It’s time to transform the old saying in payroll: “Rubbish in, rubbish out.” Clear lines need to be drawn over who’s responsible for quality payroll data and how to obtain it. Many businesses offer support services to help improve processes yet place the responsibility for data quality on the organisation they’re supposed to support. How many times have you seen providers challenge the data that has been received, process it, and then reject it back to the organisation?
At the same time, missed deadlines by people leaders often become a problem for HR or payroll departments who don’t want individual employees to suffer because of a manager’s mistake. I’ve seen my global payroll friends roll their eyes at managers who consistently miss deadlines. That assumed responsibility then becomes extra work for the HR or payroll department.
So how can an organisation streamline their payroll process to ensure proper compliance?
Data Cleanliness
When you place the responsibility into the hands of the employee through self-service, you achieve better results. However, there are three key areas that can make or break a payroll function, which include the following:
- Technology that is difficult for the employee to use due to multiple sign-ins or access and navigation challenges.
- A failure in change management planning that doesn’t educate employees about the importance of their data.
- Education on guidelines around the timing of payroll processes.
Improving these areas can make processes simpler for employees, and for the HR or payroll team.
Implementing Technology
Global organisations invest millions of pounds to build robust and secure technology architecture to operate their businesses. However, the employee experience and impact on operational teams is too often ignored when considering the size of the spend and desired outcomes.
When considering implementing a new solution or enhancing a legacy platform, the key is understanding the data it collects, how it all comes together, and educating the entire organisation about the importance of inputting accurate information. This can drive positive change for the payroll department without necessarily requiring a major platform overhaul.
It’s also important to consider changing employee expectations. Today’s workers are capable of managing their lives through their phones with mobile apps that have consumer-friendly interfaces and navigation. To ensure employee buy-in, it’s important that your payroll management system has a single sign-on and integrated time and pay.
There are also ways to leverage technology, such as an on-demand pay solution, that offer new perks and financial wellness options to improve employee engagement and retention while creating more awareness of the importance of keeping up-to-date payroll data.
Change Management
Educating people and their managers on the importance of their data and how it affects their pay should start with onboarding. While onboarding often includes the collection of payroll information, rarely do organizations explain to employees and their managers how to keep time sheets up to date, the timing for submitting them, and the process for ensuring that pay is delivered on time.
I’ve recently experienced this first-hand when my son started his first job. He had to wait two months until his first payday, relying on the Bank of Mum and Dad to hold him over. His line managers could not easily explain the process for getting paid; instead, he was handed off to the payroll department. This is unfair to new employees and inefficient for busy payroll departments.
Successful organizations should prioritise payroll during onboarding, including education about the importance of data, deadlines, and lines of responsibility for each employee. HR and payroll professionals should work together to ensure that employees are set up for success from the get-go to improve the employee experience and retention, and to ensure that accurate, useful, and timely payroll data is being collected.
Building Consistency
Processing payroll accurately can be time consuming. Payroll professionals routinely deal with timesheets, new starters and leavers, stocks and shares, and much more. There are so many inputs required to build your gross payroll. In the name of efficiency, it’s important to educate people across the organisation about the importance of the payroll audit in building the gross and getting them paid correctly and on time.
The first step is to simply document this process by sharing important deadlines across the organisation in a central place, like a company intranet site. Ensuring consistency of message across the organisation is key and will help improve the overall data input for the payroll department.
The next step is to ensure middle managers are trained in the importance of collecting payroll information from employees on time. Middle managers are often overlooked when building out new processes, but they are important to securing buy-in from frontline workers. By ensuring they understand the payroll process, they will become advocates for your department. They will also benefit from reduced complaints about pay discrepancies and delays.
Out With Rubbish
Transforming incoming payroll data from “rubbish” can be achieved with little cost to the business, and it can lead to massive efficiencies for payroll and overall engagement for employees. People want to be empowered; Educating them on how to take control of their pay saves time and energy and is a win-win for the employees and the organisation. Implementing these steps changes the overall data quality of the payroll department to “great in, great out,” leading to accurate, timely, and compliant pay processes that benefit the whole organisation.