HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Powering Up Your Payroll with Sriram Ganesan, Rippling
In this HRchat episode, we look at building a first-rate payroll product. My guest today is Sriram Ganesan, Senior Director of Engineering at Rippling, a company on a mission to help customers increase savings, automate busy work, and make better decisions by managing payroll, HR, IT & spending in one place.
Unlock the secrets to freeing up your HR team's time and enhancing strategic thinking with Sriram. Join us as we uncover how Rippling is transforming payroll, HR, IT, and spending management with cutting-edge technology. From Sriram's journey from Rippling's insurance team to leading the global payroll team, discover how they simplify complex processes and eliminate the tedium of manual tasks, allowing HR professionals to focus on what truly matters.
Explore how Rippling is breaking down barriers for companies looking to expand globally. Sriram reveals Rippling's dual approach: the Employment of Record (EOR) for seamless international hiring and a robust software solution that centralizes essential HR functions. Embrace the efficiency of Rippling's interconnected ecosystem, where manual data entry becomes a thing of the past. Much like Apple's renowned integration, Rippling's holistic approach is designed to empower organizations to solve more complex problems and thrive in the global market.
Understand the intricacies of building a successful payroll technology product. Our conversation with Sriram dives into the critical components, such as ensuring timely and accurate employee payments and crafting a system that addresses payment queries with clarity. Learn the importance of having a contingency plan and why proactive communication with customers is crucial.
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Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannon, and in this episode we're going to look at building a first-rate payroll product. My guest today is Sriyam Ganesan, senior Director of Engineering over at Rippling, a company on a mission to help customers increase savings, automate busy work and make better decisions by managing payroll, hr, it and spending all in one place. Sriram, how are you today? Nice to get you on the show, nice to meet you.
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you. Bill, I'm very happy to be here. I'm like the representative, so how are you doing today?
Speaker 2:So, beyond my reintroduction there, why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes and telling our listeners all about yourself and what you get up to?
Speaker 3:um, yeah, sure, so I'm free, ram. I work on the engineering team at tripling. Rippling is a payroll and a insurance and a hris company. I've been an engineer at Rippling for like almost seven years now. I worked in various capacities. I joined as a low-level engineer working on the insurance team, primarily helping small businesses get insurance for their companies in a less confusing and manage that in an easier way. And after that, like during the covert era especially, we wanted to serve like a lot of companies are hiring globally, so we wanted to help customers do that more effectively. So we started a team called global payroll team that I ended up, uh, leading, uh, you know, regardless of where your employees are, we just help you do payroll for them. So, yeah, that's about me.
Speaker 2:Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to challenge you now. Okay, I like to do this sometimes on this show. Give me the mission of rippling, but do it in under 60 seconds Go.
Speaker 3:I'll do it even shorter. Um, it's to free smart people to work on the important things. Um I, I guess, like you know, to explain it a little bit more. Um, you know people in hr, uh payroll, um you know, um hris, insurance. They usually end up having to do a lot of like crappy work, filling forms and like um just doing a lot of busy work, and like our mission is to basically like, let like automate a lot of the busy work and like, let the smart people working in a chat be a lot more efficient with the day-to-day can you now share a bit about rippling's approach to R&D?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think Rippling's approach to R&D is very much around automating the busy work and providing a good experience both to the employer and for the employee, and a little bit of background of how Rippling got started was because our CEO and a little bit of background of how Rupalain got started was because our CEO, parker Conrad, had a bunch of companies before. I think he's had three or four companies now and he just found the experience of managing employees, doing payroll and doing insurance really hard and confusing for a new person to the system and wanted to build something. And then saw an opportunity to build something which is simple and easy to use and doesn't make you go through maze-like software to build it. What we try to do is build a really simple and intuitive user experience and automating as much of the things as possible that a normal HR person wouldn't have to do. To user experience and like automating as much of the things as possible that you know um that hit uh that a normal hr person will have to do so.
Speaker 3:For example, you know um, especially in the us, you have to fill in like a bunch of insurance form on the paper and you have to like fax it to the to an insurance carrier and like this use this form used to be given by the HR admin to the employee, ask them to fill it up, guide them through the process of like hey, what is a PPO, what is an HMO, and things like that, and now they have to figure out where the fax machine is and then send it over. So now what Rippling does is just provides a simple web form for the employee to fill it through and provide some guidance on. Like hey, a web form for the employee to like fill it through and like provide some guidance on. Like hey, what's an HMO, what's a PPO, stuff like you know and like, and automatically send the form and like access it to the insurance company. This is the kind of stuff that like Ripple does.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Companies have lots of challenges as they expand globally, of course. How does Rippling help ease this burden? How do you guys make it easier?
Speaker 3:um, yeah, I think like we reflect on our own journey a lot and see like what we wish we had when we started expanding and like we try to build that. So rippling is also a global company like. Since early days we've had offices in India, canada and recently we've had offices in the UK and China. There's a bunch of places and each country has its own unique challenges on how you start. So in some companies, opening a bank account is a huge ordeal. You don't even know where to start.
Speaker 3:In some countries it's like opening a bank account is easy, but like registering yourself with, like the government agencies is really hard. You might like miscarriage for yourself, right? So what Rippling tries to do is like we try to like provide two different options for employees who are trying to expand globally. First option is now called EOR and employment of record, or some people call it a global PEO. But essentially you don't have to do any of the things in the local. You don't need to hire a person in the local area. What Rippling does is hires the employee for you and you just pay to playing a little bit of. We need to manage the legal costs and things like that, but like so you don't need to open a bank account, you don't need to do anything.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm assuming you're a company in the us or like we do it in like a bunch of countries, but let's say you're a company based out of the UK. You basically like withdraw some, like you want to pay your employee in India if you hire them through our UI. We just like withdraw the money from your bank account in UK and then do the currency conversions in the most optimal manner and then send it to the employee in India, right, and also provide them the benefits and all of those things that we do for our own employees in India. We provide them. That's one way. But if you're like a much more established company, who? You have your own entity, you have your own bank account, you have people taking care of those things.
Speaker 3:We provide you a world-class software experience, like you know, a best-in-class like payroll software, hr software, insurance benefit software, pension software and all of those things to basically manage the entire site yourself. The biggest thing Rippling does in those cases is like it points a really good user experience and like centralizes all in a single system, like previously, like even in our company. What you start with is like we had different payroll systems in the Canada and in the US and the Canadian person had to request a PTO in their Canadian HR software and our HR person used to take a screenshot of like that PTO request and send it to the manager and the manager will say like yeah, approved. And then, like you know, hr person would go and like, approve that, like so. Things like that like we try to like avoid just by centralizing it all in a single system. So the Canadian person now just requests a PTO to their manager and since both of them are in the same system, they can just do all of that pretty easily.
Speaker 2:So your team has described Rippling as a compound startup. Can you share what that means and where Rippling is heading in the next sort of year or two? What are the plans for you guys? Tell us more.
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure. I guess compound startup is like a very interesting concept that like our CEO contract came about, concept that like our CEO Parker contract came up with. We call it a common startup because it's explicitly against the conventional system in like Silicon Valley on like how to build software. In Silicon Valley, the general conventional base on how to build software is you pick one limited area and like you specialize on it like crazy, right? So you basically, let's say, you build a ats system, you just build a really good ats system and like you sell the ats system and you focus it like very strongly on that.
Speaker 3:It's generally called a lean software model, right, but that doesn't work all in every case. There are a bunch of places where that provides a bad experience. Um, and the main places where that provides a bad experience. And the main place where it provides a bad experience is like when you want your softwares to talk to each other, for example, an ATA system. Once you finish hiring a candidate, you want that details of the employee to go into your HRI system, to go into your HRI system. Usually, in these point-based systems, what you have to do is, like some it's some poor HRI person's job to copy the data like manually, type it over like a manual data entry into the other, into your HRI system, and send an offer letter. And this is what and this is busy work and this is Rippling's mission to eliminate it right, like free, smart people to work on the hard problems. So what rippling's ethos here is like to provide these magical experiences, like an ats system automatically pushing data to hris. What it's not, it's not enough to build like just these one software. You need to build all of these systems so that you can make sure they all talk to each other well.
Speaker 3:If you're more familiar with a mobile model, it's like the Android version versus the Apple version. Apple is much more seamless. Everything works together well. If you use a Mac laptop, if use like a iphone, you can like read your messages in each, each of the spaces and things like those are magical experiences that you can provide only if you own the entire ecosystem, and rippling tries to own that entire ecosystem, to provide those magical experiences. And we try to build everything. We don't like outsource anything. We don't outsource ats, we don't outsource payroll, we don't outsource hr. We just try to do everything so that they can all like have a consistent and a magical user experience, and that is what like rippling calls us like a compound startup.
Speaker 3:Our future plans, um, our future plans, you know it's to continue to expand globally. We are currently in seven or eight countries actually more, I keep I lost track at some point but to continue expanding globally to provide like crippling services to more and more countries and also to like continue launching a suite of products. We are currently working on a one-on-one product that I'm very excited about. I've been internally testing. It's really the best one-on-one product I've used personally, so I'm very excited about that. So you know, like we try to build the tools that satisfy our own needs as like a growing organization, so we dock for everything that we launch. We are a primary customer of everything we launch. So that's what in the future, we'll just keep building whatever like our organization continuously okay, thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Um, so, I've worked in companies and in agencies where we've got, excuse me, clever engineers like yourself who've got these visions and all the rest of it. But in my experience, what I learned from osmosis and having conversations with the engineering teams is it's really important not just to have a roadmap, which is malleable, but also to have conversations with clients to help shape that roadmap and to help dictate what the technology can do and why it should do certain things. What do you guys do there? What was your approach to building that roadmap and ensuring that you're having regular touch points, regular conversations with existing users to ensure that the technology is as good as possible?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's really important to not have your own vision of grandeur and build something that the users don't really want. That's like wasting everyone's time. So we use two techniques here. The first one is my favorite, which is that our CEO is the only HR admin in Rippling, as in. He's the one who approves every single payroll. He's the one who approves every single insurance enrollment. He's the one who approves most of the expenses, so he's the most powerful user of the software. He's the one who uses the software the most.
Speaker 3:So in some ways, you know, if you are the customer, you can talk to yourself and you can get that user feedback much faster.
Speaker 3:So we basically make it a point to use every single thing that we launch and the people who launch it needs to use it as well.
Speaker 3:So I run payroll for Ripple just to get the experience of what it is like to run payroll for Ripple and, like you know, got on like how to improve it and things around that nature, and we also like frequently set up like paths with customers is to be like hey, you know a free form call of like hey, tell us, like what do you think?
Speaker 3:What are the biggest things that you wish, like Rippling did, or could improve on, like what are the things that, like Rippling, you wish you could fix? And the other thing that we do which I think is, like, very important, is we have all the engineers do support um, every engineer goes through a rotation um one week in every month or so, where they end up feeding requests from the support task. So they understand, like they understand, how frustrated customers get or what the pain points that customers are complaining about, so we can directly incorporate into the roadmap and build those things. Basically, user feedback is extremely important. We talk to customers, we force engineers to work on support and support tickets and also, like you know, get feedback from our own internal users. They are very vocal about their feedback, so we incorporate all of them into our roadmap.
Speaker 2:Okay, very good, we are already coming towards the end of this particular conversation, sriram, a couple more questions for you. Building a payroll tech product is pretty high stakes, of course, because many companies are relying on your solution to make sure that their employees are getting paid accurately and on time every time. That's rather important. Otherwise, you get very disgruntled employees and they might go elsewhere. What have been your biggest learnings while navigating how to build the somewhat complicated product? What are your top two or three major learnings over the last years?
Speaker 3:I think there are like few things that like has come comes up when you ask that question. One is to be able to explain why I think many payroll software could do this better. Bills pay for this month is like $8,993. But why I think it should be like $7,000. That is one of the most common queries that we get from customers, right? So building something which is fundamentally explainable and like thinking about like how to build a system that's very accessible from the beginning is really important and like we did that and that has like given us a lot of dividends.
Speaker 3:And the second one is like you always have to have a plan b. Um, there's always good. Like you know, there's something which might always go wrong. It might be near control, it might not be near control, the bank might be down, the customer like made a mistake. There are thousands of things. So it's really important to build plan B stuff.
Speaker 3:Plan B, that is like another big learning for us.
Speaker 3:It's like always to think about like plan B and be extremely proactive.
Speaker 3:Proactive about like certain certain scenarios which are like uncommon. For example, if your payday ends up being on a holiday, send an email to the customer telling them like hey, we are going to pay them one day earlier or one day later because there's a holiday, and be over communicative about, like all the actions that you do, especially around like uncommon scenarios, so that, like, the payroll admin is equipped to answer these questions on, like, hey, why did I give get paid one day later, why did I get paid one day early? And uh. Yeah, those are some of the lessons, like, but, like, the biggest lesson is, like you know, payroll is really important and it's really important to like make sure the hr admin is equipped with all the knowledge that they can possibly be. Most of the time, the HR admin doesn't want to write into support to ask, hey, why is this happening, why is this X, why is that Y being more communicative and why the product is doing something. It's been very helpful for us to build this software.
Speaker 2:Thank you Very insightful. Just finally for today, shuram. It's been like very um helpful for us to build a software. Okay, thank you very insightful. And just finally for today, shuram, how can folks connect with you? So maybe that's linkedin email address or the rest of it? By the way, I sent you a linkedin connection earlier, on no pressure. And and, of course, how can they learn more about all the things happening over at rippling?
Speaker 3:um, yeah, so the best way to connect with me would be over LinkedIn. I'm happy to talk payroll and benefits with anyone. I've been working on payroll and benefits for seven years, always looking to learn more about the space and what problems customers are facing. And the best way to learn about Rippling, I would say there are two things. You can always go to ripplingcom there's a bunch of things there but additionally, rippling conducts these seminars that we invite a bunch of people to a hotel reception and we basically give them a demo of Rippling, how to use Rippling effectively. What are the advanced? And it's one of our most favorite things to do, because we get to learn from customers on how they use products in ways that we didn't even like think they could. So that's the other way, I would say, like you know, signing, signing up for like these replic webinars is also extremely helpful to learn more about. Reply excellent.
Speaker 2:Well, that just leads me to say for today sriram, thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the hr chat show thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:It was a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.
