After building a loyal digital following, Little Words Project began to expand its retail footprint with over six new locations opening in the span of a year and a half.

Behind Little Words Project’s culture of kindness and connection, is Grace Larkin, Senior HR Manager. Not only does she manage onboarding and payroll, but she also handles recruiting, performance management, and even compliance. In 2023, as the company continued to grow, running on disconnected tools like ADP and Homebase became unsustainable due to manual work and time-consuming errors. 

Time-consuming onboarding and offboarding

With high retail seasonality and new store openings, Grace is always onboarding new hires. In their previous HCM, ADP, onboarding a single hire took at least 30 minutes, which was especially tedious when Grace was onboarding seven to ten new retail employees at once, all by herself. 

The process was painfully manual: offer letters sent via DocuSign, uploaded to ADP, then accounts provisioned one by one across Gmail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more. 

“Everything was very time-consuming and manual just to get a whole store team up and running at once,” Grace explains. 

For terminations and employee changes, store managers downloaded paper forms and emailed them to Grace. These were frequently lost in Grace’s inbox as the company grew. 

Siloed scheduling and payroll

As a fast-growing business with a split workforce of corporate and retail teams, Little Words Project was stuck between two systems: scheduling in Homebase and payroll in ADP.

“We used Homebase for scheduling, but it wasn’t connected to our payroll system. Everything was disconnected, which led to errors and, at times, exceptionally high labor costs when hourly wages weren’t entered correctly. It was a total hassle,” says Martin Hogan, Director of Stores.  

Even simple tasks like swapping a shift required back-and-forth emails and manual updates behind the scenes, creating errors and frustrating employees.   

Bogged down in admin work and error-prone reporting

Grace wanted to invest more time in her people with initiatives like running 90-day performance reviews and gathering continuous employee feedback, but with payroll errors to chase down, multi-state compliance to manage, and onboarding paperwork piling up, the people side of her job kept getting pushed to the back burner. 

"Prior to Rippling, employee experience and individualized attention were sometimes put on the back burner because payroll and admin tasks needed to be correct," explains Grace. 

She was also bogged down troubleshooting reporting in ADP. Grace describes their reporting portal as "super complicated.” 

"When you're a team of one, you can't afford to wait days for a help desk to tell you your own data. It felt like I was constantly hitting a wall just to get the basic information my leadership team needed," she says. 

Managing multi-state compliance 

As Little Words Project expanded its footprint across multiple states, Grace found herself navigating a minefield of ever-changing labor laws. 

Without a centralized system, Grace had to manually research state-specific requirements, set up state and local payroll tax accounts, and administer and track required trainings across multiple states.  

As a lean team, managing multi-state compliance for 200+ employees was a huge, stressful lift. It left Grace constantly worried that a manual error or a missed update could lead to costly, unexpected penalties. 

After struggling with time-consuming onboarding, siloed scheduling, clunky reporting, and mounting compliance complexity, Little Words Project needed one system that could bring it all together. After hearing a glowing recommendation about Rippling from their new finance controller, the team set up a demo. 

Once Grace saw Rippling in action, it was a no-brainer decision. She chose Rippling for its automation features and intuitive experience for both admins and employees. 

Automated onboarding and offboarding

With Rippling, onboarding takes 90 seconds. When someone is hired, Rippling instantly provisions new employees’ accounts for Gmail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and all of LWP’s apps. When someone is terminated, Rippling automatically suspends access, deprovisions users, and schedules offboarding actions at the right time. 

For seasonal retail employees who return year after year, rehiring is just as simple. Instead of starting from scratch, Grace reactivates profiles in minutes. "We're lucky that many seasonal employees come back, and Rippling makes rehiring so much easier than starting from scratch," Martin said. "It saves time for HR, but it also makes training and onboarding much easier for the store teams."

Leveraging Rippling’s Workflow Studio, Grace created an automated onboarding email that is sent to new store employees a few days before their start date. The email outlines key details, including I-9 verification, dress code, start time, and store location, and cc’s the store manager so they stay informed.

Onboarding went from a manual, time-consuming process to the smoothest experience possible.

Grace Larkin

HR Manager

Scheduling and payroll in one system

Before Rippling, scheduling and payroll operated in silos, requiring manual exports of hours from Homebase and imports into ADP. Now, everything lives in one place. 

Store managers build schedules through Rippling, employees clock in via kiosks, and approved hours sync directly to payroll after managers approve them in one click. Plus, employees can swap shifts or pick up open shifts without manager intervention. “Rippling is one of the most user-friendly scheduling tools I’ve used over the years,” notes Martin.  

Rippling’s labor costs feature gives store managers and Martin, Little Words Project’s Director of Stores, real-time visibility into their budget. 

"Being able to see labor costs directly in the schedule has been a game changer," says Martin. "Before, we were making rough estimates. With Rippling, store managers can clearly see what they've spent week by week and stay on track for the month.”Little Words Project also uses Rippling Time & Attendance to track attendance points for retail employees. When someone clocks in late, the system automatically tracks it. Grace and her team tie attendance data directly into performance reviews, creating greater accountability and a more data-driven evaluation process.

When you're running multiple stores, you want as many things in a one-stop shop as possible. With Rippling, we can run every store efficiently.

Martin Hogan

Director of Stores

Improved employee experience 

With the administrative weight lifted, Grace could finally focus more time on the people part of her job. 

Little Words Project uses Rippling to run surveys and performance reviews. New hire surveys go out 45 days after a retail employee's first day, surfacing feedback and flagging potential issues early. Performance reviews launch automatically 90 days after an employee's start date, ensuring every employee receives timely feedback without relying on manual follow-ups. 

“Prior to Rippling, I did not have the bandwidth to administer 90-day reviews to all our employees,” says Grace. “Now, the process runs automatically, freeing me up to be more strategic about employee experience.” 

For corporate employees, after calibrations are completed, promotions and pay changes are seamless. Rippling automatically pushes compensation updates to payroll and updates employee details, eliminating manual paperwork.

“All these automations give both me time and peace of mind,” says Grace. Everything runs in the background, so nothing falls through the cracks.

Rippling makes my job 10 times easier and gives me time back to focus on employees. Now I have time to be more proactive and more employee-focused.

Grace Larkin

HR Manager

Compliance support across 11 states

Rippling's HR Services offering provides Grace and her team with end-to-end HR and compliance support, giving the team peace of mind. 

Required compliance trainings are automated through Rippling's Learning Management System, which enrolls employees based on attributes like role, department, and tenure—ensuring the right people complete the right trainings at the right time. Rippling also handles state and local payroll tax account setup and dozens of required filings.

With HR Services, Grace has access to Rippling's HR Advisory team: SHRM- and PHR-certified experts who provide real-time guidance on complex or sensitive issues.

“Rippling’s HR advisors are incredibly knowledgeable and responsive,” says Grace. “As a team of one, it’s invaluable to have a trusted sounding board. They give me quick, compliant answers and best-practice guidance, so I can move forward with confidence.”

• Time saved: With Rippling, Little Words Project saved countless hours with approved hours flowing instantly to Payroll. No more manual data entry or syncing issues between systems. 
• Cash saved: Little Words Project eliminated the need for at least one full-time HR headcount by consolidating all their disconnected systems into one platform. 
• More time for people, less time on paperwork: With hours back in her schedule, Grace now runs an Employee Spotlight survey every other month, where peers nominate team members for recognition. This reinforces Little Words Project’s culture of kindness and connection.