Pros
- Stable brand name - Payroll processing is reliable - Benefits are decent compared to smaller employers - Some capable and dedicated people within the company - It can be a good job for a junior person to build their experience and knowledge
Cons
- The company is not well set up for success in Canada. It operates as a US-centric organization, with senior leaders brought in from the US who lack understanding of the Canadian market, employees, and clients - Decision-making in Canada is concentrated among a small group of senior leaders - Many of the back office teams are not in Canada, either offshore or report to the US with Canada treated as an afterthought - Managers commonly have 15+ direct reports, making meaningful people management not possible - As a manager you can only function as traffic controller, handling urgent client issues, with no capacity for coaching, development, or addressing root causes - Accountability in the company is weak. Underperformance is tolerated in some teams while strong performers can be stretched thin - While the company markets itself as an HCM technology leader, the client feedback on HR is that it is below market standard, with gaps - Employee experience depends a lot on the team and your own manager. Support, flexibility, and fairness are inconsistent - HR support in Canada is fragmented and largely outsourced to global teams reporting into the US, resulting in a disjointed and impersonal experience - Unless you are a Director, there is no proactive HR support for managers and employees. In other companies I worked at, managers met regularly with HR and HR had an open approach with employees - Return-to-office expectations are inconsistent and poorly managed. While a three-day mandate exists, many employees hired before I started are exempt from this and enforcement varies by team, and teams are often dispersed across Canada and fully remote from each other - As a manager, I had a hard time explaining to employees why they needed to be in office all day and 3 days/week when many other teams were not respecting this and some of their colleagues could work from home permanently because they were hired that way - Depending on the office, many of my employees did not have dedicated desks and some had no colleagues in the office; they would commute a long distance to only work remotely - I found this to be very unfair - having someone who never comes to the office work in the same job and getting the same pay as someone who has to commute to the office an hour each way 3 days / week - There is also no policy to allow an employee to work remotely from another province or the US for any period of time - I had an employee who wanted to work from another province for a month to visit family and this was not permitted per HR policy (but their coworker could be remote indefinitely and be essentially anywhere in Canada) - Benefits are not bad but not as competitive compared to other large employers in Canada - my previous company before ADP and the one I joined since have better benefits overall - For a company selling HR and benefits solutions, I would expect they would want to provide the best to its own employees