How payroll outsourcing can optimise employee experience
Employee experience (EX) is how an employee perceives the company overall, and their role within it. It affects everything in a business, from workplace culture to talent retention and even productivity. When the employee experience is positive, employees are happy, engaged and able to get their work done efficiently.
With remote working still the norm in many businesses following the Covid-19 pandemic, it is arguably more important than ever for companies to put the interests of their staff at the forefront of their concerns. Seamless payroll processing has a key role to play in this.
How does payroll processing affect EX?
The World Economic Forum has stated that there’s currently a worldwide epidemic of poor mental health and related illnesses. Employers have a duty to their employees to pay them correctly and on time, to avoid creating unnecessary anxiety.
What contributes to a great employee experience is always getting paid accurately and on time, understanding ‘how things work’ by receiving uncomplicated guidance, having a single easy and secure access to personal and company documents.
Regardless of their size, companies need to get their payroll right every single pay period or risk dissatisfying employees – resulting in low productivity and poor engagement. This is one of the reasons that having ‘just’ a payroll provider doesn’t do the trick. Companies need to have a payroll partner that is flexible enough to be able to adapt to the company’s growth and specific needs.
What can go wrong?
Many factors can contribute to errors when processing a company’s payroll, which in turn can have a negative impact on the employee experience. These include:
- local regulatory complexity that entails deduction calculations and mandatory local benefits
- having to process payroll in multiple countries, which translates into a diverse spectrum of regulatory complexities in each of their local languages
- security protocols to maintain data privacy compliance
- integration with different platforms (HCM, T&A, ERP, etc.)
- the need to generate different types of reporting.
Partnering with a payroll outsourcing provider
Many business decisions and actions have a direct impact on the employee experience. When it comes to payroll outsourcing, quality of service, flexibility, adaptability, cooperation and a quick, solution-oriented approach are critical to keeping employees happy. A successful payroll process should underpin an employee’s feeling of being a company’s most valued asset.
We believe that a payroll outsourcing provider should be an extension of a company’s payroll team, forming a strong, flexible partnership which evolves in line with the business. It is a combination of understanding the company’s needs and having:
- a partnership approach to the relationship
- healthy and fluent communication
- proper SLAs (and compliance with them)
- local knowledge
- … along with the technology that helps enable all of the above.
Companies want a seamless payroll outsourcing process, driven by professionals who recognise where things can go wrong. We believe it’s critical to tightly integrate with the company to understand the culture of its business practices, how it operates, where it typically makes mistakes and how to leverage our experience with it.
In the complex payroll outsourcing environment, the goal should be to establish a strong, open partnership, founded on trust. It is important that the company’s corporate culture is well understood and aligned with by the outsourcing provider. This helps create a delivery model that can support the company, while providing exceptional customer service that fits both the company’s business needs and improves its employee experience.
Some providers claim that this can be done with the right payroll software, but it takes more than good technology to have a positive influence on employee experience. At TMF Group, we see technology as an element that facilitates the payroll process: a means to an end. For us, the role of our people remains the critical factor for successfully processing payroll. The service capability wrapped around whatever technology it may be, along with the knowledge of local jurisdictions, is where the value is really added.
Visit our Global Payroll and HR services webpage to learn how we can help you optimise your employees’ experience.
