Hello everyone.
Thank you for joining us.
My name is Ty and I will be your moderator for today's program.
Why investing in technology is the missing link your small HR team needs, presented by HR morning and sponsored by GoCo.
Just a little housekeeping before we get started.
If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the chat box in the control panel.
If they're regarding the subject being presented, I'll add them to the queue for questions at the end.
Now, I'd like to introduce your speaker, Tricia Richardson.
Okay.
Hi, everybody.
Today, we're going to talk about with technology, some different solutions and tools, implementing new technology, the steps that you want to think about as you go through implementing your technology and making sure that you have a successful implementation and rollout.
Talk a little bit about how you want to go from transactional to strategic.
This is one of the key things you can do with a new technology, with the technology that's available.
Then, just some additional returns on your investment, how your time and money that you invest in this is really going to come back to you in ways that maybe we don't think about, not just cost savings.
When we look at solutions and tools, one of the things that is important is to consider the life cycle of the employee.
When we're looking at technology, we might look at what's painful to us and what we want to solve and make less painful, but going into looking at new technology with a holistic approach is a way that you can really utilize your system.
Most folks don't utilize their system for all the things that are available to them.
Making sure that you could do that can be just a great, great addition to your process and give you a lot more than you even thought you could get.
So consider the life cycle of the employee from we're recruiting, applicant tracking, we're onboarding them, then throughout their life cycle, we have benefits and compensation and performance.
Also succession planning, which is really important that you can use your system for succession planning as well.
Learning and training, we have lots of required trainings, both at the federal and state level.
And then just provide your employees with learning that might not be required, but will be really helpful.
Things like family medical leave, injuries, reasonable accommodations through the Americans with Disabilities Act, so also tracking all that information.
And of course, time and attendance and then payroll and tax payments and forms.
All of those things from, I like to say, hire to retire or termination, the system can do that.
And so maybe you don't have any pain with succession planning, but look at a holistic approach to something a solution can provide you.
When you move to a bigger or more robust technology platform, and all of them do have these, these great new add-ons and features, there's really been a lot of development in recent years for technology.
Absolutely, for recruiting, have an automated and integrated applicant process.
There is payroll, these HR payroll systems, the technology enable you to have it all start.
Your source of information, your source of truth will be your system.
So you develop the applications, the recruiting, all of that information in your system, and it automatically integrates with those other sources like Career Builder, LinkedIn, things like that, that you might want to use to advertise.
The other thing that's nice is sometimes we get an applicant that is a good applicant, maybe not for the role you're currently hiring for, but they have skill sets that maybe is something you'll need in the future.
So you can set your system up to give you a searchable database of skill sets.
So when you're looking at hiring for a new role, start first looking at that searchable database and like put in some key words of what you're looking for.
And then maybe you don't even have to advertise the position.
If you reach out to those folks that have already applied and say, hey, would you be interested in this role? You have that information, you can save yourself a lot of time and money and resources because recruiting can be time consuming and take a lot of your costs as a company.
You can also have knockout questions.
If you are in a knockout question, could be anything depending on a role.
Maybe if you're looking for a certification in a role, ask that question, do you have this certification? And if they say no, doesn't mean that they can't send in an application.
But when that application is processed, you can put that one on the back burner because you know you want someone with a certification.
So it automatically will filter out the resumes and applications that you don't want to consider.
So you're not looking at hundreds of applications for a role.
It will likely dwindle that down to quite a few more depending on the knockout questions that you provide.
And you know, the system is completely customizable.
As long as you're compliant, which is another really great thing about this technology is it's built to not let you be non-compliant.
If you wanted to do something non-compliant, you almost have to do a workaround.
And that's your clue.
If I have to do a workaround for this, I probably shouldn't do it.
So there's a lot of that built in compliance, but you can make it customizable.
However, you want to word your recruiting.
Also put workflows in place to expedite candidates through a system.
Hiring has to be faster now.
We have to do it faster so we can get folks in, especially for some roles that are highly competitive.
You want to make sure that you are getting that applicant in and immediately you knock out applicants from the knockout questions.
Usually it goes out to the hiring folks and HR and you respond to the applicant with automated emails.
You can schedule all of your interviews and do that by text and by email because some folks prefer text.
So you can do it both ways.
So set this up so that you're in constant communication with the applicant.
There's nothing that will derail your applicant recruiting process quicker than someone applying and hearing nothing back for three days.
But you can set up automated emails, customizable, again, to say, hey, thank you.
Someone will be in touch with you soon.
So those are great.
And definitely to set up the text because folks read text, they get those right away.
And then as I mentioned, just you are able to remain compliant with the job advertising and the application and the interview process, documentation requirements.
And that's key in every state.
Might be a little bit different.
So you can make sure that you're compliant wherever you're putting, wherever you're looking for applicants.
And having a template in place for hiring managers for the questions that they ask during a Zoom interview or a live interview in person, that will keep everything compliant as well because we have things we can and can't say or ask or do in interviews.
And sometimes our hiring managers aren't, they don't always know that information.
So it helps to keep them on track and helps them get the best interview.
So then you decide you're going to hire someone and you onboard them.
And they get an email, the applicant, the new hire, they get an email with a login to your system and they can go in and fill out all that pre-hire information that you need, you know, name, address, direct deposit information.
But a good bit of that is automatically going to flow in to their new hire through their application process.
So you'll already have a lot of that information, especially if you're going to be collecting any EEOC type information, which you should now.
There's much more, we're seeing a lot more requirements for compliance in that area.
So have all that in there and just walk the applicant through automatically, it walks them through completing their information.
You can get the handbook acknowledgements, which is key through this type of system.
You can set up training schedules.
You know, when you bring in a new hire, if you have a certain position and you know that position requires some IT stuff, some maybe building security, make that part of your checklist and part of your workflow for new hires.
Equipment assignment, and as I mentioned, again, customizable.
Your supervisor or the hiring manager might want to have the first meeting be with their entire team.
So that is something that you can set up as a checklist as part of that hiring manager.
One of the things that might be something you can do as well is on the checklist.
If your remote is set up when their checklist and new hire information is sent out, a video of the hiring manager or the team, it's not too big, to say, hey, welcome, and kind of do a visual video of everybody on the team.
Hi, I'm Trish, and I do this.
So excited for you to come.
A video, a little two-minute video that just says to that employee, I like this company, because you are marketing your company when you are recruiting and hiring and keeping folks there.
You are marketing your company as a place where people want to come to work and then subsequently take advantage of your product.
So this is, again, you know, use your technology.
Those videos take, you know, not too long to do.
They don't have to be real formal or professional, but make that part of your workflow.
It's really nice, especially if you're remote.
When you're looking at benefits and open enrollment, sort of the next process, that can be painful if it's in paper.
I like to say paper painful.
It's a good way to remember this, because we have to save this documentation in our roles.
It's all about saving that documentation and saving the timelines and making sure that you're timely and being able to prove that.
We have artificial intelligence is really being used much more broadly in the HR payroll area.
So you can have AI to assist employees with choosing their best benefit options.
You know, when you go through benefit enrollment and you look at all these plans and, oh my gosh, I don't know what's best for me.
So work with your broker.
Actually, you can have your broker manage this process for you.
Give them broker access or that type of security access to your system, and then they can manage this.
They can be there to help folks through.
They can manage the chat box with questions.
And your broker should be able to do this for you.
This is what they do.
They answer those questions.
Step-by-step intuitive process that I was just talking about where, okay, this is what you've chosen.
Now let's add dependents.
Do you want them to be added as part of this plan? And do you want this? And don't just make it enrollment in the health insurance or the 401k or retirement plan.
If they want any extra like any of the AFLAC plans or any of those extra plans, employees can sign up for short-term disability or life or pet insurance.
That's a big thing now with companies is pet insurance.
So it's you're taking your benefit package and making it fully automated to make sure folks do their enrollment on time.
That can be painful as well.
Email, text alerts.
When they log into the system, they get an alert.
That's another thing that you can do.
Set up alerts to remind folks, hey, this is due.
And they have to actually proactively click on that I understand that button.
And then you have that history that you've told them.
And text alerts.
And you can set these up automatically.
You know, if someone is a week out, send this reminder if they haven't.
You can put all kinds of links to brokers and resources and the health insurance plans on the system on the employee's dashboard when they log in.
It's like one-stop shopping.
The employee can log in and they can click on that benefit provider and go in and look at their plan, their process.
And again, this ensures compliance because you are collecting the information that you need.
And the employees won't be able to move forward unless they provide you with that information.
And looking back at the onboarding piece, this would be I-9 information.
This would be tax information.
Signing for your handbook acknowledgement, which you'll absolutely want to do.
They can't move forward until they are compliant with those things.
The other really nice thing is that if you have an automated system where you're using benefit enrollment, the deductions will flow automatically from the enrollment into the payroll system.
So you're not doing data entry to update those deductions.
And the other really great thing that I'm excited about in these systems that I see a lot of folks not take advantage of, audit reports for what you've collected from the employee versus what they owe.
So when we have, when we onboard or off-board employees or there's life event changes, sometimes we miss that first set of deductions or we don't take the last set of deductions.
And that can be a huge loss in revenue to your company, but it can also be really hard to manage if you're having to do that manually.
So run a report that it's a benefit report that will show you this is what we collected versus what we should have collected.
And just make that part of your process.
Again, part of your checklist for processing a payroll, which we'll get to in a minute.
And then you are, this is one of the ways you can save the company money and be more on top of those types of tasks.
And that can be a big money saver for companies.
I've seen that save tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the number of employees and plans that you have.
And then of course the Affordable Care Act reporting, tracking eligibility, tracking all those codes that we assign to those Affordable Care Act reports.
So do that all in your system.
Make your system the source of truth.
You wouldn't have to use an outside broker to do that.
Your system can do that for you.
Performance management.
I really like this tool because it is, again, customizable.
You're going to hear me say that a lot.
And the reason that's important is you're not like every other company.
And honestly, you don't want to be.
You want your experience to be compliant, but to represent you as a company.
Again, think your marketing your company.
Performance management, you can make it an interactive process where the manager who's reviewing the employee can put some information in and then the employees can put information in.
You can ask other people that they work with to provide information.
So it's fully interactive and you can show the employee as much of that as you want.
Sometimes folks are a little more honest and they know the employee's not going to see it.
But again, customizable.
You can also use this to track incidents.
Because remember, performance management is about good things and bad things.
And so you need to have documentation, though, because if there is a performance issue, the system can be built to make sure that you are compliant with documentation and communication with the employee and all those pieces that you need to keep on record.
What's great about when I say customizable is you can create templates.
Create a template, name of employee, concern, who's looking at this, what are the dates, and track the dates in the system.
So everyone that's required to have a piece of that, they know when it's due.
Again, automatic reminders.
And you have those workflows in place, again, to ensure that compliance happens.
Also the nice thing about this is employees know what the process is and they know it's solid.
If they have a complaint or they want to, well, any type of issue maybe they're having with a coworker, could be harassment, things like that, they know that there is a solid process in place and they can see that workflow of what's happening.
All of these things you can set up, again, customizable.
You're going to get sick of me saying that word probably.
Combine your compensation management with your performance management.
And this is really nice, especially if you're looking at giving a pool of bonus money to a different department.
You give that pool of money and the manager can look at the different performance management ratings and allocate that accordingly.
If you're tracking it, this is a really good thing to remember, if you're tracking a database field in the system, you can run a report on that field.
Anything that you're tracking, any piece of information, you can see a report for that and use that for your analytics and your metrics.
But looking at your compensation management with performance management is really just is going to make managers, accounting, finance, payroll job a lot easier and fairer.
And the other thing with compensation management is that you can set up those pay ranges, which there are, if you're a multi-state, I recommend doing that, absolutely, because you may have to report on that information.
So you may have to even provide that as part of your job recruiting process to provide those pay bands or pay ranges.
Automatic goal tracking, and you can make it informal.
You can have where you have a monthly meeting with your manager and that's part of your notes.
And when you have your performance review, you review those meetings with them, very interactive.
You can record the meeting with their permission and save it in their personnel file, especially again, if you're remote, but even if you're not a remote employer.
So that's nice.
You can go back, the employee can look at it, you can reference it.
So again, use your technology for all those great things.
Learning management, there are a lot of requirements at the state and federal level that the learning is required.
Create those personalized trainings, make them automatic.
And learning management systems are part of these systems.
If you're paying for an outside vendor to do these things, right there is cost saving.
And again, you're in that source of truth, which is that one place where you have the employee data.
You set these up, they're automatic reminders.
You collect the certification or proof that they've attended and when.
And again, it keeps you compliant because your learning management system will know the technology will tell you or you can set it up to say, we need this done by this date.
So you're not tracking manually due dates and who's done it and who hasn't.
Now you can run analytics to see who's not done it yet and kind of do a push to them.
But again, it's a data field in your system, use it.
And then if you have to track certifications and renewals and continuing education credits, do that through your system.
Keep all that on file.
And yeah, here's that magic word, customizable.
Because one of the nice things that you can do is set up trainings.
Maybe you want to have a training on, you love a particular training on diversity and you want to use that training.
Have that training embedded in your system and be part of what you do.
Could be from an outside vendor, but they can give you that link or that embedded information for your employees.
Maybe you want to provide them with stress management, workforce ergonomics, things like that.
You can make that available so you can have required, recommended, and hey, this is out there for you if you need it.
How to deal with your teenagers, I don't know.
Things like that.
Or you could work with your EAP or health provider to provide some things out there, some videos.
So have it in one place.
The employee logs in and goes to learning management and says, ooh, I want to do that training.
Timekeeping, lots of compliance around timekeeping.
Again, if you're doing paper timesheets or using an outside timesheet vendor that you are uploading data into a system, try to stop doing that because a lot of these systems, they might work with a third-party vendor, but it will be integrated and automated.
So you can have the timekeeping entered, tracked, employees signing off.
Our employees have to sign off on their timesheets.
So you can track it to make sure that happens with reminders.
Get alerts.
Payroll, HR, get alerts that this isn't happening.
You can also, if you want managers to sign off, you can get those alerts of who the quote-unquote problem managers are that are just routinely late approving timesheets so that you can address these issues and you don't have to track it manually.
You can get that information and know that it's happening.
The employee can get an automatic alert.
You can do this by text or email or both that they missed a punch.
This will help you with tracking overtime, late and early arrivals and departures.
You can run that analytics report.
Show me everyone that has late punches and show me which department maybe has the biggest problem with this or which employees.
And what's great about these reports is you can see them in analytic data if you're like a spreadsheet analytic data type of person or pie charts.
You know, these, whatever visual helps you understand what's happening in the system.
And also, track overtime.
You know, maybe this department has a lot of overtime and we're seeing this happen consistently.
Well, maybe it's time to look at changing the work or, you know, maybe you have some employees with a ton of overtime and half the employees aren't working any overtime.
Maybe you look at moving that workload because it's not just about money.
It's about employee engagement and you don't want to overwork them.
Or maybe it's time to look for a new position.
So these are things that you might when you're in the trees, you might not see the bare forest and what's happening.
So automatically schedule these reports to run so the managers see them, you see them or whoever owners, whoever you want to see them.
So you have a payroll run or you can schedule it monthly, whatever.
Have a report automatically push out to those folks for them to look at so that they can see it.
And no data entry errors.
If you have that automatic integration with the payroll system, automatically what the employees putting in is what they're going to be paid.
And you can set your timekeeping devices up.
If you have, you could even have, like I've seen the location based time where if you have people on the road and they try to clock in through their smartphone, if they try to clock in and they're at the Dunkin Donuts or at another store when they say they're at a client, you can see those reports.
And that's how you would know that they're not clocking in at the, they're clocking in where they're not or they're clocking in from home.
So that's another tool to use in the systems to really look at your timekeeping and how you're collecting it.
If you're going to do thumbprint, scannings, anything like that.
So when you're looking at systems, you build it with your time clock and how you want it.
The other thing I just recommend, pay by the punch.
I know that we can round up or down.
If we pay by the punch, there's no misunderstanding.
If someone signs in at 823 and they sign out at 423 or 434, you're paying them per punch.
You can see that on their pay stub.
This is when you clocked in.
This is when you clocked out.
So you have true, accurate numbers.
And statistically, for the most part, and for employers I've worked with, they actually end up saving money paying by the punch.
You can set up in the system for folks not to be able to punch in early.
And alerts if they punch out late or mispunches, those types of things.
So these alerts are very helpful to managing what's happening in your company as far as timekeeping, payroll, enrollment.
Remember, the employee cost is going to be your biggest expense.
So that's where you can save money.
And those are some of the ways that you can do this.
For payroll, it all rolls into payroll, right? Those overtime calculations, you're not doing manual calculations.
Set the system up so that you're compliant with wage and hour laws.
You can also look at if you are doing bonuses, are those discretionary or non-discretionary? Are they part of overtime? What are they part of? Are they part of the 401k or retirement pensionable earnings, so to speak? So then you're compliant with your retirement plan documents.
And we all want to make sure we're compliant with those.
And any of those wage and hour laws.
If you are in a state where overtime is due after eight hours worked in a day or all those, unique scenarios, your system can be set up to do that to happen.
And then when you process payroll, run some automatic audit reports.
Employees paid or not paid.
Sometimes we set folks up for auto pay.
They're terminated.
We don't turn off the auto pay, and they get paid.
So you run these reports, again, a way to save money and to make sure you're compliant and to make sure you're paying folks correctly.
You can run an audit trail, every payroll of who did what in the system and when.
That's something you can do in the system to track what's happening as well.
Those fringe benefit limits, so we can't go over or we know what's taxable if we go over.
For those of you looking at earned wage access or on-demand pay, absolutely process this through your technology if you're looking at doing this.
Garnishment compliance, that's key.
Garnishments can be a little bit all over the place.
This takes priority over this, and what if they don't have enough money for this? So set it up for your system to do it, and then you're not doing manual calculations on the side.
You could do a trust but verify, but you're letting the system keep you compliant.
Same with how you pay employees, direct deposits, pay cards, checks.
Also, you wanna make sure that your pay stubs are set up to be compliant with what the states require be on those pay stubs.
So punch in, punch out, you can put everything on that pay stub.
You know, their leave time, again, you can track all that through the system.
Anything that you are doing outside of your system or on paper can be changed to be done in that source of truth in your system.
And then total compensation statements, and this is really exciting because this is where you really show, you can really shine as an employer.
All of these things that benefits the Social Security and Medicare you pay, time off that you give the employee, all of those things, expense reimbursements that you provide an employee can go in your system and should, like expense reimbursements.
You know, you reimburse them instead of writing a check out of accounts payable, run it through your system, put it on the total compensation statement.
And at any time you can run that and say, you know, here's, we might be paying you 50,000 a year, but really we're paying you 80,000 a year in benefits.
And it's a good way again, to market and show what you provide and see what you provide for fringe benefits.
Total compensation statements, absolutely use the systems for those, they're built in, you can do them.
And if you're not doing them now, that's one of those things that, oh, hey, that wasn't painful, but because we're not doing it, but let's do it.
So again, looking at a solution is not always solving pain, but it's also expanding what you can do.
I just talked about the expense reimbursements with payroll, make it easier, employees love getting one check.
You're not having to track it out of the system.
You can still do expense, you can do expense reimbursements through the system where the employees say, you know, can put in for their expense reimbursement through the system, automatically flows into payroll.
So you're not looking, if you have an outside expense reimbursement vendor, might be able to get rid of them.
You can set it up so that the expenses go towards a specific general ledger code.
So accounting's happy, they're still getting the information that they need, but you're running everything again through that source of truth.
You can also manage independent contractors through these systems, which is nice, because then there are many states that require new hire reporting of independent contractors.
So you can just make that part of what they're already doing in your system.
You know, independent contractors are a type of employee, although it feels a little weird saying that, but track that through your system.
It will generate 1099s.
You don't have to pay an outside vendor for that source of truth.
Multi-state taxation compliance, that's key.
That's just, if you're manually navigating, that can be, you almost have to hire a position just to do that.
And if an employee moves mid-year, you can set that up in the systems if you're using a system where it automatically will track those earned wages for their W-2.
And general ledger uploads, have your general ledger allocate when you're processing payroll so that the accounting department can just get an upload of the general ledger entry.
Also, you can have alerts created that maybe you have a new earning code that doesn't have a general ledger assigned to it.
You will be able to see that.
Accounting will love you for that because they will get the information that they need straight out of the system.
You don't have to download it and do manual entries.
It can be a download of an Excel or CSV file that automatically they can upload.
So again, you're saving money not just in the human capital management piece, but across the company.
With the accounting department, you're really easing their pain.
And they can get more robust reporting.
Reporting is great.
You can get analytics, productivity.
Again, if it's a field you're tracking, you can run a report on that.
And these reports are, you haven't heard it in a few, customizable.
You know, get it in whatever format you want.
For active employees, terminated employees, employees in a department, filter.
Track all that data we need to report to the federal government and the states.
Collect that OSHA information, injury reporting.
If you have to use payroll-based journal reporting for, if you're like a hospital or a medical facility and you have to provide that, set it up so that it's automatically coming through the system.
Labor distribution, workers' compensation costs.
Track your worker compensation codes through payroll.
It's set up when you hire the employee, it will automatically do the calculation.
So if that is something, if you're in a more, like if you're a roofing company, you can see what your workers' comp cost is gonna be.
Prepare for that.
Accounting can set it up as a payable.
And so you have more accurate and solid financial reporting.
You could track employee uniform sizes, their laptop information.
So you know what laptop they have, what the serial number is.
And your IT department doesn't have to track using a separate system.
They can use your system to track those inventory items.
Policies and procedures, have them in your system.
You can embed them in there, change them, make them searchable.
If you release a new policy, you put it out there and people have to, employees have to actively acknowledge that they've received it and read it, so you're compliant there.
You can have documented process with checklists.
If, again, we talked about harassment or maybe you need a new piece of equipment, you can track that through the system.
Maybe you want to apply for tuition reimbursement and set that up.
You can set that up as a checklist, a template form to flow to all those places it needs to go to and it automatically stays in the employee record.
Audit trails, if you want to find out when something happened and who did it and in what area, like maybe direct deposit changes, you just run that audit trail and it shows you.
And then again, we talked about those workflows for all of those processes.
Don't handle these things manually.
You're still going to be part of the process, but it keeps you compliant because you collect the information you need and it also just makes it easier.
And then we get to how all of this really helps empower your employees.
Happy employees are better productive employees.
I mean, that's just really how it is.
They can do everything through the system, enter time, request time off, change their direct deposit, update their tax forms.
If they need to find shift coverage, you can set it up so that they can do that, so that they can see shifts.
Storing all those documents, you can let employees provide positive feedback to other employees.
That's really nice.
Like, hey, Trish really did a great job on this project.
I want to recognize her for that.
It goes to all the people you want to see it, and it goes in their performance management record.
You can have those real-time accruals.
Accruals can be painful.
Let your system track it.
And if your accruals are really hard to set up in your system, here's where you can, when you're going at looking at implementing a system, here's where you can say, if this is too hard to build in the system, it's probably too hard to understand.
Let's change it so it's a little easier.
And send surveys.
I love surveys to employees.
Before open enrollment, what are some of the benefits you'd like to see? If you have 70% of your employees who want pet insurance, maybe you didn't know that because you didn't ask, right? Now you know.
So, okay, let's provide pet insurance.
Employees are being engaged in their employment process.
Okay, so here, that's all the things, all the solutions.
Some of them, maybe you didn't even think that you could do or wanted to do.
So you have, so now you're saying, okay, we can do all this.
So how do you implement that? First of all, this is key, work as a team.
Everybody that has a piece of this system needs to be included in the implementation process.
HR, benefits, payroll, accounting, technology, because we don't know where those pieces hit us.
One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to just have payroll choose a system or just have HR choose a system and not include these other folks.
Technology is gonna be key because they wanna make sure it's secure and will work on those platforms.
The other thing, give yourself a year.
I can't stress this enough.
Two months to plan.
And planning is looking at all those solutions and seeing what you wanna do.
Two months to vet to find the system you want.
Four months to implement.
One month to test.
And three months for change management.
Three months for change management usually works like this.
Month one, oh no, they're never gonna change this.
It's too much.
Month two, and this is for employees and leadership and everybody.
Month two, oh, maybe they are.
Month three is acceptance.
So if you try to implement new technology in six months, you're gonna be pushed and rushed.
Remember, you have other things to do.
You have a full-time job.
This will be in addition to that.
And you might miss those other things that you can implement and just, because maybe we just say, okay, let's get payroll running, and then we'll get all this other stuff added.
Give yourself a year and plan it and get it perfect or as perfect as you can for what you want.
And nobody's rushing and nobody's as frustrated as you could be.
Make a list.
What are you doing on paper? What are all these other vendors you're using? And how can you implement those into the system you wanna buy? Are you having someone else process your 1099s? Are you having someone else process your W-2s? Are you using an outside recruiting platform? What are all those other solutions you're using? Maybe you can get rid of them.
What are your future plans and strategic goals? We're not just thinking about solving today's problems.
Where do we want to be? Maybe right now is not a total compensation statement need or priority, but that is definitely something we want.
Organize your list by must have, needs, wants, and would be nice to have.
So you're pulling all these teams together.
Have everybody give you a list of what they want in this order.
And then you can make a decision based on the must have, needs, wants, and would be nice to have.
Because some departments that would be nice to have becomes a must have for another department, and we didn't know that till we asked.
And are there overlapping processes? Is accounting doing something that's already going to go in payroll? How can we save that time? Look at a budget, because you definitely want to be prepared.
When you look at a budget, you're going to look at what it costs to implement versus ongoing fees, because typically you will see two different fees.
You'll have an implementation fee, and then you'll have your regular monthly costs.
When you look at comparing vendor pricing, it may be apples to oranges.
A vendor might price something differently, so you really want to look at when you compare pricing.
Maybe one vendor might look more expensive here, but in the aggregate, they're actually cheaper because of the other things that they don't charge.
Negotiate for your costs for implementation or whatever.
Negotiate.
Look at this to say maybe you're giving us this in the system.
We're paying for that, but we're never going to use that.
So negotiate, like if you're buying a car.
And then can you save money getting rid of all those redundant systems? So look at the cost in total when you're looking at your budget.
When you vet your system, make sure you have that list that we just talked about and provide that to possible vendors.
Tell the vendors, this is what I need.
Can you do this? And also, that will help them target their demo to you so that your demo time is valuable.
Get a fully integrated system.
Make sure it's secure and requires that two-factor authorization.
That's where you look with your IT.
Ask your peers for recommendations.
Who are they using? Make sure everybody attends these demos because everyone's going to be working in the system.
It's fully integrated.
HR, payroll, accounting.
Maybe some of that information in there doesn't impact them, but they should be part of that process.
Make sure you have the disaster recovery plan from the vendor and their SOC audits.
If you are multi-state and you have local taxes, make sure those systems can do those because Pennsylvania, which is where I am, we have all those local taxes.
Make sure that if you're in Pennsylvania or any of those states that have those local taxes, or you might go into that state, that they can handle those local taxes and those nuances.
When you choose a vendor, prepare a timeline.
Work back from the first punch date.
Preferably, you want to start a new system the first of the new year because you work back from when that first punch will happen.
Have one project manager from both the vendor and your company to coordinate one source of questions because where things can derail is if tax asks a question but didn't let HR know that that happened.
So pick a project manager on both sides, a source of contact, truly a project manager.
Stick to your list or plan.
Think of this system as building a house.
If you are building a house, you want to stick to what your plans say.
If you decide later that you want to add Central Vac, you're going to have to tear some things down to put that in.
So this is where the planning process is solid, and that's what you stick to.
Deadlines should be non-negotiable, but don't ever rush the process.
Make sure training is part of that timeline.
And when you are testing, choose employees from all levels and departments to test for you.
You want to get the employees who are resistant to change, who thrive in change, and employees not comfortable in technology.
Because if you can convince all of them that this is a great system, you will have an easier time implementing this out to your employees.
So you want to make sure that even your most difficult change management employees are excited about it, because they'll tell other people they're excited about it.
Lock down those security protocols.
Make sure there's a segregation of duties.
Not everyone should be able to do everything.
Then you have those audit controls, which also help with making sure that you're not making mistakes.
It inherently keeps you from making errors.
Security by role, not individual.
Have your audit controls in place.
So HR assigns the wages.
Payroll can't go in and change those wages.
So who's processing the payroll can't make changes to the payroll.
So that you are fully integrated and it catches any of those types of errors.
Or fraud, although we like to think, well, never going to have that.
And hopefully, you don't.
Make sure your system is completely web-based with a mobile app that provides the same functionality as the web version.
Because some folks don't work on computers.
They work on tablets or smartphones.
Document what you're doing.
Documentation will provide a contingency plan.
You'll have a backup plan.
And it will, for sure, ensure more efficiencies.
And if you share that with your vendor, if something happens, they might be able to step in and help you process a payroll.
Don't be afraid to document what you do.
It's not going to eliminate your job.
It's not going to make you replaceable.
What it will do is show, this is all the stuff that I do.
Sometimes in HR, payroll, we just get it done.
And folks don't realize all the steps involved.
If you document it and you have this 50-page document, whoa, it's really clear there's a lot more than just writing a check here.
And again, as I mentioned, share that documentation with your vendor.
Compromise.
Everyone is not going to get everything that they want.
That's probably.
You might, and that might be wonderful.
Or that would be wonderful.
Use those priorities.
And remember, working as a team together, this is a solution for the company, not just for HR, not just for payroll, not just for managers, not just for accounting or benefits.
And think about it this way.
If doing it the same way because it's always worked were true, why are you looking for a different solution? You will have people at the table that say, I've always done it this way.
I don't want to change what I'm doing.
Well, this is where we want to make sure that we are managing the project leaders to say, OK, but let's try doing it a different way.
And here's why this might be better for us.
You will have at least one person that says, I've always done it this way.
I'm not changing.
You might have to compromise a little bit more with them.
But don't let that derail your process.
How you can become, you want to move from transactional to strategic.
We talked about history of applicants, those staffing needs that we'll see when we run these reports of overtime and look at that real-time reporting on those workloads.
You won't have to use the outside vendors, and you can use this integrated system.
So the transactions are being collected by the system.
You are strategically looking at it.
You can look at different metrics with other peers in your workforce.
What's your turnover rate compared to other companies that are your peers? Turnover trends.
I love this part.
If you have a department that is, you're seeing a lot of turnover in that department, maybe you have a manager problem.
So this is where you, again, the transactions are being collected by the system, and you are strategically looking at it.
So if it's the manager is the common theme, maybe they need more leadership training, or you can talk to them about that.
Timekeeping automatically comes into payroll.
So payroll can do a more detailed audit review and reasonability of costs.
You don't need payroll entering time.
Your payroll department can strategically look at those.
Employees can be trained to better understand their paycheck.
Educating employees on why you're asking for things and how it works, they will trust you more, and there will be transparency.
You will have document storage, so you're not scanning documents into a file or putting them into a paper file.
Again, that's transactional.
Go to strategic.
You don't need to be doing that.
Same with employee performance management, moving paper and sending emails and reminding folks to do performance management.
Let your system do that, so then the folks involved in this can strategically look at the information.
Time off alerts for leave balances, expanding on those training topics, injury trends.
Maybe you want to open up a safety committee, which can maybe even get you savings on your workers' comp.
You have all that data you're collecting about affirmative action, OSHA reporting, the EEO-1 reporting, where you can look at your diversity.
You wouldn't have to track this manually.
Any federal or state metric reporting, and then, of course, those 1095s.
So these are the things that sometimes we get more involved in manually, and we're not able to be strategic leaders or contributors to our company.
And then we're the professionals.
We know, we understand HR.
We know the deeper levels of these things, so we can provide more strategic guidance.
Those general ledger uploads we talked about, again, those ad hoc reports.
Schedule those automatic deliveries.
I've already kind of covered a lot of this.
Train your managers on looking at these reports, so that, again, your managers can go beyond scheduling to managing the profitability of their department and their staffing.
So another transactional to strategic.
These systems are inherently collaborative.
So you want to work collaboratively.
It will, because they're inherently set up that way, it will work that way.
So I'll just give you a real quick example here.
HR has reviewed some data.
They noticed an increase in turnover specific to the department.
We have an exit interview.
Summary information, specific information.
Shown a lack of confidence in leadership as a common theme.
So performance management, you look at those metrics.
They've shown the same department has the lowest ranking reviews of any of the other departments.
You can then schedule a meeting with leadership to talk about the metrics.
And again, you might have a management problem and not necessarily an employee problem.
So we can look at maybe it's just a simple solve.
And then we can reduce the turnover, increase productivity, turnover of staff is very expensive.
You know, you have to retrain people.
So let's keep people, let's retain them by making sure that we're looking at common trends.
Your return on investment, like cash sort of return.
Ernst & Young does an annual report of what it costs an employer from annual transactions.
Their 2019 report, $4.
51 per employee.
And many, if not all of those can be automated with an integrated system.
Not only will you save money on that $4.
51 per employee, but you can save money by not using redundant systems, not using a separate expense management platform, not using a separate learning management platform.
Looking at those collected versus paid benefits, you will have increased productivity, engaged, empowered employees just work better.
As the leadership can become less transactional and more strategic, productivity will increase.
You will be able to increase your branding by being an employer of choice.
Put those statistics out on your website that what percentage you have in diversity.
You'll have those numbers.
You don't have to track it manually.
You can actively prevent concerns and issues before people leave.
Certainly less opportunity for data entry errors, which will again, inherently save money.
A lot of data comes through HR, a lot of data.
So the systems can lock down things and make sure that we don't make errors with that data entry.
And I think that gets us to the end.
The key things are collaboration and really look at this as you're building a house.
If I could have any house that I wanted and everything in it, what would I have? And maybe you didn't know you could get CentralVac.
Well, now you do because you're looking at what the systems have.
And then maybe HR might need a different type of room.
Well, that's where you come together and build your house together.
Thank you so much, Trish, for all that great guidance and info.
And in order to remain on schedule, we'll respond to the questions that came in via email in a timely manner.
So with that, on behalf of HR Morning, I would like to thank everyone for attending.
Thanks again, Trish.
This concludes our program.