Unlocking Employee Engagement and Innovation | ADP’s Chuck Lafferty

**Chuck Lafferty** (0:00)
Bring 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 gonna 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.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:23)
I feel called out right now 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?
On 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, Conor Bronsdon, 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. Chuck, welcome to the show.

**Chuck Lafferty** (1:07)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:08)
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?

**Chuck Lafferty** (1:22)
Yeah, well, I think it'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. But how I like to say it is we do everything from hiring to retiring.
So we really help the 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 that 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
I have not heard someone say a bigger number than 3.1 trillion.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:09)
That's pretty solid. It's up there, that's for sure.

**Chuck Lafferty** (2:12)
And we pay one in six workers in the US. So there's a good chance your listeners out there, they might look at their pay stub and see our logo.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:19)
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.
What's the approach you take?

**Chuck Lafferty** (2:48)
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.
This comes out every once in a while, and we kind of broadcast on different types of commercial radio shows and stuff like that, and 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 defined employee engagement as the emotional state of mind that causes people to do their best work sustainably.