3 leaders who are hacking global HR

The decision to go global typically comes from company leadership, but the brunt of the execution falls on HR. As HR, you have to make a choice: you can spend most of your time on the manual admin of hiring and managing a global workforce. Or you can use systems that streamline repetitive tasks and keep yourself laser-focused on the more strategic initiatives that contribute to a successful global expansion, like building a cohesive worldwide employee experience. 

This story is about 3 HR leaders who chose to do the latter. Here’s how they drove operational efficiency and global business outcomes using Rippling, in their own words.

Kathryn used employee data in Canada to boost retention worldwide

Kathryn Lee, Senior HR Manager at Create Music GroupThe more your workforce grows, the more difficult it becomes to maintain control over employee turnover. And when you have employees all over the world, you also need to consider how the different cultural expectations around benefits and compensation could impact retention. 

I’ll state the obvious: keeping your offerings competitive and top talent happy across multiple countries is hard. But don’t just take it from me. According to Rippling’s recent report, the #1 challenge HR teams face during global expansion is ensuring they’re offering international employees competitive benefits and compensation packages. 

So, how can you even start to form a global retention strategy if your data for employees across different countries is scattered across different systems and virtually unusable? In the absence of magic, I don’t think you can.

That’s why we use Rippling. We can build reports that consolidate information about every Create Music Group employee around the world, compare salaries, benefits, and satisfaction across countries, and weed out inconsistencies. Then, we can pull out insights on equity across our global workforce. 

That’s how we discovered that we should update our PTO policy. Our Canada-based employees got an entire week of vacation the last week of December for the holidays; US employees did not. Coupled with exit survey data, we put two and two together and noticed there was an appetite across the organization for more time off. We took action and added company-wide additional floating holidays and PTO allowances. And as expected, we saw an uptick in employee retention.

Grant only spends 45 minutes on global review cycle outcomes

Grant Wojahn, Associate Director of People Operations at New EngenHR trivia question: What recurring process takes HR months every time but is necessary to do? If you guessed biannual performance reviews, what I’m about to say next is your prize. 

The whole process takes a village, and even the last step, the fun part—promoting employees—is a lot of admin work. You go through employees one by one and send documents, update your HRIS with their new title, and adjust payroll with their new compensation. At New Engen, we have employees across the US and India—which means we’d have to do the process twice for US dollars and rupees. It used to take me a whole day to make these updates. Now, it takes me 45 minutes. 

My trick Your prize: I automated the process using something called “bulk changes,” and you can, too. And all it really takes is a simple CSV document. Oh, and Rippling. Here’s how I did it:

1. Take the raise and promotion data for every employee—in the US and India—and drop it into a CSV file. I know, basic. Stay with me.

2. Upload the data into Rippling, which cross-checks everything and flags errors. 

3. Then, update the CSV, re-upload it, and Rippling does the rest. Automatically.

The system just recognizes: this person is getting a promotion. This is their new title, and this is their new compensation. This is the document that needs to go to them. India-based employees get India-specific paperwork with raises calibrated in rupees. US employees get US-specific paperwork with raises calibrated in dollars. I get a whole lot of time back. 

Sarah saves 3+ hours onboarding each global hire

Sarah Kulhanek, People Operations Manager at brightwheelOnboarding is pretty straightforward, but it’s a lot of little things to keep track of. You have to send offer letters—which, by the way, I used to draft in Google Docs, export to PDF, and send via Hellosign—send an orientation invite, assign workplace harassment trainings, submit IT requests. Oh yeah, and make sure everything actually gets done, every time.

That work compounds when you hire employees all over the world. In 2020, we made our first international hire in Canada, using Deel. We had a US-based employee who was moving due to her spouse’s relocation, and we wanted to keep her on at brightwheel. 

Since then, we’ve opened up the floodgates and hired employees in the UK, Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and India. The thing is—each of these countries has different wage laws, mandatory benefits, required trainings, and payroll taxes. Did you know that Portugal requires a separate “teleworking agreement” for remote employees? Neither did I. Onboarding internationally was… complicated.

I was determined to figure out a way to make it easier. When we made the switch from Deel—and moved our international employees onto Rippling with the rest of our domestic team—our workforce was growing. We couldn’t possibly go on spending that many HR resources onboarding each new hire. Automated workflows became my best friend. Now, when we hire a new employee—no matter where—they automatically get a locally compliant offer letter. As soon as they sign it, we send a welcome email, assign trainings, ping their new manager, and even handle IT logistics like creating email accounts and configuring app logins—all without me, or anyone else on my team, lifting a finger. It’s like magic. The best part: I don't need to set calendar reminders to check on anything, ever. We can just “set it and forget it.” 

These basic workflows save me three to four hours per hire. Streamlining as much of my repetitive work as possible allows me to focus on more strategic initiatives, like reimagining our quarterly employee engagement surveys. With that time back, I was able to:

• Spend more time reviewing engagement survey responses and deeply understanding employee sentiments

• Stop asking employees the same questions we came up with in 2019, and instead, ask more meaningful and actionable questions based on people science

• Work on new engagement initiatives like exit surveys and onboarding surveys

You know, all that creative stuff that robots haven’t quite cracked yet.