Three years ago, when Leif Oldert joined Clicklease to lead the equipment financing company’s fledgling HR department, he noticed processes and perceptions in need of a makeover.  

For one, Clicklease’s workforce was split between the US and Costa Rica, with each country using a separate HR system (ADP Workforce Now and BambooHR, respectively) to manage employees. “It was like we were two separate companies; there was zero communication about simple stuff,” Leif said.  

The bifurcated platforms left Clicklease without a single source of truth. Even within their silos, Leif found ADP clunky and BambooHR incapable of keeping pace with headcount as the company scaled.

Leif wanted to scrap existing systems and build a new HR outfit from scratch. But in the process, he also wanted to alter company leadership’s view of the department as a strictly administrative function and prove that HR could have a strategic impact.

Leif researched alternative HCMs that could unify his workforce and automate as much time-consuming administrative work as possible to clear the runway for the HR team to focus on strategy. One option stood out. “I realized that everything else is built on older platforms or code. Rippling blew everything out of the water,” he said. 

Leif implemented Rippling as Clicklease’s unified workforce management platform—for US and Costa Rica-based employees—and found instant use in a bevy of automations that transformed the company’s HR function.

“Rippling understands the need to automate and optimize all these tedious tasks that distract HR from becoming more strategic and keeps it stuck in the day-to-day monotonous weeds,” he said. 

With the help of Rippling, Leif and his five-person HR team spearheaded efforts to help improve retention and boost employee engagement, drawing from the platform’s survey data to persuade leadership to make a $500,000 investment in revamping benefits packages and adding two more workplace holidays a year. 

“We educated the leadership team about what we can do at a strategic level,” Leif said. “Rippling positions us as a pivotal component within the company… We’re internal consultants and business partners instead of back-of-the-house generalists.”

Rippling positioned us to be the pivotal component of the company… We’re internal consultants and business partners instead of back-of-the-house generalists.

Leif Oldert

VP of HR at Clicklease

Clicklease’s revamped HR team broke free of spending most of its time on administrative work thanks to more than 100 automations the company customized through Rippling’s Workflow Studio. 

For instance, Leif teed up a recruiting workflow that sends questionnaires to hiring managers, who fill in information the HR team uses to create a job requisition. “We created a self-service portal, reduced bottlenecks for the talent acquisition team, and created a better flow of information,” Leif said. 

At the other end of the employee lifecycle, Leif and his team created an offboarding workflow that allows managers of departing employees to quickly access a survey to add information HR needs when team members leave the company. And answers to that survey can trigger other workflows that help teams backfill roles if needed. 

Once Clicklease’s HR department identifies the time-draining manual tasks, Leif can reliably customize Rippling workflows to handle many of those tasks on his team’s behalf. “We keep lists and prioritize as a team,” Leif said. “What are some of the most repetitive things? What are those ‘dailies’ that we could potentially remove? How can you get rid of spreadsheets?”

In addition to setting up workflows for onboarding and offboarding, Clicklease also uses Rippling’s Surveys to gather employee feedback and boost engagement. 

“Department heads had to create four year plans for our CEO, so I dug into our data,” Leif said. With Rippling, he “looked into our eNPS, identified common trends throughout engagement surveys, and referenced them against exit surveys.” With Rippling’s analysis tools, he presented data to the C-suite team and recommended solutions to help with leadership development, retention, career mapping, and performance reviews. “Rippling really has been helping influence the executive team and the goals that they set.”

Even with all of Rippling’s powerful automations and robust reporting capabilities, Leif praised the platform’s ease of use. “You don’t have to be a data scientist to pull a report,” he said. “Rippling built the UX and UI so that the average daily person can do some pretty crazy, amazing stuff.” 

Leif has also built tons of scheduled reports for his HR and finance colleagues so they can easily access data, such as a 401(k) contributions report. “They’re set-it-and-forget-it. I never have to think about it.”

Rippling understands the need to automate and optimize all these tedious tasks that distract HR from becoming more strategic and keeps it stuck in the day-to-day monotonous weeds.

Leif Oldert

VP of HR at Clicklease

• A strategic HR team: With Rippling, Clicklease’s HR team became a strategic business partner with leadership, helping the company revamp its benefits and enhance the employee experience
• Offloaded administrative work: Clicklease now uses more than 100 workflows to create surveys, self-service portals, and reports that save time for team members across the company
• Consolidated systems: Clicklease ditched its two siloed HR systems in favor of a unified HRIS for US and Costa Rican employees