The next time you sit down for coffee or pancakes, you might actually be in a PayrollHero Lab

When a patron walks into The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Burgos Circle, Fort Bonifacio, he enters into a testing environment.

Business ideas are put up to the light, so to speak, in the warm, glossy interior of this coffeeshop. In one example, the sponsoring company wanted to see how employees would act if they have a “like” to give to a coworker at the end of each business day.

This is PayrollHero Labs. PayrollHero uses this lab to try out its new products and new features that are related to business intelligence. As of this moment, PayrollHero provides solutions relating to time, attendance, scheduling, payroll, and human resources information systems, but this could evolve as products are put to the gauntlet in its eponymous lab. Their clients include BreadTalk, Candy Corner, Krispy Kreme Donuts, Zendesk, and Faburrito.

Just looking around

PayrollHero Labs is only about three months old. It was formed because PayrollHero CEO Michael Stephenson wanted to test out ideas live at client establishments after testing them internally within the team. Unlike many corporate labs, PayrollHero Labs has multiple locations. In addition to the one at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, PayrollHero also has labs at Krispy Kreme and iHop. PayrollHero pitched the idea of having a lab at one of their locations, and all three companies readily agreed.

The hope is that the findings across the different outlets will not conform with one another, but that they will differ. “We’re looking to see why they are different,” says PayrollHero co-founder and head of business development Stephen Jagger. “So that we can see the uniqueness across the different stores – iHop being a full service restaurant, Krispy Kreme being a factory store, and The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf being a traditional coffeehouse.”

Though PayrollHero Labs is ostensibly designed to test out new products, it’s also supposed to serve the broader goal of helping the team better empathize with its end users. This process can go really in depth.

Jagger used iHop as an example. The PayrollHero crew toured the restaurant, and they were abuzz with questions. “How does their kitchen work? What are the notices on the boards in the back? How do they disseminate information across multiple locations?” he says. “We’re not looking for something – we’re just looking.”

The goal is that the team finds inspiration to develop a product that solves their customers’ pain points. “The more time we spend with our end user and learn about their role, the better it is for them,” says Jagger.

See: How one startup creates ‘adventure engineers’ to live on the edge in Southeast Asia

Making the team

Developing great products may not even be as important as weeding out the bad ones, which may be promising enough to test in PayrollHero Labs but not great enough to make it out. Jagger emphasized that the goal of this testing is not to bloat their offerings with more products and more features, but to find the ones that are genuinely valuable to their users. PayrollHero prides itself in being what it calls “ridiculously customer focused.”

To find those, PayrollHero has to go through lots of chaff. For example, the PayrollHero team tried out securing “manager tools” with a pin system. “Problem was it was just one more thing for managers to remember,” Jagger says. “In theory, it made sense, but in application, it did not work.”

The feature was quickly nixed. In assessing new products and new features, the PayrollHero team employs an evaluation process that is equal parts quantitative (data driven) and qualitative (feedback driven).

In listening to their clients, PayrollHero pays attention to everyone. While the manager tool is an example of a feature for management, PayrollHero wants to provide value from the CEO all the way down to the cleaner.

In providing their clients with business intelligence, one of the major goals is to help them retain their best employees, and to do so for longer. Churn, after all, is a serious problem in the Philippines – workers tend to have very short stays at companies. Part of PayrollHero’s value proposition is that their data can reverse this trend.

According to Jagger, even PayrollHero’s most basic features serve this purpose. For example, their time and attendance analytics will allow the CEO of a company to see which of their employees has never been late.