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report. The study also notes that 57% want AI to strengthen payroll compliance and accuracy, and 56% want AI to automate repetitive payroll and HR tasks to free up time. “Payroll experience is about how confident your employees feel about pay and how easy you make it for them to understand what’s happened each pay period” AI and automation make the right behaviours sustainable, while reducing repetitive administrative tasks, surfacing exceptions faster and helping teams to focus on the work that requires human judgment. AI is a practical tool for flagging irregular changes and unexpected shifts. Automation can help standardise approvals, enforce cut-offs and reduce manual handling which creates errors. When data flows cleanly and employees can self-serve the basics, payroll teams spend less time untangling exceptions and more time improving accuracy, control and service. Measuring payroll experience success So, when it comes to payroll experience, what
does good look like and how should it be measured? Strong payroll functions measure it in the same way they do with compliance: consistently, visibly and with an eye on preventing problems. How can you follow suit? We suggest you start by tracking a series of employee-facing signals. Query volume and query type look at how many payroll questions you receive per pay cycle and what they’re about (such as missing pay, deductions confusion and late changes). With time to resolution, you’re looking at how long it takes to close the loop once an employee flags an issue. Next are corrections and re-runs: how often does payroll have to correct output after processing? And last are payroll confidence indicators. These are repeated queries from the same employees, recurring confusion around the same deductions and spikes in escalations around known change events (benefits renewals, pay reviews and onboarding peaks, for example). Additionally, use communication and transparency to address what employees can feel when left in the dark: confusion, surprise and frustration. Proactive messaging turns these feelings into order. Publish key cut-offs, pay dates and important changes in one predictable place, and repeat them often. Your payslips count as communication, too. Review their labels and descriptions through a plain-English lens. If an employee needs a glossary to decode their payslip, it
isn’t transparent enough. Pair this with an FAQs resource and a clear escalation path, so employees know where to go, what to share and the response time to expect. Does your payroll experience measure up? Our report revealed that 88% of payroll and HR leaders say accurate and timely payroll is a critical driver of employee satisfaction and trust. Payroll is one of the few business processes employees experience so personally. That’s why the basics matter. When you make pay accurate, understandable and easy to access, you remove friction from people’s lives and reinforce confidence in the organisation. However, there’s still a lot of old school mentality around data processing and reporting within payroll. People will assume AI is here to take over their workload and make them redundant. We argue the opposite. We see payroll as an industry that will never be fully automated and will always require a human touch, because it’s so personal. This creates a unique opportunity for payroll and HR leaders like you to have a greater strategic impact on your company’s success.
If you want to explore how modern payroll and HR technology can support
smoother, more resilient payroll operations, visit Sage People: https://ow.ly/GtWz50YcoN9.
Michael Burns Senior Partner Success, Sage
Lauren Kirton Human Capital Management Senior Account Manager Consultant, Sage
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