Taking back control
Karen Booker, head of payroll for Dimensions, offers sound advice
T he demands of the payroll manager can be wide and varied. Not only do you have a team to manage, you also have a manager to manage. The pressure can be quite intense and this is when you find out if payroll is really in your blood. The responsibility of payroll deadlines, staff demands, and meeting your own and your manager’s expectations can be a challenge. And you have to have those all-important one-to-ones with your team, engage with your wider customers, battle HM Revenue & Customs and deal with any variety of complex and obscure payroll and tax related queries. I love the exhilaration and excitement of not knowing what the next challenge will be, but I have learned the hard way that I need to look after myself and maximise my work time. Open plan offices are very popular today, so you may not have the luxury of your own office, or in some cases your own desk if you have a hot-desking arrangement. This doesn’t mean that you can’t control your environment and limit the access people have to your valuable time. If possible, have a corner seat with less foot traffic: you need to see who is coming to interrupt you so you can
prepare to fend them off or hide what’s on your desk or screen (remember those data protection fundamentals that we drum into our teams). Open plan offices can be noisy and this does not help you when you need to concentrate. If you need to read or write a report, book some time in a meeting room, office or quiet area, use a laptop or work from home to get it done without interruptions, most likely quicker and more thoroughly. Block-out time in your calendar and work away from your desk – this tells people that you are not to be disrupted and that you are doing something important. Book a lunch break in your calendar and make sure you take it. You wouldn’t expect any of your colleagues to skip lunch, so you shouldn’t either. Get some fresh air, even if it’s for ten minutes. Switch off email notifications, as that annoying little envelope or ping needs to go. Emails are a constant distraction. If a message is that urgent they will call you, or at least they should, and if they don’t call then that’s on them. Create lots of folders in your email box. As soon as an email is dealt with
file it away. You should only be seeing emails in your inbox that you have not yet dealt with. Once you have read them, make sure they are marked as ‘read’, so you know exactly what’s new and what’s not. Sounds simple, but it can really help keep the panic and feeling of being overwhelmed at bay. At times when you are really pushed for time, set up an automatic reply thanking customers for their email, stating that you have limited access to emails and that you will respond to their email as soon as possible. This gives you a little grace and will remove any expectation of an immediate response. Also, try not to respond to emails too quickly; unless an email is of critical importance a response can wait for a few hours. You may also find that it gives you time to think about your response and as such it will be of a higher quality. Use signatures as email templates; they are great for all of those recurring emails that you have to send, such as password changes, HM Revenue & Customs’ contact details, or guidance on how to log in. Simply set up a signature email, insert the signature into the email as the message and send, job done in seconds. You also need to get these signatures set up in the generic email inbox, so that you team can blast through emails quickly and there is
...tells people that you are not to be disrupted and that you are doing something important
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2017 | Issue 28
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