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1984 – my world turned upside-down as the payroll manager left the Chartered Quantity Surveying company I worked for, and suddenly I was on a payroll training course with the responsibility of running the payroll for 120 staff the following month!

Over the years I developed and implemented new Work In Progress and Job Costing systems, upgraded the payroll system and started to learn about ‘change’ then I moved on and held a variety of roles within payroll and HR including Help Desk, Quality Assurance, Pre-Sales, Training, Payroll and HR Consultant and have managed large outsourced payroll and HR teams and been responsible for several large bids in different organisations.

Through all my roles I have worked with payroll teams all over the UK and Ireland and now really understand how changing the way teams work, how much of the system they use really can affect their efficiency and ultimately their customer service and how people are always our most important asset and should be treated that way.

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All these mean much the same with slight variations on the theme – but ultimately change means something different for everyone, in different circumstances.

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Process – looking at how we do things, i.e. operational procedures

Systems – looking at whether our system is fit for purpose

People – looking at behaviours, motivation and personal development

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Discussions around:

Do you behave differently depending on your customer?

Do you have good relationships with your customers?

What outputs do you provide to your customers? Do you ever review that and make sure your output is fit for purpose?

Highlight the point that you can always challenge when a customer requests something and offer suggestions for alternative solutions to make sure you provide exactly what they need – often they ask for what they think they need which might be a slightly different thing!

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A ‘perfect payroll world’ would have no incoming calls or emails

What are you doing to achieve perfection? Or at least to remove some of the incoming calls

How often do you review/analyse the type of calls you get into payroll?

Quite often there are no SLA’s in place internally – have you ever offered them – i.e. with ICT, Finance, HR? It’s usually a verbal agreement rather than a formal written one.

All calls/emails into the team is classed as “Waste” if we use a process-re-engineering methodology term

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It’s good to understand what we can do to improve, even small changes can have a big impact on the way we work.

The first step once we’ve analysed the level of ‘waste’ in our system is to review what we do – our processes – and make sure every step is fit for purpose

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When you look at what you do, you’ll need someone to act as a ‘change champion’ to own the process and keep a look out in the future to see if things are still working effectively.

Test the re-designed process first, and keep changing it until you’re happy – if it doesn’t work try again!

Make audit aware that you’re reviewing processes and get them involved, it makes it much easier to fulfil any audit requirements you might have if you get them on board early on in the process

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If you’re changing something, it may be that you immediately see a positive difference in what you’re doing so you know it’s worked well.

Sometimes there may be more pain before you start to see improvements – i.e. implementing self service could cause an influx of calls into payroll but once things settle down it will make life easier for everyone

If things haven’t worked, you’ll see things deteriorate quite quickly – don’t be afraid to go back to an old process until you can work out what has gone wrong – you can keep trying until you get to a process that works effectively.

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Some examples of how you can measure the accuracy of your payroll internally – if things are going well, the error rate should be low.

By including the total value of the payroll and include the number of errors, you can see the impact – i.e. there may be 100’s of errors but only 20p wrong – whereas 1 error could be £1,000+ it gives some context to the number!

By breaking down the errors into department or section – you can see if one particular part of the company causes more problems than others so you can target your review to find out why and perhaps do some more training or issue some guidelines to help

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It’s also useful to understand whether the total number of errors on the previous slide were relating to things your customers have done wrong, or your payroll team.

Here’s the customer errors – the main errors being late claims being submitted – something like that would be resolved by the use of self service – but if that’s not an option – then maybe you could establish if there’s 1 or 2 managers that are holding on to claims and not approving them in a timely manner – a bit of investigation may resolve most of these issues.

What more can you do to educate your customers?

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Finally on measures:

Look at the errors your own team make – why are they making them?

Do you do 100% checks on payroll? Often if there are too many checks taking place team members get complacent and don’t care as much since their work is being checked anyway. Take out most checks and only perform them randomly and people will subconsciously take more care when doing the input - ultimately creating much fewer errors!

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Challenge everyone about ownership of the day to day operational processes

Who owns them?

Where is that change champion we talked about earlier – that person who thinks outside the box and wants a personal challenge?

Use those individuals as your process owners, taking responsibility and accountability for how you work!

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Often it’s not about the processes – your system may be letting you down.

How many of your operational processes are in place because of failures of your system?

How much duplicate input are you performing?

Are there manual calculations being undertaken when the system could do the work for you?

Discuss how many spreadsheets you, or your team have holding data because you don’t trust your system?

Your payroll system should be working for you not the other way around!

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Often, when you implement a new payroll system, you have phases – go live will always be as much as you need to do in order to pay employees accurately and on time but will invariably be missing some automatic calculations, such as Occupational Sickness and Maternity Pay

How often does phase II, III and IV not actually go ahead due to budgets being cut or there just not being enough time?

Do you know how much of your current system was actually bought? (i.e. HR and Payroll and Self Service?)

How much was actually implemented?

Is there anything you can do about that now?

If you re-engineer some of your processes like we discussed earlier, it may free up some time to spend on looking at implementing some new areas of your system to make things even more efficient!

Make your system work for you rather than the other way around!

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How many of you actually have time to lead?

Do you end up rolling your sleeves up more than you should?

What is stopping you from leading your team effectively?

Or would you personally rather be involved in the day to day ‘stuff’ rather than being the driver for change?

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Which are you?

The leader that drives ahead with change

Or

The one that drives off at the next exit if change is mentioned?

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At payroll leadership level it’s important that you are leading – not doing. How many of you think you’re doing too much? What is going wrong?

It’s important you’ve got the right team behind you and there are some critical factors that you need to be aware of:

1. Your Team – need to have the chance to grow in knowledge and confidence but reliability is inherent so pick your team carefully!

2. Walk the Talk – show by example and lead your team as you would expect to be lead yourself

3. Make a big emphasis on competencies – use all the tools available to you – either within your own company, or through other organisations such as the CIPP (Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals)

Performance of an individual should be monitored and there’s some great tools available to help you do this.

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Most payroll leaders inherit their team – you don’t always get the chance to recruit, so you have to manage and support your team as best you can.

How many of you have the following in place?

Probation

Appraisals

Performance Management

Performance Development

Any others?

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During May 2013 there was an episode of Undercover boss on TV – I was so impressed by a particular ‘change champion’ that was highlighted in the organisation being showcased I thought I’d share it with you.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/2486618/Boss-spies-on-holiday-park-staff.html#ixzz2Si7lLHlG

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One of the 2 members of staff that was unmotivated was very obviously in the wrong job, a change of role made a world of difference to her behaviour and her motivation levels

One of the ‘promoted’ team was so obviously a change champion that the ‘boss’ gave her a new role, championing a new way of working across the whole organisation… This gave her renewed confidence to go on and do bigger and better things!

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/2486618/Boss-spies-on-holiday-park-staff.html#ixzz2Si7lLHlG

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I was really pleased to see that the outcome of this particular programme paid so much attention to the people and processes – as we’ve already discussed, there needs to be consistency in what we do and how we behave and we need to change those things that don’t work well.

We can’t always do what they do in these programmes and go ‘under cover’ but we can do some things that will help us understand our teams better.

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The key to getting our team on side is to motivate them:

Think about what motivates you…

Do you really understand what your real motivators are?

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One side is things that make our life easier, the other side will actually make a difference if we have, or don’t have them in place…

There are different things that motivate different people and its up to us as managers to understand what those things are – take time in your 1-2-1 meetings to understand what your team are thinking!

Money isn’t always everything – there isn’t always extra money to hand out so what else can be done?

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Thinking about your potential plans for improvement – have a look at those individuals you thought about earlier as your change champions – what can you change in their roles to give them some motivation and career growth and development opportunities?

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In my role as Non-Executive Director/Trustee of the CIPP (Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals) – I’ve seen the payroll standards accreditation awarded to many different organisations.

If you’re not engaged in this programme, what do you use to find out what skills your team have got, and at what level?

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The PQP can have a skills analysis, with 3 sections that employees complete – technical (payroll), Business and Management and Personal Skills – they determine themselves how experienced they are in a number of key areas:

For managers you would expect a level 4-5, for team members a level 3-4 and for junior staff 1-2 – which gives them a development plan to try and achieve a higher level throughout their employment.

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This is an example of what the payroll skills section might look like

Each role has an ‘expected’ level of expertise for each section

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An individual will use these definitions to identify what their skill level is. They will then mark themselves and those scores will be verified by their manager – discussions taking place if there’s a disagreement.

If an individual marks themselves as less than the expected, they have a career development opportunity – and those that have marked themselves at a higher level, will be en route for succession planning. Those with higher scores can also be used to train those with skills gaps to improve the overall performance of the team.

Everyone will have an opportunity to grow and even those individuals that are happy to stay doing what they do, they will have to make sure they keep up to date with legislation etc. to keep their knowledge current.

This whole process links in very nicely with an appraisal process and CPD (Continuous Professional Development)

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As well as payroll skills, it’s important to review an individual’s experience in other areas, such as analytics, people management (especially important for team leaders and managers) and innovation (great to identify those change champions) and programme/systems development – highlighted further here to show change management skills

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One of the most difficult areas to manage but probably the most important, around behaviours and personal skills.

If all behaviours are positive and appropriate then you’ve got a great team but remember ‘Undercover Boss’ and those individuals who were negative – their behaviours were drastically changed when the issues with their roles were addressed.

If you don’t act when there’s poor performance it could make things worse and those who are behaving appropriately tend to start getting negative and not seeing the point of their good behaviour!

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There are a few great benefits to a team, and personal development plan.

Those quiet ones can see themselves as being experts in certain fields and get their opportunity to shine

Don’t be afraid to tackle issues with staffing – it’s crucial to success!

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