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A s increased collaboration is finance and human resources (HR), communication has never been more important for the profession, particularly when considering the growing reliance on technology and third-party suppliers. What can payrollers do to encourage better two-way communication? To find out, I asked some prominent experts: ● Nick Clarke MCIPPdip , director of product management – payroll, legislation and portal solutions, Zellis ● Jason Davenport MCIPP MIoD , non- executive director, CIPP necessary between payroll and other departments, such as ● Maria Mason MCIPPdip , national payroll partner, business services and outsourcing, BDO ● Gemma Tait MCIPP , head of HR services and global assignments UK, BMW Group. How can payrollers encourage timely and accurate data from the wider business? Nick Clarke: Continued business engagement is key. Payroll departments used to be back-office functions tucked away without the exposure they deserved. It’s time to make the shift. Many employers have already done this by increasing direct engagement with managers and leaders to raise the profile of the profession. Raising the awareness of downstream impact will increase timeliness and accuracy, and needs to be continuous, with regular engagement backed up by data. A performance dashboard can be powerful and drive improvement by showing (by business area): ● volumes of over and under payments ● corrections made outside the normal cycle ● time spent rectifying errors ● net promoter scores from colleagues. Payroll professionals should work with managers and leaders to improve relationships, data quality, timeliness and to enhance service delivery. Jason Davenport: Consistent, regular communication in the form most appropriate for the business is crucial. This will ensure employees and line managers understand the importance of timely and accurate data. Whether regular emails, newsletter updates, business bulletins or operational meetings are best for getting
the message across will depend on each business circumstance. Whatever plan for communication is made, it must be a repeated message, and one thanking those who are making an effort, while persuading those who are non-compliant of the benefits of supporting. Payroll professionals should think about which key messages are important for the business. Consider the impact of late data and the often-unseen challenges it creates, and promote good practice and governance of data to support performance improvements. Payroll departments used to be back-office functions tucked away without the exposure they deserved An example could be a manager who always authorises information on the deadline date and expects 100% delivery beyond that. A useful strategy could be to focus attention on areas for improvement and discuss why bad habits have formed. They may not realise the impact it’s having, and how simple it’d be to improve the process by authorising straight away. Maria Mason : Payroll professionals understand the importance of delivering a high level of service to stringent timeframes. They require structure and time to ensure they can carry out the processes and tasks required to complete a payroll. Unfortunately, although payrollers understand the importance of having set payroll schedules in place, this isn’t always understood by the rest of the business who provide payroll input. Boundaries are pushed, and late changes occur. They’re often accepted by the payroll team, who don’t want to let people down and aim to pay people correctly. This means that payroll teams work under pressure, outside of standard hours and to tight deadlines. It reduces the time available to perform appropriate quality checks, which can lead to payroll issues. It’s important payroll departments have
schedules for payroll processing, which are shared with all parties associated with payroll. It’s also important that payroll stand firm on deadlines and inform others about the impact of late data, and the risks associated with giving the payroll team insufficient checking time. BDO introduced a task management system to control all tasks associated with client payrolls. The system provides prompts for both the client and payroll team at all stages of the payroll schedule. To encourage clients and other departments to provide timely and accurate data, BDO employs technology, including robot process automation and artificial intelligence, to link to our clients’ HR and finance systems directly. This prevents data having to be re-keyed and streamlines the processes for data ingestion. This has improved the accuracy rates we’re able to deliver and allows us to offer additional runs and more flexible payroll schedules. Gemma Tait: We document and share our payroll calendar, key dates and cut-offs annually. They’re circulated in November, for the following year, to all key HR management contacts, trade union representatives and any other regular submitters of data. The calendar is stored on our HR portal for easy reference. Hosting monthly meetings between our HR services and HR management teams across the UK allows us to reiterate the next monthly cut-off date as a reminder. Late data submission is also one of our service level agreements, so we track and monitor performance, and feedback the results to help drive improvements. How can payroll keep communication relevant and informative to a wide variety of customers? NC: This often depends on the industry segment. Communications to colleagues should be tailored so they’re relevant. A customer can be a manager or leader who would be interested in performance statistics, with powerful reporting tools becoming readily available. This need can be met through visual dashboards or automated reports. Colleagues will be interested in easy-to-use processes, simple intuitive online engagement tools to submit and change data and, most importantly, accuracy of pay. Self-service tools are an effective way
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 78 | March 2022
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