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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!).
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.
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.