REWARD
If we should live that long…
Henry Tapper, chief executive officer of AgeWage , identifies an aspect of the contagion which resonates with planning for contingencies andwith employment benefits
T hough you are reading this column in the May issue, from where I’m sitting – in the last week of March – May seems a long way away. There is a real chance that some of the people I’m writing this for may not be around to read it – and that includes me. This is not the start to a column in Professiona l magazine I ever expected to write, nor one you ever expected to read, but it does put the question of ‘continuity planning’ into sharp focus. We are used to scanning risk registers with an amused eye – the more outlandish the suggestion, the more caustic our response. Nobody could have predicted that as much as 99% of the people reading these words would be ‘working from home’. Though we have watched the pandemic sweep in, it wasn’t until Italy’s northern provinces went into lockdown that we took any notice. In retrospect, our lack of foresight was shocking. But what of foresight? Can I foresee the circumstances in which you will be reading this? Will the FTSE100 be at 6,000 or half that? And will there still be an operating market? By the time you read this, we will be able to look back at the last week of March with nostalgia! And yet life will have gone on. You will have processed the April (and the May’s) payroll, got your head around the peculiarities of paying furloughed workers and dealt with all the nuances of sick pay you had thought possible (and
many you hadn’t). You might even remark to yourself that running payroll is a matter of life and death. And you would be right to have smiled grimly while carrying on, because that is what you do. You are a payroll professional and without you people don’t get paid. You are a keyworker, whether your badge, car- parking space or salary says so (or not). By the time you read this, Skype, Zoom, Hangouts and Teams might be your various meeting rooms. You will have learned how to touch up, set backgrounds, privately chat and throw emojis. You will be as adept at conference calls as the people who trained you two months ago. You will have learned how to isolate the dog and the kids and the spouse in pyjamas from your call, and that the most important buttons are ‘video off’ and ‘mute’. You will have stopped arguing about digital signatures and accepted that what the Law Commission says is the ‘law’. You’ll have worked out that an MPEG recording of someone e-signing a document can be used as a witness statement. You might even remark to yourself that running payroll is a matter of life and death
In February, articles about ‘the end of the office’ were fanciful; in March, you left and you haven’t been back, and you don’t know when you’ll go back. None of the post has been opened and scanned – it’s sitting in a great pile, like emails in spam. You may never open those letters, working on the principle that ‘if it was that important, they’d have sent a message’. And what of employee benefits: death in service, permanent health insurance and pensions? They are all a lot more interesting now. There is a point to all these things when you see the impact not having a wage coming in can have. Yet there is the wait for universal credit (or for the self-employed wages grant), and the worry that the money lost to the pension may not be recovered, that your pension pot will never be so big again. Nobody, including the author of this piece, ever thought that they’d live so long as to see what we see around us today. We didn’t have a plan to cater for this contingency – though looking back it seems so obvious we should have. Which is why we insure. Because although we cannot plan, we can lay aside money against the crisis – the unknown unknown we never anticipated. And at the end of this episode in world history, when the world was shaken as it hasn’t been since the second world war, we will smile and wonder how we ever took such risks and were so complacent. And we will vow that we will never-ever be so dumb again. If we should live that long. n
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | May 2020 | Issue 60 40
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