Get it wrong, and your valuable employees will become motivated to look for work elsewhere — and getting it right is harder than you might think. Each passing year sees an increase in what you can realistically achieve using through your payroll process, and what employees can generally expect.
To keep up with your competitors, you need to pay close attention to how the process of payroll management is changing — so let’s arm you with the necessary information by looking at 7 payroll management trends your business needs to know:
Provision of financial advice
In recent years, we’ve seen a broad move towards companies providing their employees with additional support outside of work. The reasoning for this is simple: the healthier and happier your employees are, the more productive and useful they’ll be. Consequently, many businesses have started offering financial advice for their staff members: investment tips, banking suggestions, and anything else that could help. If you want to keep your employees happy, you should let them know what benefits you’re willing to provide.
Widespread near-total automation
Automation is getting into almost every part of the business world, and payroll is no exception. Driven by free payroll tools from companies like Wave, and aided where necessary by general automation tools like IFTTT, even the smallest businesses can now configure their employee payments to go out automatically — no manual work required. If you’re not already automating your payroll, it’s time to make the shift.
Implementation of service chatbots
What happens when there’s a payment problem, or someone simply wants more information about when they’ll be getting paid? They could ask one of their colleagues, but they might not even be a full-time part of the time, so that could be tricky. It’s easier, then, to set up an automated service system and have questions answered automatically — and this is perfectly possible using chatbots like MHR’s Chatbot.
Increased salary visibility
It used to be completely taboo for people to talk about their salaries with coworkers, but that’s changing somewhat in a time when people are more concerned about parity and visibility. It’s important to show that managerial staff aren’t getting paid absurd amounts, and that low-level employees aren’t being exploited. If you’re not doing so already, you might want to consider having more open conversations about relative compensation.
Support for project-based workers
You’ll no doubt be familiar with the gig economy that’s so prevalent today. Plenty of people don’t hold down full-time jobs, or even keep part-time jobs: instead, they take on isolated projects, flitting between distinct employers in the process. A modern payroll system will be able to handle these isolated payments without much fuss. Even if you haven’t yet outsourced anything to someone who works in this way, it’s a good idea to get prepared.
Flexible payment scheduling
Everyone, whether they run a business or hold a low-level position with one, has personal cash flow to manage — money coming into their account, and money leaving their account for everything from rent to food. And with the number of different subscriptions that people can rack up, they can end up needing money at different times of the month (or even week). This fuels a demand for flexible scheduling: splitting monthly salaries into weekly payments, or paying someone in the middle of the month instead of at the end.
Payment in cryptocurrency
It’s taken a while for cryptocurrency to pick up steam outside of the speculative investment world, but it’s certainly becoming more interesting for mainstream use as time goes by. Because of this, it’s entirely plausible that some employees might want to be paid in cryptocurrency, and you might want to allow it (if you can, as it isn’t always possible) — not least because crypto payments can be cheaper to make than their traditional counterparts.
Do you need to adapt to each of these payroll management trends? Probably not, as they won’t all be applicable to your specific business. But you should be aware of them, and update your business model where useful.