Research says 61% of Australian workers aren’t completely satisfied with their pay experience

Payroll is one of a company’s most important activities, but for many, the process is still fraught with inefficiencies. In fact, 61% of Australian workers are not completely satisfied with their employer when it comes to their overall pay experience, according to findings from a new Ceridian survey.

The survey, conducted by Hanover Research on behalf of Ceridian, included 964 Australian workers, comprising a combination of part-time, full-time, and contract workers across a variety of industries. Their responses about their pay experience were based on factors including timeliness and accuracy of pay.

Also notable, of the workers who said they had received their pay late in the last 12 months, 40% chalked it up to disorganisation within their company.

These findings highlight an opportunity for Australian HR and payroll professionals to re-evaluate their current systems, and take steps to modernise their payroll processes.

Why modernise payroll?

Payroll is an integral part of all organisations and goes beyond ensuring your employees get paid. Your payroll department provides a view into your organisation’s culture, brand, and financial stability simply by looking at its processes. An efficient payroll department reflects your organisation’s commitment to your employees and your reputation – a positive employee experience starts with payroll.

The payroll team is also charged with protecting the organisation’s bottom line, by staying in compliance with various legislations. However, without the right tools for the job, payroll could be prone to errors and delays, resulting in not only the improper calculation of employee earnings or compliance mismanagement, but also a decrease in employee engagement.

Learn more about the benefits of modernising your payroll experience

Three ways to modernise your payroll experience

1. Bring time and pay together

Paying employees properly is the first step in keeping them engaged and satisfied. A system that brings time and pay together in a single application makes it easier to pay employees accurately and on-time.  It keeps payroll up-to-date any time a HR, benefits, time, or employee record is changed.

As well, payroll teams can access and audit data throughout the pay period. In a system that provides continuous calculation functionality, payroll is automatically updated to reflect changes in real time, keeping data accurate.

2. Digitise your data and information

Going paperless has many advantages. While reducing or eliminating paper saves you time in sorting through notes, paper cheques, and time sheets, there are other benefits to going paperless and using payroll software.

By digitising your operations, you can eliminate manual time cards and manually updating employee records, and have fewer misplaced or misfiled documents. You’ll also save time communicating with employees and delivering key information (such as tax forms) to your workforce.

Using payroll software will also give your company the ability to set up automated payroll reporting processes, meaning you can build templated reports, and schedule those reports to be automatically delivered to your inbox or sent out to the appropriate teams. You can also implement automated workflows to make approval tracking easier, which can help with internal and external audits and compliance.

3. Authorise your people to do more

Payroll and HR professionals have traditionally handled the paperwork and administration associated with updating employee records and time and attendance changes, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for other projects.

An impactful solution? Get your people on board to do it themselves with technology that provides self-service access for employees. This enables them to do things like update their records, make time and attendance changes, manage their schedules, trade shifts, request time off, and make other adjustments.

This takes simple tasks off your plate and provides greater transparency. It also streamlines communication and reduces data-entry backlog, saving valuable time.

Making your people responsible and accountable for their own records and schedules positively impacts everyone. An empowered workforce is a more engaged workforce.

Learn how American sports team the Houston Texans automated their payroll