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Eliminate Stress and Implement a Payroll Best Practice – Employee Self-service
In some way, we all strive to accomplish best practices. Trying to find the best possible way to accomplish a task, at home or at work, is a best practice. For many of us, we try to get more done in less time.
For example, our two-day weekends are short, yet this is when we have time to run errands and take care of household tasks. We learn the most efficient routine to get our chores done, so we can also enjoy the weekend.
It is the same concept on the job, although the goal may depend on your role in the organization. Maybe your goal is to get more work done in eight hours, so you can go home to your family. The CEO’s goal may be to cut costs for budget constraints, or to spend the savings elsewhere. To ensure success, there is a proven methodology to follow when implementing a best practice.
As you will hear from our featured speaker in this month’s webinar, “Implementing Payroll Best Practices,” there are eight phases in the best practice implementation cycle.
- Understand the current situation
- Gain knowledge of the best practice
- Create a vision of the future
- Assemble the team
- Understand the details of the current environment
- Confirm the business case
- Test and implement the best practice
- Review success and begin again
The first two steps are pre-implementation. Understanding your current environment and situation gives you the knowledge of where improvements need to, or can, be made. There are several tasks in the payroll department that consume a lot of personnel time, such as looking up information for other employees, entering employee hours, collecting timesheets, amending timesheets, recalculating errors, etc. If you are in the payroll department, you understand how often and how much time you can spend on these tasks.
To demonstrate implementing payroll best practices using the suggested implementation cycle, let’s look at implementing employee self-service to accomplish these tasks and more. We just completed both step one (understanding the current situation) and step two (gain knowledge of best practice).
On to step three: “create a vision of the future.” Imagine employees having access to timesheets to enter their own hours or make changes for approval; access to accrual balances and scheduled time-off; ability to update their address, phone number, or other information; provide access to W-2, as we have all lost these in time of need. Employees can be alerted to turn in timesheets and managers can be prompt to approve timesheets, without payroll personnel having to do the legwork. What a vision.
To make that vision a reality you need to assemble the best possible team, including a leader, a project manager, and other key support personnel with a variety of expertise. This particular project is going to require personnel familiar with technology, preferably personnel from your IT department. You may even want your project manager to be from your IT department, as you begin to gather details for the project. As with any team, communication is key. Everyone should know his or her responsibilities clearly, understand the objectives, and be aware of the timeline. All of this can be decided as a team or by the leader. However, working together as a team to make these decisions gives everyone a more personal investment in the project. The decisions made in step four are critical to the success of the project.
Step five is a good time to create a current flow chart of the environment in question. In many cases, you will find this flow chart to be a large diagram with several boxes and arrows that drill-down to the details of every step in the current process – probably not a seamless flow. But, this provides a foundation of the current environment, so you can make the most effective enhancements.
How will the new flow chart look? Most likely, it will be a simple and clean process flow. This will help support your business case in step six. By this time, you will have detailed information on how employee self-service will improve productivity and lower costs. By implementing a fully automated system, calculation errors are eliminated, retroactive paychecks are processed accurately, and the overall process is completed on time, every time. Electronic manager approvals ensure accuracy of submitted hours, projects, rates, etc., and it saves the payroll department from having to track down the information from each manager, for each employee. As we discussed earlier, the timesavings for the payroll department is significant, providing the department with more time to spend on other tasks. At this point, you have compelling information to support the new change.
Step seven is one of the most critical phases – implementing the new way of doing business. Anyone who will be affected by the change should also know about the change before it is implemented. In this particular example, a company meeting is an opportunity for you to demonstrate how the system will work and how it will make their lives easier because information is immediately available to them. It is also the time to find out if there are any concerns. Make sure you ask the important questions, such as “does anyone think this will not work” or “is anyone unhappy with this change?” Now is the time to address concerns and help you gain buy-in from everyone to make this a seamless change.
The final step is review of the process. What went well? What could we do better next time? What is the next best practice we should tackle?
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