Confessions of a payroll manager - Best laid plans of mice and Penny
T hough 2020 will go down in history as a very, very bad year, there have been some upsides to the pandemic: the heart-warming mutual aid groups which have sprung up; the newly clear waters of Venice; the reclamation of the streets by local wildlife; and the time I’ve been able to spend in my pyjamas watching Ice Road Truckers! The shiniest silver lining for me, however, was a panicked Mr Crumbitt at the beginning of March calling me home from Portugal to help with a factory workforce threatening meltdown! The office reunion wasn’t quite as I had envisaged as we were in lockdown working from home. Undaunted, the team threw me a virtual ‘welcome the boss home’ party with party poppers (which was just Stevie Stevenson shouting “BANG!” and throwing shredded paper over the camera), party hats (fashioned, almost exclusively, out of toilet roll tubes and biscuit wrappers) and a vast array of cakes – from Evie’s three-tiered masterpiece to Jace’s imaginative ‘stack o’pancakes’ (flour shortages didn’t hit the team as hard as the rest of the population; well, there are perks to working in a biscuit and cake factory!). As the faces appeared in squares on my screen – like some kind of version of the Muppets – I was a little taken aback to see Evie and Tony sharing the same square! Another anonymous episode revealing the world of payroll featuring payroll avatar, Penelope Fortham (‘Penny’), who is payroll manager at the nation’s favourite biscuit makers Crumbitt’s Confections. The previous instalment (November 2019) saw Penny seconded to Portugal, and a hiatus in Confessions...
Seems I’d been away longer than I thought!
keyboard), squashed into a corner of my sofa with my laptop propped on one knee, I began to appreciate the benefits of office working, and the challenges of working from home. I hadn’t spoken to anyone all day either. I set up a daily update with the team and could see some were coping better than others. To focus on the positive I start every meeting with a ‘one good thing’ section where everybody can update on something positive that has happened to them since we last talked. (Billie and Jace’s ‘happy’ news that Albert flushed his own poop away for the first time probably wasn’t incredibly inspiring, but their smiles were cheering.) I was pleasantly surprised by how straightforward the gov.uk website was when I made the furlough claim. Both myself and Mr Crumbitt breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was finally submitted; indeed, he promised another box of Celebrational Crunchtastics and a hug post- pandemic as thanks. It’s been a crazy few weeks back in the UK, especially as I still haven’t seen any of the team in person; but the old adage is true, that sometimes you have to leave something to realise how much you miss it. Although my return was meant to be temporary, it’s clear I won’t be going back to Portugal any time soon. And maybe it’s time for me to think about where I really want to be… n The Editor: It’s great to have Penny return. As always, any resemblance to any payroll manager or professional alive or dead, or any payroll department or organisation whether apparently or actually portrayed in this article is simply fortuitous.
The team attempted to sing a rousing rendition of ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow’, but with the time lag and the tone deafness in the team it sounded like something being slowly strangled. So they gave up, and instead we just drank tea, and I caught up on the factory scandals I’d missed, before getting down to some serious payroll business. Considering the scale of the crisis and the speed at which everything changed I was proud of how the team had adapted and coped, but we had to ensure everything was prepared for whatever lay ahead. Having organised the team to follow a slightly more coherent timetable of daily and weekly tasks, I took on the job I’d been called back to do: make sense of and organise the government job retention scheme paperwork. Subscribing to the government alerts seemed like a solid idea at the time but I soon found my inbox filling up with emails (five or six every hour) ranging from closure of public swimming baths to taking your pet dog, cat or ferret abroad. Trying to navigate to find the notes and guidance that actually mattered was almost a full-time job in itself. Hands up if you’d heard of ‘furlough’ before March? I didn’t even know how to pronounce it, let alone work out what it was. It took me four read-throughs of the guidance (and a tub of Crumbitts Celebrational Crunchtastics which Mr Crumbitt had couriered to me as motivation) before I understood it; and, hand on heart, I’m still not 100% sure. But, thankfully, I grasped enough to summarise it for the team. After spending six hours, almost entirely unmoving (apart from my fingers on the
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | October 2020 | Issue 64 52
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