Optimising the employee experience: how to meet payroll expectations

Ask yourself: are your payroll processes damaging your employee experience?

We’ve found that the employee experience can often make or break a business as it has a direct impact on engagement, productivity and satisfaction.

Although businesses often overlook the effect of payroll on peoples’ day-to-day, the bottom line is that if you don’t pay employees, they won’t work.

In fact, 49% of employees will search for a new job after only two issues with their payroll.

So, combine the sheer importance of paying employees correctly with modern-day expectations for digital services at our fingertips, and suddenly getting payroll right becomes far more intimidating.

Don’t worry! In this blog, we’ve covered three payroll considerations you need to make to ensure an optimised employee experience.  

1) Digital payslips and payroll documents

As demands change and business processes become increasingly digital, employees now want their payslips and payroll documents online.

Not only are digital documents more sought after by employees, but they’re also far more efficient for those who send them.

By ditching your printer and envelopes, you can save an enormous amount of time/costs each month while simultaneously improving the employee experience.

The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) further explained the cost savings of digital payslips: “There’s no need for printing or postage costs and you’ll probably save money on payroll staff time too.”

2) Self-service 

People want media to be immediately available in their personal lives and that same expectation is now leaking into the workplace.

To put this expectation into perspective: a recent study found that people express frustration within 22 seconds if their TV or computer doesn’t start streaming a film properly.

You can apply this behaviour to payroll as employees don’t want to email someone and wait every time they need to change a detail or find an old payslip.

Instead, they’d rather utilise a digital solution to immediately self-serve their payroll tasks at a time most convenient to them.

3) Cloud functionality

If the COVID-19 pandemic has showcased anything, it’s that people can do their jobs effectively while working remotely.  

I’m predicting that we’ll see a permanent rise in the number of people operating via a hybrid model.

What this means for payroll is that employees must be able to access key elements from any location at any time.

To truly offer a payroll service that can meet the demands of an ever-evolving workforce, it needs to all be on the cloud rather than confined to an office.

But cloud payroll doesn’t only offer employees greater flexibility – those who manage payroll will also benefit as they’ll have far more freedom in their day-to-day.

Adapting to the future of payroll

The workplace is changing and as a result, payroll also needs added focus to become more modern and digitised.

To find out how other businesses are meeting a modern payroll demand, read one of our case studies here.