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Previously named the #1 Best Place to Work in Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Award

Largest departments include Technology and Investing

Employees are better known as “Fools”

MEET CHRISTINE AND LISA

Christine Noonan, Resource for Humans

Christine, like many of her peers, “fell into HR.” She began her career at a law firm and moved from their office operations department over to the HR team. Around 2006, she learned about The Motley Fool through a business class, applied to an open HR Benefits Coordinator role, and the rest is history.

Lisa Shapiro, Payroll Manager

In college, Lisa studied business and international affairs. After taking an accounting course one semester, she got an accounting internship that turned into a full-fledged career. Like Christine, Lisa also came to The Motley Fool from a law firm, where she worked as an Accounting Specialist.

Together, Christine and Lisa are a dynamic HR and payroll duo. If you’re wondering what it looks like when colleagues genuinely love working together, look no further.

CHALLENGES

“I knew we needed an HR system with everything in one place.”

Prior to selecting Namely, The Motley Fool was using an antiquated system for payroll. But the lack of a connection between their HR and payroll data was causing lots of headaches.

Plus, Christine was focusing on benefits, and the work was getting to be unwieldy. She started investigating a standalone benefits platform, but she found out that their current system wouldn’t connect. “I knew we needed a solution with everything in one,” she explains.

THE MOTLEY FOOLS’ WISHLIST:

Integrated HR Platform

Because The Motley Fool’s HR and payroll systems didn’t connect 100%, one side would sometimes override data in the other. Christine ran into one too many cases of wiped-out data, so she knew it was time for a new solution.

User-Friendly

The pain points with the system weren’t limited to the HR department. Employees couldn’t figure out how to log in and couldn’t easily “read” their paychecks — leading to tons of frustrated questions for the HR and payroll team to field.

Customizable

The Motley Fool has a unique (and award-winning!) company culture. Christine wanted a solution that would be flexible and allow her team to personalize their company’s experience of HR software.

THE EVALUATION

The Search for an HR Solution

We’ll keep the story of The Motley Fool finding Namely short and sweet, because that’s how it happened: Christine’s fellow Fool, Greg Martz, was good at identifying vendors. He found Namely. She loved it right away.

Why did Christine love Namely? Schedule a demo to see for yourself.

Christine proposed Namely to the company’s Controller, who was passionate about bringing finance into the modern world. When she told him that The Motley Fool “needed a new system desperately,” he was already on board, as long as it fit into the budget.

So they made the move to Namely.

SOLUTION

The ROI of Using Namely

Given their creative company culture, The Motley Fool has some of the best Namely stories we’ve heard so far. Here are some of their biggest wins.

Christine can (literally) do the work of two employees.

Before Namely, Christine shared responsibilities with someone else on her team. And they were both swamped, thanks to manual processes. But then they got Namely. A few years later, Christine’s coworker left The Motley Fool, but they didn’t even need to find a replacement because Namely was such a time-saver. Christine describes her current workload as “really manageable.”

Survey says: Employees love using Namely.

The biggest win for HR is when your employees are happy. Before Namely, Lisa explains that “employees revolted against the system.” A company-wide survey found that employees hated the payroll system and found it very antiquated. After implementing Namely, a new survey found that Fools were 85% positive about it—the kind of results that Lisa says HR platforms “never get.”

Onboarding is quick and easy for all employees.

Of all the Namely features, onboarding is a standout. Lisa describes it as “a huge lifesaver, so magical.” They used to mail out a huge packet before employees started, which new hires would inevitably forget to bring in on day 1. This was especially a big win for The Motley Fool’s annual class of ten interns, who filled out the forms as soon as they received them via Namely. Now, they become Fools without “drowning in paper and myriads of reminders” from Lisa and Christine.

Centralized Resources

Through Namely’s Resources section, Affinivax’s HR team can keep employees informed.

“In Namely, we can store all of our company resources and easily share them with our employees,” Sarah stated. “This has been especially helpful during the pandemic because we’ve changed our COVID-19 policy several times. Whenever we did, we could easily update our paperless policy within the system. Since Namely is our single source of truth, employees knew that the policy stored in the platform was always up to date—which has helped them feel safer when going into the office.”

“We have a better relationship with employees.”

CHRISTINE

Christine’s biggest win from choosing Namely is having more time to work on HR strategy. She has extra hours in her day to invest in creating processes that support the company’s growth.

Plus, she loves that she can customize Namely to match whatever strategies are right for The Motley Fool. “We can make it so personal.” (Which is one of the best compliments we can get with a motto of HR for Humans.)

LISA

Namely has completely transformed Lisa’s relationship to the rest of the company.

“We have a better relationship with employees. They used to be so frustrated about different things, but now they’re able to use Namely easily.”

Now, Lisa gets to be an active participant in the company culture. When we spoke, for example, she had just completed a morning egg hunt around the office (which she won!).

BONUS: USING NAMELY PROFILES

When The Motley Fool launched Namely they set up a company-wide challenge. The ask? For all Fools to fill out their Namely profiles.

First, they asked Fools to share their job title—which, believe it or not, all employees can choose. The Motley Fool employs everyone from a Unique Snowflake to a Data Diva. While self-selected titles are fun, it can be hard to figure out what someone actually does. So employees were also asked to use their bios to explain what their roles actually entail. Plus, they threw in some fun thought starters, like “If you could have lunch with one Fool, who would it be?”

The company was so on board with this kind of community-building that they offered a bonus for 100% participation. With some strong collaboration (and some friendly nagging), The Motley Fool hit their target.

ADVICE

“Namely is a great product. I would recommend it to anyone who asked.”

CONSIDERING NAMELY? HERE’S CHRISTINE AND LISA’S ADVICE.

With over 2 years of experience using Namely as admins, Christine and Lisa are full of tips for how to get the most out Namely.

First, they encourage admins to utilize their Namely Support Consultants. Christine and Lisa expressed appreciation for their Namely Support Consultant, Allison, who “felt like she was [their] friend and always gets [them] what [they] need.”

Second, while they were eager to launch everything at once, they decided to phase their roll-out to start with the parts that most excited employees. One quick win was getting compensation info loaded into the system. With their previous system, there was no way for employees to check their salaries, salary history, or to see if bonuses had been paid out. As soon as Fools logged into Namely, they had instant access to information they had been craving—one of the reasons Namely got such high marks on the employee survey.

Motley Fool is one of more than 1,400 companies that use Namely to streamline people operations, payroll, benefits, and time & attendance needs.

Ready to see how Namely can give you back hours in your day? Request your demo today.

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