How Teams Across YipitData Are Collaborating Better and More Efficiently With ChartHop

Discover how ChartHop has helped YipitData

YipitData is the trusted source of alternative data insights for 450+ of the world’s largest public and private investment funds and companies. They answer key questions about e-commerce and consumer purchase trends by providing actionable data and insights, synthesized from billions of data points to help their clients make better business decisions.

Leaning further into their company mission, Mike Cameron, Director of People and Development, and Jaime Moskowitz, Senior People Operations Associate at YipitData, wanted a solution that would provide actionable people data and insights to help their colleagues efficiently access their team’s data and make better informed decisions. 

Searching for the missing piece of the puzzle

In the before times, YipitData didn’t have their own payroll system or HRIS, leaving the People team at the mercy of their PEO whenever they needed to access their people data. Unfortunately, they had difficulty customizing their PEO experience to their organization’s needs and were unable to upload information directly to the system. This produced information that YipitData’s People and Operations teams couldn’t rely on to make informed people decisions. 

Adding to the team’s data woes, they had a performance management tool owned by the People team, a recruiting platform owned by the Talent team, a bonus and commissions tracking tool owned by Finance. Many other sources of information lived in the old standby, Google Sheets, which was used by all but owned by none. This hodgepodge of asynchronous and inflexible systems owned by multiple teams made it extremely difficult to pull together a holistic picture of the company or their people at any given time. 

While each system held a piece of the puzzle, there was no way to connect them to see the big picture. Jaime repeatedly found herself saying, “There has to be a better, less manual way for our people to get the information they need.”

Enter ChartHop.  

Bringing the full picture into focus with a people operations platform

Nowadays, YipitData has moved from a PEO onto a dedicated HRIS and they’ve implemented ChartHop to pull all of their people data into one place, creating a single, real-time picture that everyone can access. 

Mike explains why it was important to have a people operations platform layered on top of their HRIS: 

With any HRIS, it’s really hard to build out custom fields to collect data points specific to a company and set access controls at various security levels. But this isn’t a problem in ChartHop. ChartHop allows us to build custom fields to collect data specific to our org that maps from our HRIS to align our people data across systems. Having this level of data empowers our leaders and managers with the visibility and insights required to make better decisions.

MIKE CAMERON

Director of People and Development, YipitData

With the full mosaic of their people clearly in view, YipitData now has a common place to retrieve accurate and up-to-date data, improving collaboration and information sharing across teams. 

Sharing is caring: Better visibility into people data for functions outside of the People team

At YipitData, the two largest departments by headcount, Product and Revenue, each have their own operations groups and rely heavily on performance data, promotion cycles, and more for their departments.

Even though a lot of the information they need exists in the HRIS, it was next to impossible for the People team to provide leaders from these teams with a real-time view into it. The only recourse was for the Product and Revenue operations groups to spend time manually gathering the information from disparate sources, requesting information from the People team, and then pulling it all together into a useful report. 

The inefficiencies of this process limit the actionability of the data. Operations leaders must spend so much time building and maintaining the system, it leaves limited time to use the data to inform impactful changes.

Turning to a solution that would both save time and surface potential issues in a timely manner, the People team has begun to bring the operations groups into ChartHop. And ChartHop’s role-based access controls meant the People team could provide them with just the right amount of visibility – not so much that they’re privy to sensitive employee information and not so little that they can’t glean actionable insights from all the data being collected across systems.

Streamlining headcount planning sans spreadsheets 

Having a shared platform that’s built for collaboration has also streamlined YipitData’s approach to headcount planning. Gone are the days when FP&A would send out spreadsheets to each executive requesting their proposed headcount and then consolidate the responses, leaving no time for the Recruiting team to have input or insight into the overall headcount plan. 

Now with ChartHop, all stakeholders have the valuable data they need to back up their headcount decisions. Within the platform, each leader can use filters to better understand the current state of their team and identify any gaps, then build out headcount scenarios in their own sandbox environment.  As the planning process is happening, other stakeholders are no longer left in the dark and can see plans as they’re submitted, making adjustments to their own plans as needed.

Likewise, the People team is better equipped to work hand-in-hand with YipitData’s senior leadership as headcount plans are being built out. Is someone reaching too many direct reports? Or maybe there’s someone being stretched too thin across too many disciplines? Previously, answers to these considerations would come to light after the fact and the team would have to reactively mitigate risks. Thanks to the visual and collaborative nature of ChartHop (e.g. being able to drag and drop roles within the org chart view to clearly visualize reporting lines), these potential risks are surfaced much further in advance. 

Summing up the impact of this process improvement, Jaime says: “Using ChartHop to facilitate collaboration is a really huge win for us. Not only are we able to make sure the Recruiting and People teams have the visibility they need, but FP&A also has the ability to work directly with senior leadership and managers in a shared platform, where everyone can see all current employee information. Combining forces together when it comes to headcount planning (and comp planning in the future) to see everything as one larger picture has been great.”

Collaboration and efficiency is the name of the game

Reflecting on how ChartHop has helped YipitData colleagues collaborate, Mike shares: “People are able to be a lot more self-sufficient, which speaks to our value of Ownership. Team leaders now have a lot more independence viewing their own people data. If someone needed a report on people’s physical work location, they used to need the People team to pull that information. But now we can direct them to use ChartHop as a shared resource.” 

In addition to better collaboration across YipitData, bringing teams onto a shared platform is a boon for efficiency. Removing the need for teams to manually pull people data from multiple systems or for the People team to support one-off data requests, YipitData’s People team estimates the company saves an average of 10 hours per week using ChartHop, and the number of teams benefiting continues to grow.