ADVERTORIAL
Unlocking operational efficiency and well-being
Stuart Matthews, head of payroll, Experian, discusses the unforeseen benefits of implementing a new payslip solution for thousands of employees, and the ways in which it’s helped to raise payroll’s profile in the organisation
T here can often be some
change would become business as usual, everyone would get accustomed to the new system and things would continue relatively unchanged.
any queries they were raising to us via the ‘raise a query’ functionality.
apprehension across a business when implementing a new software
Payslips and engagement: some surprising benefits With the idea of providing more than just a payslip, the platform emerged as the ideal tool to bring employees closer to their pay, while fostering well-being with the inclusion of rewards and financial well-being tools within the payslip portal. Experian’s consumer research shows that 88% of employees want to receive benefit information through their payslips. So, our objective was to trial this across the workforce, to see if we could capitalise on the point-in-time engagement with pay to increase engagement with Experian financial benefits for employees – such as our workplace savings, salary advances, personal loans and debt management advice. Our statistics revealed an extraordinary 551% surge in employee engagement, evidencing the power of payday in driving awareness of reward schemes. A key driver of these engagement figures were the innovative features delivering tangible benefits to employees. The government’s benefits calculator,, for instance, earned employees nearly £27,000 in unclaimed benefits within the initial month, evidencing the real monetary value these features have, while helping to drive users to the portal to engage with their other rewards and benefits. We all know how challenging it can be to navigate company intranets to get information or remove pressure for staff to be sent and read more important emails, so the advantages of having reward alongside payslips has been an absolute game changer. n
solution, and in payroll this is no different. Pay is personal and such an emotive subject – employees care about it, and anything going wrong (no matter how small) matters. Therefore, it’s important when looking at improvements and efficiencies, streamlining processes and optimising costs that we balance potential improvements with impact to both individuals and the pay team. However, that said, any improvements which can help educate people about their pay provide great opportunities to explore.
“Pay is personal and such an emotive subject - employees care about it, and anything going wrong matters”
Surprisingly, we were wrong. Such a seemingly simple change to the payday experience for an employee had a continued effect on raising our profile within the business. Colleagues were much more aware of when their payslips were available, and of the payroll team and what we did (other than pushing the big payroll button!). We saw a change in the type of payroll queries coming into our team. Previously queries had predominantly been focussed on changes to net pay values, now we began to see queries become more focussed due to the previous month comparison functionality (particularly after bonus season when employees were able to check and understand the fluctuations in their net pay, which would have gone unnoticed if not highlighted to them in such a clear way). This positive shift in employee interactions was both encouraging and indicative of the initiative’s success – a win-win for both payroll and HR and a sign that we had made a positive change. Our staff members were understanding more components of their pay and getting educated around it, through the self-service PayDashboard articles and
A simple change In 2023, Experian implemented
PayDashboard as a new payslip delivery mechanism for our employees. Previously we uploaded PDF payslips to our human resource (HR) portal for employees to view and download. There were no problems with this process, and we weren’t actively looking to make any improvements. But the previous year Experian had acquired the PayDashboard business, and when we saw a demo of the technology, we could see it offered employees a bit more in the way of interactivity, through graphs and helpful payroll articles. And as it was a relatively simple change to make (just uploading a monthly data file to a different system), we saw no harm in rolling it out for our own internal payroll. Elevating the profile of payroll The launch went smoothly with lots of positive feedback from employees about what an improvement this was on the old PDF payslips, which was great to see. We expected that after a few weeks the
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | May 2024 | Issue 100 28
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