Categories - HR/Payroll

Sometimes it takes a little social media to get the message out. At Salary.com, we’re trying to make the esoteric world of payroll and taxes a little more approachable for small business owners. So instead of difficult-to-understand brochures and tacky-suited salespeople cold calling your business, we’re using YouTube, Twitter and a Payroll Concierge team.

It’s different, but then again so is our offering. We’re really trying to get beyond the white noise of traditional payroll markets, but that requires something that’s never been done before. So, we launched a free payroll offer that is for a year. Not a month or two. But for 365 days.

Now, let’s see if we can create a collection of celebrity paycheck images that we can post on Flikr…..

In business school, much is made of the ability to manage numbers. How much goes in, how much goes out, how much creates more? I think HR people could take a lesson in learning how to speak business people’s language of statistics.

 

HR people need to embrace the numbers and metrics that describe their business and learn how to use them to demonstrate the tangible results of their good HR policies. It’s not enough to say “employee satisfaction has increased our retention rates.” Back it up with real numbers: “In plant A, we measured our annual retention rate at 75 percent. Our employee satisfaction survey showed the greatest dissatisfaction with our time off policies. Thus, we’re recommending a set of time-off policy changes that we expect will result in a 5 percent improvement in annualized retention during the next five months.”

Payroll professionals are preparing for the end of year, and it feels like the calm before the storm. The payroll industry has been talking about the possibility of significant legislation and how it might impact payroll providers.

When economic times get tough, states get creative about protecting and managing revenue. Payroll professionals have already hustled to accommodate new COBRA legislation and changes to state unemployment and disability eligibility earlier in 2009. Some states are even establishing new approaches to taxes, such as adopting state-based earned income credit.

There is a lot of excitement here at Salary.com. We are in the midst of our first ever user meetings, dubbed Salary.community. So far we’ve had very successful meetings in Boston, New York and Chicago and are looking forward to meeting clients in San Mateo, Singapore, and London.

Our agenda features five different tracks covering compensation, competencies, payroll, talent management and IPAS. When I ran into a client of our survey management tool attending a session on competencies, I asked her about her decision to skip the composite building session.

“I’ve been in comp for years, and I’m comfortable with the decisions I make about blending surveys, but I don’t know anything about competencies and I have no other venue to learn about how companies use them.”

And that’s what these meetings are about: an opportunity to network and get educated on HR best practices. I hope to meet many others next week who similarly take advantage of our daylong agenda and learn something they didn’t know already.

When I strolled the tradeshow floor at this spring’s American Payroll Association Congress, I took a good look at many of the service providers’ offerings. The booths were snazzy, and the Live Strong, flash drive, arm-band giveaways were nice. But when you got into most of the Web-based payroll applications, they were…well, boring.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ve got all sorts of important earnings, deductions, tax and employee data in their super cool .NET, SQL brains. But unless you have a degree in payroll from MIT (which they weren’t offering), the usability and intuitive nature of the apps were next to non-existent. Why do payroll service providers do that? So payroll people can have job security? Or because they’re trying to show you how payroll and taxes are really, really, really sophisticated and difficult to understand. Sorry, I don’t buy it. And nor should you.

Do we speak the language of our customers and associates? I was reminded of the importance of this after watching a 2005 movie about the oil business starring George Clooney, Syriana.  There’s a poignant scene where one character notes that the Chinese were the only foreign associates who bothered to learn the language of their Middle Eastern business partners.

What about us? In the HR and payroll arena, do we speak the language of our associates, customers and employees?

 

Get ready. As we contemplate the impact of change, and the new world order of $3.55 trillion budgets with $1.75 trillion deficits (four times the largest in history!), one can’t help but wonder how that will play out in the stodgy world of the HR and Payroll department.

Regardless of whether you subscribe to a red or blue state of mind, I think it’s a healthy exercise to consider how we will ever pay for such fiscal largesse on a going-forward basis. With the recent pronouncements of the Chinese and Russian governments indicating that they may be less willing to pay off our deficit spending, I think it’s important to consider what that may mean to employers and payroll taxes during the next 10 years.