Recent Research:
A Fortune 250 company founded in 1888, Core-Mark International is one of the largest marketers of fresh and broad-line supply solutions to the convenience retail industry in North America. The company serves 44,000 customer locations and operates 32 distribution centers. Core-Mark employs approximately 7,500 across its geographic footprint, which spans the United States and Canada, and first went public in 1974 under previous ownership. For several
intervening years afterward, Core-Mark returned to private ownership. Since 2005, the company has publicly traded on the NASDAQ.
To gain an understanding of the company’s deployment of UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group), 3Sixty Insights spoke with Ahmad Noordin, who joined Core-Mark in December 2020 as senior director of human resources. Responsible specifically for systems, payroll and people analytics at Core-Mark, Noordin has previously worked at comparable levels in HR at several large companies, where he gained experience working in several of the longest-running, most well-known platforms for HCM, including PeopleSoft, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors.
isolved is a vendor in the human capital management (HCM) software market. Founded in 1986, isolved is well established in the human resources (HR) field as a provider of comprehensive workforce management solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses. The company offers a wide variety of tools designed to help its clients transform the employee experience, including platforms for benefit services, talent management, engagement management, and HR and payroll. isolved leverages both direct technology and service sales and a robust partner network to deliver its solutions, enabling the company to pair its cutting-edge cloud-based technology offerings with strong service provider relationships.
isolved is headquartered in Charlotte, NC and has grown significantly in the last few years: the company now employs more than 1,300 people. In addition to its own substantial workforce, isolved serves some five million employees through the more than 145,000 employers it counts among its clients. With this impressive growth has come considerable changes, including the appointment of a new chief executive officer, Mark Duffell, in March 2020 to bring even more velocity to the business. isolved also brought on Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer James Norwood just six months later.
3Sixty Insights spoke with Vice President of Marketing Lina Tonk and Director of Brand and Content Amberly Dressler about how isolved successfully navigated the pandemic while planning and executing on rapid growth plans and completing a re-brand.
Recent Articles:
Square Meets the Moment with Afterpay
Square, the digital payments giant co-founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has this week acquired Australian fintech company Afterpay. The announcement has already made the rounds; plenty of outlets have proffered their own predictions of the effects this acquisition will have on the market. We at 3Sixty Insights see this going far beyond the market moment: we believe that buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) will continue to increase in relevance at the point of sale. By connecting AfterPay directly to purchase transactions, this acquisition has the potential to have a profound and lasting generational effect.
Pay and Payments in the Present
On-demand pay (ODP) has taken the HR world by storm since DailyPay was founded in 2015. There’s Dayforce Wallet (from Ceridian). Last month, global payroll provider CloudPay launched CloudPay Now, “as the first earned wage access solution that can be deployed globally,” according to the related press release. Even when ODP was new, many saw it as the future of pay, and thanks to the pandemic, both the value and estimation of ODP have skyrocketed. As Jeanniey Walden, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer of DailyPay, remarked in a recent 3Sixty Insights HR Tech Chat, ODP’s popularity even pre-pandemic is due in large part to younger workers who have grown up in a digital world, accustomed to ordering anything they need with the click of a button. She adds, “Everything in life is an instant experience: when they need it, when they want it, it’s available to them, so why not pay? . . . And to access it, it should be very simple, like the click of a button. Just like getting a ride share.”
The road to global payroll is paved with reactions. Let’s add that it’s paved also with good intentions. We all know where those lead, and an unaddressed global payroll process won’t exactly take you there, but the ride can be rough. This is why, for most organizations, the journey to well-sorted global payroll is long and windy — and bumpy. It is the exceedingly rare employer that sets the table to process global payroll in an efficient way the very first time the need to process global payroll arises. This is what I’ve learned, anyway, from lengthy discussions with executives in this industry. No, almost to the very last one, organizations that become global pretty much never outsource it promptly; instead, they do their best, with best intentions, to process unnecessarily complicated payroll with old-fashioned elbow grease — pay period after pay period. As they grow into an increasing number of locales, regions and countries, they put forth their best efforts to continue crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s. And they manage through all the inefficiency to wrestle payroll to its conclusion, compliant with every law affecting it across the globe.
That is, until they don’t. The thing is, it can take a long time for the house of cards to collapse….
Getting into Hot Water
During a recently aired episode of #HRTechChat, Richard Limpkin, chief product officer at the Dublin, Ireland-based global payroll provider Immedis, noted that there is essentially no way to deploy a solution for global payroll until the moment an organization becomes global. This makes the decision to find and implement a solution the textbook definition of a reaction. In another episode of the podcast, aired earlier, David Barak, chief marketing officer at United Kingdom-headquartered CloudPay, another provider of global payroll solutions, made a similar observation. The processing of global payroll eventually becomes unmanageable. This is the flashpoint of reaction for most, and Barak described the process that eventually leads global organizations to well-sorted global payroll.
Recent #HRTechChats
Our latest guest on #HRTechChat was Ryan Anderson. As vice president of global research and insights at Herman Miller, he helps lead a team keen on investigating aspects of the world of work long-linked to the employee experience. More recently, their efforts have focused on how those dynamics play out amid a worldwide pandemic.
Some in our audience may be aware that, for a long time, Herman Miller has been about far more than office furniture. Alongside Boston Consulting Group, Fortune, and “quite a few HR leaders,” Anderson says, the company is a founding partner of the Slack-launched Future Forum. This consortium strives to help “executives at leading companies deliver on the transformation needed to thrive in the post-pandemic world.” Part of that centers, of course, around protecting the employee experience and maximizing positive aspects around it.
With the sudden disruption of the pandemic last year, Ryan says, he’s noticed the responsibility for optimizing office environments increasingly becoming the domain of HR, and less the responsibility of facilities management. In parallel, the greatest influx of inquiries to his division, at Herman Miller, have come from leaders in HR asking questions on how to optimize employees’ work environment as work, for many, becomes less of a physical place.
This was a great discussion for the video podcast. Ryan shares much around the nature of these inquiries, as well as Herman Miller’s philosophy around the employee experience.
3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat with Brenda Laughlin, SPHR, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Enavrio
For this episode of 3Sixty Insights’ #HRTechChat, we decided to approach our favorite subject matter, technology for human capital management, from a slightly different angle. Joining us was Brenda Laughlin, SPHR. Brenda is not only co-founder and managing partner of Enavrio, a consultancy that helps “create tomorrow’s world of work for today’s workforce,” but also CEO and principal consultant of PeakSource Consulting.
A central area of Brenda’s expertise is in helping to ensure organizations’ “data collection and retention process aligns with industry rules, regulations and best practice.” This is where our discussion focused: around the extensive considerations that wise organizations take when handling their people’s data. The very idea that data privacy is important is just beginning to hit its stride, in my opinion. Highly varied across regions, countries and continents, the related regulatory landscape is still developing, and the act of complying can be complex. In the European Union, there’s GDPR. In the United States, there are state-specific and even city-specific rules to follow. And those are just two of myriad examples.
Beyond all this compliance, however, is the principle of protecting the security and privacy of employees’ data. What’s compelling from a philosophical standpoint is the notion that a person’s data is akin to private property. It’s not technically or exactly so, but it may as well be. Just look at the opinion many have about their own identifying information. Mess with it, and you lose their trust and exact possibly irreparable damage to your employer brand. Not that we always see companies treat customers’ data with the respect patrons assume it enjoys, but it’s interesting to hear organizations begin equating the potential downsides of mishandling customer and employee data.