The term ‘business-critical’ is overused in today’s world of work. In the context of the payroll department, however, it’s entirely appropriate.
We know it’s vital (and contractually necessary) to get pay right. Not doing so will fuel employee stress and rising attrition – two things that organisations very much want and need to avoid. This is why delivering excellent experiences for payroll professionals is not only crucial for attracting and retaining talent, but for future-proofing both payroll operations and wider business success.
These knowledge experts are in high demand and short supply, however. They also represent an ageing workforce demographic, and with legislative change adding to complexity (and stress), the payroll talent pool is becoming smaller.
So beyond flexible working, value-add benefits, and a generous holiday allowance, what can employers do to attract and retain payroll talent against this challenging backdrop?
Create a culture of continuous learning and development
LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report reveals that 90% of organisations are currently concerned about attrition. Their number one retention strategy? Enabling opportunities for learning. The previous year’s report even describes a ‘craving for career development and learning’ that is particularly strong amongst younger generations (18 to 34 year olds) who, according to the report, prioritise L&D over work-life balance and meaningful work.
These studies emphasise the strategic importance of L&D in retention terms, but we also know that learning and development is vital for recruitment – and especially where talent is in short supply. According to Gallup, 87% of millennials cite development opportunities as a key factor in their decision to accept a job offer or not. With this in mind, and with legislation and new technologies continuing to evolve, providing payroll professionals with effective training and upskilling will become ever more critical in continuity and compliance terms.
Creating opportunities to access continuous learning also creates an essential means of tapping into and retaining the tacit knowledge of more experienced payroll professionals. This calls for formal, informal, and blended learning; access to subject matter experts; and learning in the flow of work. In this way, organisations can create an active culture of learning that inspires payroll talent to join – and stay with – an organisation, whilst also encouraging new talent into the profession.
Leverage technology to make work easier (and less stressful)
Alongside learning and development, technology is also creating new opportunities to positively transform the payroll talent experience.
Payroll admins are used to the heightened stress that coincides with the end of every pay cycle. Those frenetic few days that see payroll admins working against the clock to verify data before cut-off. It’s a repeated – and long-standing – pattern of stress but one that realtime payroll (RTP) is finally helping to address.
By replacing traditional batch processing with an ‘always in calculation’ model, RTP can reduce end-of-cycle stress by distributing workloads more evenly across the month. It also promotes greater accuracy by continually updating pay calculations as soon as new data comes in, which enables payroll admins to see and address any anomalies as they happen, rather than having to tackle a large to-do list at the end of the month.
Beyond this, increasing automation of data entry is also helping payroll teams to focus on higher-value, strategic initiatives. For example, AI can accurately ‘read’ common HR forms (i.e P45s) and enter information into an employee’s record automatically. In addition to reducing the administrative burden that weighs heavy on busy payroll teams, this will soon resign manual data entry to the payroll history books – and that’s another great thing.
Investing in the future of payroll
Payroll professionals are known for serving the needs of other employees yet the exceptional experiences that today’s HR and business leaders are striving to achieve must extend to and include these business-critical colleagues.
Exceptional experiences are those underpinned by open communication, feedback, and recognition. They present opportunities for continuous growth, learning, and innovation – and they swap stress for more enjoyable experiences of work that feed into productivity and improved retention.
Over time, this is how organisations can reinvent the prospect of a payroll career, making it more appealing to new recruits so that this most critical of business operations is future proofed for years to come.
Rebecca Mullins' role and teams are focused on working with customers to release the value of their investment in technology and services.
She has over 20 years' experience in payroll, reward, HR, and workforce management operation and consulting experience, is a Fellow of the CIPP, and has been named in the Payroll World Top 50 and Reward Strategy's Reward 300 (Payroll Leadership section).
