Beyond the Paycheck: How Efficient Administration Impacts Employee Experience

The conversations we hear about employee experience regularly include familiar themes—team culture, quality of managers, opportunities for growth and development. These are all things that are easy to observe, measure, and reflect on. And for good reason, they matter. A lot.

Pay Errors Aren't Small Mistakes

There is a concept in organizational psychology known as hygiene factors. These are fundamental conditions that do not make you happy if they are present, but make you immediately unhappy when there are issues. For instance, in a workplace, the most obvious case is being paid accurately and on time.

When someone is paid wrongly or late, something in the psychological agreement is broken – the assumption that if you turn up and work, the organization will keep its side of the bargain. Once that trust is gone, it's more difficult to reestablish than you might think, whatever the company does to remedy the situation.

Invisible Friction is Still Friction

Mistakes in administrative tasks not only result in negative feelings but also in wasted time and effort from employees that could be directed towards their actual responsibilities.

For instance, if an employee identifies an error in their pension contribution, cannot access their payslip, or questions why their tax deduction amount has changed, they must reach out to HR, perhaps follow up if they don't get a timely response, and then wait days or weeks for the issue to be resolved. Meanwhile, this person can't stop working on their deadlines to resolve the problem. This adds up to significant lost productivity and increased frustration that you won't see on the account books.

Self-service portals are an easy, cost-effective way to reduce this friction point. When employees can instantly view their own leave balances, tax information, and payslips, the relationship becomes far more proactive and transparent. Just that added level of visibility will change how your employees perceive their employer.

Outsourcing As A Cultural Decision

Payroll is still seen by many businesses as an internal process that should be handled manually, whether on a spreadsheet or through a company's legacy system which is often the responsibility of one to two people. However, this process is particularly delicate, redundant, and rewards entirely the wrong type of work that HR should be responsible for if you want to build a thriving company and happy workforce.

For one, if the two team members handling payroll are on leave, sick, or on vacation, the entire company's payroll system halts. It's not scalable, you won't be the first company to really feel the pain of this during COVID-19.

Secondly, if anything untoward were to occur, the business will suffer dramatically as a result. No matter how many months or years have passed successfully, any business faced with a payroll crisis will raise serious questions about the viability of the company.

Finally, where does it position all the creatively assembled internal HR teams for building company culture, driving effective recruitment programs, monitoring employee health and wellbeing, and expanding the business for the better? Somehow stuck minuting overtime on spreadsheets.

Switch to professional Payroll services and you'll realize that getting the numbers right is only half of its benefit.

Flexibility Now Sits At The Administration Level

Younger workers have indicated that flexibility is not just about where they work or when they work. It also refers to how they are compensated. Real-time pay, which means accessing the wages earned even before the scheduled payday arrives, has shifted from a special benefit to some expected feature in various industries.

Real-time pay is only possible on modern cloud systems that can handle real-time calculations, instead of lumping sums each month-end. Any administrative payroll systems you use will determine if this level of flexibility can be an option you consider.

Varied benefit systems are not any different. If the system can't process different contribution rates, various election timeframes, or any changes during the year without creating a few mistakes, these options may not be available. The ceiling for your employee value proposition is set by the quality of your administrative systems, whether leadership knows it or not.

Onboarding is Where First Impressions Are Made

There is a specific phase in the employee lifecycle where this is particularly evident. The first two weeks. If, for instance, someone new to the organization is not paid the correct amount, cannot get into their pension details, or has to spend 3 days trying to track down the person in HR who can grant them access to their computer, this is not just a poor start from an onboarding perspective.

This individual will already be mentally adjusting their original expectations of the organization. The organization didn't arrive, the individual wasn't expected, their time isn't important, this is all a bit flaky, etc.

Admin is Culture in Disguise

We often focus on culture as if it's created during all-hands meetings or off-site retreats. But in reality, it's the culmination of a thousand tiny, repeated interactions that happen every day at work. Being paid accurately. Getting an immediate answer to a simple question. Locating their data before submitting a ticket.

These interactions are often overlooked, but they add up. They eventually become the things employees recount when they're at a dinner party and a friend asks, "So what's it really like working at your company?"