Feature insight - epayslips
Epayslips – trends and developments
Glyn King, Epay expert at Prolog Print Media, shares trends and looks at emerging insight for payroll leaders
A decade ago, for me, Epay was a concept. Today, it’s a product hosting thirty million documents a year and rising. Over the years, we’ve gained valuable insight to the business and technology drivers attracting payroll leaders to epayslips. Here are some thoughts and observed trends – around employee engagement, delivery channels and data security. Payroll teams want to deliver a high quality epayslip service. Those achieving success see employees as consumers: prioritising ease of access to information and contextualising content. Accessibility is a major driver for engagement. IT research company Gartner suggests: “Every employee is a digital employee” and “…employees now have a growing digital dexterity in their personal lives: often self-managing home networks, devices and apps”. Enterprises are now recognising the need for consumer-like computing with epayslips. Providing access to information at work, home and on-the-go is a key trend. Employees, outside work, are using on- demand media services such as BBC iPlayer. They enjoy connecting 24/7, from different devices and value the content. Epayslips need to be just as accessible. Employers using secure web portals are addressing this requirement. Contextualised content is making the experience personal. A payslip is a valued document and well-read. Payroll teams are now digitising other documents such as P60 certificates, P11D returns, time sheets and P45 forms. Human resources, reward and pension teams are adding to the user experience. Working with payroll they are creating personalised documents such as reward statements and adding employee messages and company documents such as staff handbooks to epay portals. A major concern ten years ago was accessibility. Early epayslips could only be
accessed by employees, at work, using self-service. Thankfully, advances in home broadband and mobile technology now provide solutions that reach beyond corporate infrastructure. ...prioritising ease of access to information and contextualising content Payroll teams increasingly communicate with evolved employees using different devices. We’ve seen a shift from routine, repeatable work patterns to non-routine, dynamic work from multiple locations. A mobile-first mind-set is essential. Our How employees access epayslips report in January 2016 showed 43.8% of employees viewed epayslips from a mobile device (up 5.6% on 2015). Payroll teams need to include mobile as part of their epayslip strategy. Epayslips aren’t just for tech-savvy youngsters either. According to the Office for National Statistics, 88.3% of 55–64 year olds used the Internet in the three months at the start of 2016. Internet use across all ages is rising. At this point, I should offer a cautionary note for those emailing payslips. Billions of emails are sent daily. It’s said 76% are deleted within 24 hours. Increasingly employees, outside work, are texting and using WhatsApp and Facebook as their primary communication tools. Payroll leaders are reconsidering email and looking at more appropriate channels for epayslips. So, what about print? Well, only 10% of the companies using our Epay service achieve 100% epayslips. Enterprises find offering print, as part of a multi-channel service, gives employees choice: which improves engagement. Enforced epayslips
often creates a negative start point. Another growing trend is single sign-on. We work with several employee benefit companies to give employees access to Epay via their company’s benefits portal. This approach drives weekly and monthly visitors to the portal and increases visibility of rewards. High profile data breaches, such as TalkTalk and Tesco Bank, are public reminders of the need for secure methods of handling and protecting data. Data processed and hosted on United Kingdom (UK) servers is subject to tight controls and more payroll leaders are understanding the importance of UK-based services. In 2018, a new general data protection regulation (GDPR) comes in to force – Brexit decisions pending. Part of the regulation calls for a data processor to inform the controller of any sub-processors: so an epayslip supplier should tell their customer if they sub-contract their work. We value this change, which will give payroll leaders greater transparency of who is processing employee information. Cyber security is an increasingly complex issue, too. Outwitted by IT systems which block virus programmes attached to emails, cyber criminals are using alternative attachments such as Word documents. These emails are difficult to block and for employees to identify as fake. Payroll leaders should question if email is a reliable and secure delivery channel. Keen to protect employee epayslip portals, payroll leaders are seeking reassurances from their epayslip supplier. A way to achieve this is by sharing of penetration test results: where cyber security experts audit epayslip software for vulnerabilities. Any epayslip supplier should share their results. To conclude, payroll leaders continue to find success by providing epayslips that consider accessibility, availability and security. Epayslips are here to stay. n
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Issue 26 | December 2016/January 2017
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
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