COMPLIANCE
Their experience speaks volumes. Because the payroll is good, the HR was great, because the holidays are good and we can book holidays ourselves, the employees stay. They’re productive, not because of the sales commission they receive, but because of all the other positive experiences they have told us about. PJ: Payroll attracts a certain type of person. Businesses in general have a lot to learn, and payroll needs to be a stand-alone department, with a payroll director. Payroll shouldn’t be black and white; it should be more colourful Jason Sweby: We’re trying to put the HR and payroll platform in the middle of the organisation, rather than it being a ‘back-office function’. You have the ongoing battle of control between payroll and HR, and HR tend to have a voice on the board, whereas payroll don’t. FW: One challenge for the industry is moving towards digital working. Employees are often surprised they must log in to an online payslip platform and use a complex password to enter the system. Payroll shouldn’t be black and white; it should be more colourful. Potentially we need to get rid of these traditional payroll cycles of monthly and put payroll back in the hands of the customer, which is the employee, so they get paid in the way they want to. DA: Accessible payroll data would put the power back into the hands of the employees. Q: One of the top three areas which respondents believe payroll will see increased involvement in the future is financial well-being. How do you see payroll professionals being responsible for financial well-being? MS: We’re quite responsible; people trust us and they rely on us. MP: Do you think it’s an additional burden, or would you just think it comes along with the job as such? MS: It goes hand in hand. Why wouldn’t you take the ownership when we’re thinking about these things anyway? We enrol employees into an auto-save, which acts like automatic enrolment, where we contribute into a credit union savings
account for them. Financial well-being does sit with payroll because it all hits the payslip. SK: I don’t think a lot of companies have the resource to do this. From the data I see, for everyone who has a fabulous idea, there are seven people behind them who wouldn’t open up about being in financial crisis. When people are really in crisis, we should be directing them to debt charities,
employer’s choice whether they offer this to employees. SK: For employees with a bad credit score, they have nowhere to go. SW: Gig economy workers live weekly, at best. But we don’t respond to that. Payroll data is the influencer. Payroll, for me, isn’t the holder of financial well-being, it’s just a small part of it.
What role will payroll professionals play in financial well-being?
Q: As transactional tasks are removed with process automation, where do you think payroll teams should focus their attention with the free time they now have? MS: Getting it right first time. Implementing automation, you don’t want to lose the expertise. Spend time on creating frequently asked questions and knowledge sharing. SW: For small and medium-sized enterprises, payroll teams don’t exist, so it’s the business owners who need to be considered here too. Data from payroll should sit within finance forecasts for key business decisions. Payroll teams should use the time to really show their specialisms and look at data analytics to spot areas of improvement. MS: We look to cut out the non-value- added tasks. We have completed a project where employees add their own overtime, and once managers approve it, it feeds straight through to the payroll. By moving this digitally, it empowers the employees to be in control. DA: What is it the board care about? It’s making more money and spending less to make that money. With technology,
who are skilled in how to deal with people in that situation. SW: How do you advertise this to the chief executive officer to get buy in? “Because we did ‘this’, our employees didn’t have to do ‘this’.” Financial well-being should be led by education. DA: It’s absolutely the priority. Your employer pays you as an employee – that’s the definition of financial well-being. And then everything that sits around that, like, are you educated on what you’re getting paid and how can you do a better job of using the money we pay you? FW: When I have worked today, I should be able to draw down on it today. Technology stops us. People question, ‘do we trust our employees to have their wages whenever they want?’ Well, why not? It’s interesting, isn’t it? Through application programming interfaces and open banking, we can change the view on what payroll is. MS: You become an employer of choice when you offer things like that. These things are successful if they choose to use them. We’re not forcing people to use them; we’re simply putting them out there.
JS: Financial well-being isn’t going to come from government. It will be an
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 85 | November 2022
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