for your time and hand it back.