Unlocking Employee Engagement and Innovation | ADP’s Chuck Lafferty

0:00Bring your whole self to work. Every day you come to work excited to want to be there. You are doing your best work. When you're doing something you love and you're good at it, that's called a strength. When you're doing something that you don't like doing, but you're good at it, that's called a task. That's going to burn you out. Think about something that you love doing, but you're not very good at. That's called a hobby. People might not necessarily pay you. I feel called out for that. How can you build a metrics program that not only measures, but improves engineering performance. What's the right metrics framework for your team?

0:34On May 2nd and 7th, Linear B is hosting their next workshop where you will learn how to build a metrics program that reduces cycle time by 47 % on average, improves developer experience, and increases delivery predictability. At the end, you'll receive a free how-to guide and tools to help you get started. You can register today at the link in the description. Hope to see you there. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm your co-host, Connor Bronson, and I'm delighted to be joined by a listener of ours today, the one and only Chuck Lafferty, Senior Director of Application Development at ADP.

1:05Chuck, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's a distinct pleasure. I know you are a professional podcaster in your own right, and ADP is one of the biggest companies that people don't seem to know about, despite the fact that y 'all had$18 billion in revenue last year. Can you tell us a bit about the company? Yeah, well, I think that's a great starting point, and I don't know about professional podcaster, but thanks for that. ADP is a human capital management company. We're also a tech company. And what we do is we help your payroll. So you can think of paychecks, you can think of taxes, you can think of benefits like 401ks, medical and dental.

1:38But how I like to say it is we do everything from hiring to retiring. So we really help your company out there. A couple more things about ADP too that people might not know is we're coming up on our 75th birthday. So we found in 1949. We have over 1 million clients worldwide. It's a huge number. Surprisingly, as we're here at this conference, I have not heard a bigger number than this one. ADP moved$3.1 trillion in client funds in fiscal year 2022. Wow. I have not heard someone say a bigger number than 3.1 trillion. That's pretty solid. That's why it's on there, that's for sure. And we pay one in six workers in the US.

2:14So there's a good chance your listeners out there, they might look at their pay stub and see our logo. Well, I appreciate that context. And I know that you're someone who's steeped in the ADP culture. You joined back in 2010 as a senior application developer. You've worked your way up. You founded the ADP developer community to help foster new relationships and new communication channels between ADP development teams. As I mentioned, you're also the host of the internal ADP technology podcast. You have a great presentation that you give about unlocking the power of employee engagement. Let's dive into that a little bit.

2:46What's the approach you take? Well, first, the questions that I get is what is employee engagement? And so I think we started there. We define what employee engagement means. Really, ultimately, what you want is a happy, productive development team. I mean, who doesn't want to work at a great company where you feel like you're making a difference? We have something called the ADP Research Institute at ADP. And they do studies. We study employees. We try to figure out what makes them productive. You know, you might have heard of the ADP employment report. Yes. You know, this comes out every once in a while and we kind of, you know, it's broadcasts on different types of commercial radio shows and stuff like that.

3:24And we talk about how many people, private sector jobs, were in the economy. And so this research study they also do is around employee engagement. What makes people happy at work and want to stay and productive. And so Dr. Mary Hayes and Marcus Buckingham did a study in 2020 called the Definitive Series Employee Engagement. You can look it up online. And they define employee engagement as the emotional state of mind that causes people to do their best work sustainably. So that's a bunch of words. Now let me translate them for you. What that means to me is bring your whole self to work. Every day you come to work excited to want to be there.

4:03You are doing your best work, meaning that you're not just like, you know, of course there's downtime and uptime at work and stuff like that, but you're coming there every day to kind of make a positive impact, help your teammates out and do great work. And so we call that a strength. So when you're doing something you love and you're good at it, that's called a strength. When you're doing something that you don't like doing, but you're good at it, that's called a task. That's going to burn you out. You know, that wouldn't be very much fun. Think about something that you love doing, but you're not very good at.

4:34That's called a hobby. People might not necessarily pay you. I feel called out right now. For that. Hey, I'm good at building Lego. Thank you very much. So people may not necessarily pay you for that. So we try to find what are you good at and what do you love doing? And we try and match that. And that has great impact on your company. That's a fantastic philosophy. How do you measure employee engagement? Okay, measuring employee engagement, that's really tricky. The only way that I'm going to know if you're engaged is if I ask you. It's going to be really hard for me to figure it out. Otherwise, there's not really like metrics on code or productivity that's going to tell me whether or not you feel fulfilling your job.

5:14So ADP has a tool called Standout. And it's actually a tool that you can buy. It's a survey that goes out to your company and it has eight questions on it. And the questions are broken down into we questions and me questions. I can give some examples of the questions. I don't have to read them all out. What do you want to do is you want to find qualitative and quantitative questions in any kind of thing, like the door metrics. Absolutely. There's quantitative metrics like deployment frequency and qualitative metrics like mean time to recovery and change value rate. And so this is kind of the same idea.

5:42How do you balance these? How do you have a great work environment, but also feel challenged? The we questions are about, why did I join this company? And the me questions are more about, why do I stay? So let me give you a couple examples of some of those questions that we ask. Let's talk about the we questions first. And these are, these also kind of, to me at least, feed back to psychological safety. So one of the questions is, my teammates have my back. That one kind of makes me feel like, okay, I'm a part of a community. I'm a part of people who are trying to help me do my job. And there's trust.

6:13And we're going to talk about trusting. Oh, great. You should ask me about trust. I'm jumping ahead here. As the next question. All right. Because I'm excited about trust. These questions are not about like, what's the strategic direction of my company? Like no one's going to know. Some might, but unless you're reading every single article, you're not going to know, do I agree with the strategic direction of my company? It's really worded difficult. But a question like, in my team, I'm surrounded by people who share my values. You're going to feel that one. Or another question is, at work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.

6:44That's such a great one. That's such a telling one. Because if you don't know what's expected of you at work, you got to ask. You got to go to your manager. You have to figure out what you should be doing. And then you align. Then you can become more productive. I'm taking notes here. This is great information. So you mentioned trust. I'd love to jump in there. As you mentioned, it's something that's very important to you, it sounds like. It's something that's very important to the survey and standout. What are your thoughts around trust within employee engagement and teams? So trust is one of the most predictive indicators whether or not you're going to be engaged at work.

7:20So when I talk about trust, you are 14 times more likely to be fully engaged at work if you trust your leader. So if you're a direct manager, you say, you know, there's always this old adage of people don't leave companies, they leave bosses. Right. I think this one kind of proves it. if you trust your frontline manager, your direct manager, you're 14 times more likely to be fully engaged. So that kind of proves that you got to work on trust. Now, the next question is, how do you build trust with teams? How do you build trust with team leads or managers or between teammates? And you're a manager of managers.

7:58Yes, I am a manager of managers. So I have to teach this to my managers so that they can help manage those frontline people. How do you teach building trust? So it's really hard. You can't fake trust. You can't fake caring. That's a really hard thing to do. So I have a lot of items I can share with you here. Maybe I'll just touch on a couple of them. That'd be perfect. You can ask me to deep dive in any of these as we go along. First one to build trust is people want to know why you're making the decisions that you're making. It's really important. Because so many times people will go, that's a stupid decision.

8:34Why did someone decide to do that? I've been guilty of that myself. Right? Why is management making these decisions? I don't understand the strategic direction of my company. Yeah. Or even my team. Or my team. What am I supposed to be doing? But if there is a reason behind why you're doing that and you're able to articulate that to your team, oh my God, then what happens to people is they know the goal. They know what they're after and they know why these decisions were made. They're going to be so much more engaged, so much more happier. They're going to understand what they're trying to do. And then you don't need to be prescriptive as a leader.

9:09You can say, this is my objective. This is the reason why we're trying to achieve this objective. Go at it. And then team becomes autonomous. You want to create autonomous teams in your company. Then they can go after it. A couple more. Let me just touch on a couple more for you because I know you want to ask me. I'm excited to share it. All right. The next one is how do we actually build trust? And it's through one-on-ones. It's doing what you and I are doing right now. you know you want to learn about and you want to learn about each person's individual life their family uh their pets people love talking about their pets you have a you have a dog guilty i have i have three cats actually three cats i bet you i bet you those cats are really important to you they are you know and if your manager knew your cat's name photos photos right it's really important people dogs pets anything it's really important and it's it becomes almost like you When I ask you, how's your cat doing?

9:59I heard they were sick. You take them to the vet. Becomes more engaging. But also what happens during those conversations when you're doing a one-on-one is they could reveal something they want to do at work or something that's making them upset at work or something that you as a manager might have influence over that can help them. So that's another way to build trust. Another one I like to use, and maybe I'll pass it back to you, but I have actually 27 items in my presentation. I love that. Let's keep going. People can watch the presentation and learn more about it. I guess one more that I'll talk about is, let's talk about just caring.

10:35Let's just talk about caring about people as people. That one's really important. Again, like I mentioned, you can't fake caring. You have to be invested in somebody. And what happens with caring is it's kind of double-edged because you want people to improve. You want people to have a fulfilled life, but also be great at their jobs. And what happens is you're meeting one-on-ones. you feel like you're investing in somebody and they could leave. They could leave the company. And that hurts. It hurts. Totally. You know, you never think of it from the manager's point of view. You always think like, this company stinks and I want to leave.

11:09But when you think of it from a manager's point of view, you're like, oh, I invested so much in this person. I gave them training and opportunities and growth and promotions and they decided to take that talent somewhere else. It could hurt. But what I want you to think about is you gave that person an opportunity for confidence to challenge themselves to now go do something bigger. And you never know where life's going to take you or that person, you could work with them in the future. And what are they going to say about you and your team and what you did for them? They're going to have that for the rest of their life.

11:37So that's another way to build trust is just investing relentlessly in your team. I love that. And both of these examples, you know, building trust, understanding what matters to people and maintaining that relationship with that, they actually bring to mind an example from American business history. So John D. Rockefeller, famous business magnate, philanthropist, built a massive business empire. One of the things they discovered when he died was that he had kept files on every person he'd ever met in his business dealings. And he would keep notes. He would say, this is their dog's name. This is their kid's name.

12:11This is their kid's going to Brown. Great. Oh, and they're on the swim team. I should ask about that next time. And that intentionality in building his relationships obviously was a crucial part of his success because people saw that he cared, whether they were, you know, a business partner or a potential customer or a team member. He would go and he'd say, okay, I'm meeting with, you know, Chuck. Let me go like remind myself like, oh, Chuck has a, you know, a wonderful daughter is going to Brown. Let me ask about that. And I think that attention to detail and care about people is at the core of so many incredible renowned leaders is they are intentional not only about designing systems and technology, but also in designing their interactions with people.

12:54And I think a lot of folks think, oh, you know, soft skills don't matter. But this is, you know, we always talk about on the show, this is a very actionable way to approach and say, hey, I'm going to build employee engagement. I'm going to build trust. What are other ways that you can engage individual developers? I have so many for you. Let's bring it on, Chuck. I love this. Let's talk about it. All right. So one thing that I want to mention here is I do want to talk about what I call innovation ideas. And I want to touch on this one because this is one way that I get developers really engaged in their work.

13:24So I talk about listen actively, no matter the idea. And what that means to me is that you can come to me with any idea. Ideas are a numbers game. Okay. You want as many ideas as possible because one or two, 1 % of them were going to be blockbusters. Sure. So if you're going to come to me an idea and I understand, you know, in management, it might be hard to come to your boss or your boss's boss, right? With an idea, because you want to feel like you're sharing something interesting with them, right? Well, and this is where that psychological safety piece comes in that you mentioned earlier. Exactly.

13:53And if you care about somebody and you're showing that to them, they're going to want to come with more ideas. But the second you shoot down an idea, it's over. They're not going to come back to you with more ideas. So what I want you, all management leaders, all team leads, all friends of friends that do development, listen actively to that idea and try and build on it. So it's yes and, you know, there's always this thing, yes and not no but. You don't want to say, no, but your idea is not going to work. You want to say, yes, and here's how your idea could work. The classic example I use is that if you came to me and said, Chuck, I have these Excel files.

14:28They're really good Excel files. We can add and remove data from it like a database. We should use this as a database. I'm like, so what I'll do is I'll talk to you and I'll say, let's build on it. Instead of saying this is a stupid idea. I didn't say that. You said that. I'm not as good of a leader. what i would say is let's talk about it okay let's let's have a conversation let's figure out how we can use excel as a database does it lock the file could could we read from it often like how's all that work and maybe through the course of our conversation we realize it just might not be the best database yeah but guess what that person's going to be excited next time because i listened to that one yeah right and so that's what you want to build with development teams now when it comes to innovation ideas so now that i'm listening to ideas what i do is i don't and this is a side topic, I can dive an hour into this one with you around tech debt.

15:20I don't call it tech debt. Wait, let me ask the producers, can we break up some more time? What's our run time here? I don't call it tech debt. I call it innovation ideas. And the reason why I do this is because debt has a negative connotation to it, as most people say. And so I call it innovation. Imagine creating a tech debt team. What developer, I mean, some would, but not a lot. If you want to be on a team that solves technical debt, Like that's really tough. I mean, sometimes that's what platform teams do is they're solving technical debt for the company. But what I like to do is I like call them innovation.

15:53So imagine being on the innovation team now. All of a sudden it's like, I want to be on the innovation team. A little more exciting. A little more exciting. And so just that simple switch in the words. So what does an innovation team do? They lower build times. They make application more performant. They find ways to tune queries in the database. They'll reduce the time in the CICD pipeline. They'll add automated testing. They'll make sure everything is in CICD pipeline so that I can extract things like Dora metrics or have tools that help me figure that out. And so that is the foundation of your application.

16:26That is the stability of your application. It's the most important thing you can do in your application. You're showcasing results. Oh, 100%. You want your application to be highly available, highly resilient, and performant, right? And of course, a whole other non-functional requirements. And so if we frame them that way, What you're doing is you're helping that team become more engaged to make the application better. And another thing you're doing is whenever I hear, you know, I join architecture meetings and stuff like that. And I'll hear things like we talk about it, but we never do anything about it.

16:59That's my favorite words. Believe it or not. That's my favorite words. Why? Yeah. Why is that my favorite words? Because now what happens is we get to fix your problem. Now that's my job. Now my job kicks in. like as a leader. Now I hear that and I go, well, who's going to make the change? I'm going to put it on your backlog. And now that you get to, you get, you said you were the one that completely, well, mentioned it was a challenge. You get to fix it. Yeah. I'm now going to give you that opportunity for that thing that drove you crazy. For innovation. And guess what happens? They're engaged.

17:33And guess what happens when they finish it? They're so proud that they made it faster or better or stronger. And you've reduced friction. And you've, and you've made the whole team productive. Yeah. Maybe even the whole company. So important question, when are you writing your book? I have a lot to say. I haven't planned to write a book yet, but I definitely am passionate about all this, as you can tell. Whether you're watching on YouTube and seeing Chuck evoke this or listening on one of our podcast apps, it's very clear what your passion is here. And I've also heard some really interesting things from your talk and other pieces, including something called survey roulette, which I'd love to understand.

18:14Yeah, survey roulette. So this is one of my, one of the leaders on my team named Rick, he came up with survey roulette. And it's a fun thing to engage development teams. I try to make work fun. You know, technology and stuff like that, it can be a little bit daunting, a little bit monotonous at times. And also a little bit, you know, if you work on a defect for two or three days, it can kind of crush you a little bit, you know, you don't feel like you're being productive. So how can we make it fun? So one of the things the team invented was something called Survey Roulette. We do a lot of surveying.

18:44We try to figure out whether or not people like our application. And so we send out surveys to them and they give us a score. And they're also a little text box that says, give us feedback. And so what we do is when we send that out, every month we're going to get that feedback in and then we review it as a development team. And so on there, we'll say, okay, developer Max, would you like a positive, negative, or neutral comment? and Max will go, I would like a negative comment. So then we'll read it. So we'll pick a random one in the survey. We'll read the comment. What it does is it's kind of fun, number one.

19:16But number two, the developer gets to have empathy for the clients, the people using the application because they get to see a problem. Most of the time, there's a fix for what they're complaining about. What might be negative in the survey? Let's say it that way. And then we'll say, okay, we'll just go down the list. We'll say, okay, Jesse, what do you want? And they'll say, I want a positive comment. Okay, we'll read the positive comment. What happens there? It might be a feature that we stumbled across that was just released. And guess what? Jesse might have been the dev that did that feature.

19:44Oh my God. Now they're proud of their work and they got direct user feedback about what we did. So we do this for 15 minutes. It's a fun little thing. I thought I'd share it with some other people. Is this how you approach discovering features to improve applications people use? Oh, 100%. 100%. There's so many things we do there. We do things, again, I mentioned surveys. Right. So we ask people directly how they feel. We also do observations. I call this also fueling your backlog. So when you say observations, is this like ride-alongs for devs basically with customers or what is this? So there's actually a field called user research.

20:19And you might have heard of UX, user design, stuff like that, but not a lot of people hear about user research. So this is people that are in the industry and we have them at ADP. And what they will do is they are legit academic researchers. They're actually a part of our teams. at ADP, and there's a lot of them in ADP. And what we do is they'll do time and motion studies. They'll do things like watching users complete tasks and figure out how long they take or how easy it was. And we'll ask the users at the end, we'll say, how easy was this task? And then we'll get scores from that. And we'll be able to take scientific measurements about how productive that was.

20:58And then we'll apply it, a hypothesis. Then we'll apply whatever the change was and retest. Did the scores go up? and it's the scientific method, right? And so we just keep doing that over and over until the scores are where we want them to be. So that's fueling your backlog. And you mentioned, you did mention seat rides that the other one is called seat rides. That's a little bit different. Okay. A seat ride is not like me flinging you down the hallway in your wheelie chair right now. A seat ride is when you sit with a person using your application. So when I will sit with a person that's actually using the app, it's mind blowing because they might have stickies on their monitor.

21:33They might have things they're writing down while they're trying to complete the task. And you realize the thing they're writing down is either a feature you already have, or it's a feature that you can now invent for them. Right. So that they don't have to go and write the sticky note down, something you place right away. You won't know that unless you go sit with the person. Just watching them use your app and their environment, what's around them? Is there a mirror? Is there something else they're doing? How are they facing the computer? What screens do they have what on? Because then you'll discover, oh, they have Outlook open over here.

22:03and they have our app open over here. Why do they have Outlook open? Well, they need to send an email. And so you're going to get so much more about how you can put more things in your app if you discover that. Yeah, that context is so important and the understanding of how real users use it because this is so common in application development that we imagine this path of, oh, the user will do this. And then I'm sure you've seen this famous video of square pegs go in the square hole. Okay, great. The triangle peg also goes in the square hole. Great, like just keeps going in there. We designed all these, there's a triangle hole, put it through there, no, no, it just goes in the square hole.

22:36And I think it's such a common thing for us to discover when we do these ride-alongs with our users. And we go, oh, you're using this in a different way than I expected. And maybe you don't know about this feature that you mentioned. So the beauty of what all this research does is you are now making your employees use your app more engaged. You are now making them better at their job. They're more productive. And guess what? They become happier because their app is what they needed to do. Right. And so now you're scaling your engagement, not just from your development team, but now to the whole company.