How one rewards manager’s data obsession helped Flock Safety grow from 150 to 1,100 employees

When I first joined Flock Safety’s HR team, we weren’t exactly swimming in data. I didn’t even know our headcount—though if I had to ballpark it, we had about 150 employees. If we wanted to make our lofty growth plans a reality, we needed better reporting. 

We also needed to address tough issues like:

• Reducing turnover for our highest-performing employees 

• Incorporating survey feedback into our compensation philosophy 

• Predicting our growth to better support the business

I took it upon myself to be the data guy. My plan: cobble together as much concrete information as I could to help find solutions for these abstract problems. It started with basic org charting, compensation planning, and compliance audits. Then once we had better numbers to work with, I dove deep into reporting. With Rippling, I ran a new report every day, using custom fields to connect different slices of employee data and spot underlying trends. 

For instance, if we noticed a certain team was dealing with unusually high turnover, we pulled things like tenure, comp, quota attainment, exit surveys, and performance scores into Rippling’s analytics dashboard to see if any correlations jumped out. 

But I wasn’t just tinkering. The C-suite actually took action based on the data. Now that we can create any report we want, we are making smarter decisions about how to hire, manage, and pay our employees. Insights from internal engagement surveys, external comp surveys, and termination data have all impacted our benefits packages, pay bands, and retention efforts. We used to make subjective decisions based on fuzzy notions. Now that we can quantify things, we’re more equitable. 

To this day, I’ve built more than 400 advanced reports and our attrition has stayed lower than industry average—helping us grow from 150 to 1,100 employees. This new headcount figure, I’m sure of.