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Notes from the Payroll Prof
by Roger A. Smith, CPP & Payroll Consultant
One Mistake
If you read my January column on New Year’s Resolutions, you know that I recommended monthly “SMART” personal objectives rather than lofty 12-month “resolutions.” In following my own advice, I decided that a goal to lose 20 pounds or so would be difficult for me to achieve. However, losing two pounds in a month seemed to meet all the qualities of a SMART objective:
- Specific – not general.
- Measurable – so that you know when you are successful.
- Agreed upon – in the case of personal objectives, you need to agree with yourself – in other words, commit to the objective.
- Reachable – while objectives need to be challenging, nothing will be achieved if the objective is unreachable.
- Time specific – commit to a target date to achieve the objective.
So, have I been successful? Here are my results so far:
January: No problem. It was easy to lose two pounds that I gained over the holidays by the 15th and I had lost three pounds by the end of the month
February: As I suspected, the first few pounds were the easiest. However, I was able to lose an additional two pounds by the end of the month, and I was down five pounds.
March: Perhaps a bit too self-confident, I pretty much held steady for most of the month. Then came Easter week-end. Easter cookies. Dinner out with the family. Easter brunch. Chocolate Easter eggs. You can guess what happened. It was a big mistake to stop worrying about losing weight during the Easter holiday period. I not only didn’t lose any weight in March, I actually gained back the two pounds I lost in February.
Isn’t life like that? One mistake can wipe out thousands of hours of perfection. As Scott Adams, creator of the popular Dilbert comic strip puts it, “One ‘oh sh*t’ can erase a thousand attabboys.”
As payroll professionals, we probably understand this more than most. We can produce thousands or even hundreds of thousands of paychecks to perfection, but if we make a mistake no one will care about anything but the errors. At one time in my career I was responsible for a very large payroll producing millions of checks per year. We were doing a great job, but a small programming error produced erroneous paychecks for about ten employees who had a unique combination of factors. When I was called into the boss’s office to explain the problem, I told him how it happened. I explained the details of the error, and the unique circumstances involved. When I told him the other 99.998% of the checks were correct, he wasn’t impressed.
Payroll is like that. We must be constantly vigilant to prevent mistakes! No amount of correct checks can ever offset any errors we make. Our profession is similar to that of a baseball umpire: “You have to start out perfect, and improve from there.”
Next month I’ll discuss some recommendations on what to do after “the big mistake.”
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