Every employee has an experience with their paycheck. Many have experiences with their timesheets, either entering or approving them. Then there are the various self-services for changing banking, taxes and so on. Too often, payroll consultants and professionals focus on so many other things than these payroll experiences. We get focused on calculating payroll accurately and delivering it on time, getting compliance and accounting right, that we neglect these payroll experience points. That needs to change. We might not (OK, won’t) be able to make payroll a fountain of positive employee experiences, but we can prevent bad experiences. And that is worthwhile. Here are a few things to consider.
Pay Statements
I’ve seen so many ugly pay statements from various payroll systems and services. It’s painful, really. So many painful abbreviations for various types of pay, deductions and taxes because payroll systems have this tradition of a two-column pay statement which constricts space. Direct deposit statements printed on plain paper, with the bottom third resembling a voided check. Really? On plain paper? And going through all sorts of effort to ensure a pay statement doesn’t go over one page. All these things are awful legacies of when we printed and delivered physical paychecks for every employee. But now, most people at most companies are paid via direct deposit and get their pay statement online via PDF so why haven’t we changed the pay statement? I’ve successfully renovated pay statements at several companies, but some are hesitant to make the change. And the resistance usually comes from the payroll department, not from the legal or HR departments. Even if we make the best static pay statement, it’s not going to make people really happy and engaged. At best, it avoids disappointment – and that is worth something.
Going beyond a better pay statement, which is still needed for compliance purposes in most countries, we have interactive pay statements. These are great! Employees can see their pay represented in charts and graphs, drill into detail, compare current to previous and so on. This is a good, but also so far, rare experience.
Timesheets
I’ve seen as many ugly timesheets as ugly pay statements. Too many columns, too much scrolling, too many buttons, slow refreshes for example. Usually it comes from trying to make one solution fit several types of employee populations. Sometimes it’s just old, outdated software constrained by an old platform. But it’s a usability issue that generates a bad user experience – and that matters. No one is going to really enjoy or look forward to their timesheet, but at least we can make the experience easy and streamlined.
Timesheet Approval
I’ve heard from so many supervisors that timesheet approval is a chore for them. We all understand it’s necessary for accountability, controls and accuracy, but how can we make it suck less? So far, I haven’t seen good solutions for this that leave supervisors feeling positive about the experience. What if we used some algorithms to identify discrepancies and outliers? Distill the company’s controls and supervisors’ knowledge into some rules, combine it with employee demographics and show people which timesheets really need some attention?
Self-Service
Employee self-service for routine changes like address, banking and tax have been around for a long time now. And as a consultant, I end up enhancing most of them for every customer because out of the box they have too many rough edges and assumptions. For example, most every company I’ve worked with doesn’t want employees to be able to make retroactive-dated tax withholding changes. So we build in extra logic to prevent that. Some companies wisely want to limit the number of bank deposits an employee can have – usually additional logic to code for that. I could go on.
But even aside from the extra coding, we need to make the process less clunky. Let’s guide the employee through a smooth process. Let’s provide them with feedback so that they feel confident the changes were successful. As with the items mentioned above, this won’t necessarily be a great experience for employees (WOW! I feel really good about how I was able to change my tax info!) but at least we can prevent bad experiences.
On-Demand Payroll
What if you could get an advance on your earned pay at any time? Maybe you’ve worked 30 hours this week at $20/hr, you could get an advance of $450 right now via an app on your phone (yes, I can multiply 30x20, but let's keep some back for taxes). There are a number of services you can contract with to do this, and it improves employee experiences and engagement. Yes there are details and exceptions to deal with that we payroll geeks think of whenever this is mentioned, but it is feasible.
Great Ideas – But How?
I can hear, and have heard, payroll professionals agree these are all good but getting the time and funding to do it is a big obstacle. Getting it done during a payroll implementation is tough because people are focused simply on getting payroll accurate and tested by the cutover date. Getting it done after the implementation is also challenging because why invest in payroll when we already pay everyone accurately and timely?
Improving employee experience leads to lower turnover and higher engagement. When employees don’t dread their interactions with payroll, when we can actually deliver a pleasant, smooth experience for them, they will have more energy left to devote to the things that make a difference for the company – making and selling things. Tie your payroll experience projects to the overall human experience story, because it really IS part of it! Maybe start with something smaller and easier to measure. Then do it, and measure again. Then brag about the improvement and use it as a lever for the next project!