Payroll giant ADP is planning to issue a new quarterly report examining different trends in the U.S. workforce.
The company’s most visible report has long been its monthly national employment report on private sector employment, which typically comes out a few days before the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics issues the official job numbers and unemployment rate on behalf of the federal government.
However, ADP has been broadening the number of employment reports it releases in the past year, including monthly reports on franchise jobs and regional employment trends. Now ADP plans to take a deeper dive into its wealth of payroll data with a new quarterly workforce index that it will begin releasing in October.
The new index will measure quarterly changes in a broad range of U.S labor market metrics, including employment growth, wage growth, job turnover and hours worked.
With the new index, the ADP Research Institute and its partner Moody’s Analytics will also try to answer a number of questions about the state of the U.S. workforce, such as how is the workforce thriving as a whole, how do major regions and large states compare, which industries are doing well, where are the jobs, what are the wage trends and what roles do age and gender play?
“We are actually taking a look at our employment report in a much deeper way,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and head of the ADP Research Institute. “We created an index which is measuring overall U.S. workforce wages. In other words, we took that 24 million employee-level data and created an index, measuring different dynamics in the labor market. Broadly speaking what we are measuring with the index is total real wages paid to employees in the United States.”
At the same time, ADP is deconstructing the index into different metrics, Yildirmaz explained. “For example, we are looking into real hourly wage growth for employees, and we are looking at the growth in the number of hours worked as well as turnover rate and employment change,” she said.
“In the employment report, we report the net employment numbers. Here we’re actually going a step further and really trying to answer the question of what kind of jobs are being created—low vs. high wage—and what’s happening with the overall workforce. We’re reporting the number of hours worked and also hourly wage growth. We’re also looking into those employees who moved from one job to another vs. those employees who held their jobs. All this data will be available by region, by state, by industry, by different firm sizes, as well as full time vs. part time, by income groups, by gender, and by age.”
Detailed graphics will be included in the report to help accountants and other financial experts track and measure the overall U.S. workforce. “I think accountants, economists and poll estimators will look at this data, and they’re going to understand the macro and micro level details that are in the economic environment around the job market,” said Yildirmaz. “It’s going to help them to manage their businesses better and understand where the growth areas are in the market.”
