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High-growth Morning Consult uses Rippling to run lean and remain a top place to work

Rippling helped Morning Consult add hundreds of employees and subtract hundreds of hours of manual administrative work—all while sparing costs and preserving a standout company culture.

2

people ops admins manage all payroll, benefits, and devices for 500 employees

500

hours per year saved in onboarding, offboarding, and reporting work

Headquarters

United States

Industry

Technology

Employees

500

about the company

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Pain Points

Connectivity issues: Morning Consult’s previous solution for HR and payroll, Paycor, didn’t integrate with other systems the company used.

Manual work that necessitated more headcount: Scant integrations meant more hires for manual work. But the company wanted to stay lean as it scaled.

Neverending email chains: Morning Consult sent emails to every single new hire and for every single departure—four to five hours per week of admin work.

Sluggish payroll processing: The one-person HR team spent three hours running payroll every pay run.

Shoddy reporting: The company spent 5 hours per week fielding reporting requests with Paycor, which lagged and needed manual calculations.

The Challenge

Morning Consult added over 300 employees in just under two years with a people ops team of only one IT admin and one HR admin. Amanda Perry, the company’s then Director of People Ops & Technology, wanted an HRIS that could integrate with all of its systems and automate manual processes to continue to hit growth goals without bloating administrative headcount.

Morning Consult switched to Rippling in late 2021 and drastically reduced its administrative burden.

01

Tight integrations

Since Paycor, Morning Consult’s previous HRIS, didn’t fully integrate with user security software, teams had to repeatedly and manually update systems. The company considered alternatives. 

“In the end, we looked at Rippling and Paylocity, but Paylocity did not have as many connections and integrations as Rippling. The number of integrations sold us,” Amanda recalls. Rippling integrates with Okta for automated identity management, allowing companies to provision users and create and remove accounts and groups.

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Scaling fast while running lean

“We grew from about 200 employees in mid-2020 to over 500 employees two years later,” Amanda said. “And we’re still bringing people on at a rate of about 10 to 20 per month. Hiring is our focus—and Rippling is what we use to do it.” 

Despite such massive growth, Morning Consult maintained a two-person admin team. This is a prime example of running lean and working smart instead of simply throwing people-power at a challenge and hoping headcount will solve it. 

“Had we not switched to Rippling, we would have needed to hire another head in our People Ops & IT department to manage our previous onboarding process,” Amanda said “In addition, our IT team would likely need another head to process the manual connection between our HRIS and Okta accounts.”

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Quicker onboarding and payroll processing

Amanda’s team ceased spending five hours a week sending onboarding and offboarding emails. “Rippling Workflow Automator gave us that time back,” she said. 

Amanda also saved valuable time running payroll, “My payroll entry went from three hours to about 30 minutes.”

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Better, easier reporting

Rippling also helps Morning Consult managers and executives access the information they need, exactly when needed, without wasting time on report requests or administrative tasks. 

“I gave our managers and executive team special access to Rippling. I sat with each of them for 10 minutes to teach them the basics, and then they were able to run with it,” Amanda said. “Now my team doesn’t get report requests anymore! Instead, managers and leadership can pull data, make reports, and create formulas independently, wherever they want.”

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Flexible, people-focused software

As Morning Consult continues to evolve, both as a business and a company, it does so with a flexible and easily scaled technology solution at the heart of its people operations. And for an organization whose success results from its culture and employees, this foundation is invaluable.

“I wish I had Rippling when I started in HR,” Amanda said. “Rippling knows how ops teams work. In addition to the software, Rippling’s reps become extensions of your ops team—they are extra thought partners, people that can help optimize your organization.”

The Impact

  • With Rippling, Morning Consult eliminated the need to hire three additional team members
  • Across payroll, onboarding, offboarding, and reporting, Rippling automations save Morning Consult 500 hours a year and reduce payroll processing times by 84%.
  • Amid their rapid growth, in 2021 and 2022, Inc. Magazine ranked Morning Consult one of America’s fastest growing companiesand one of the best places to work.

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