Payroll is the essential but often overlooked ‘back room’ cog that underpins any organisation, it’s the fundamental contract between employer and employee. When it goes wrong, everybody knows – who wants to join the bad-publicity congo-line of major Australian corporate underpayments. But when payroll goes right, with 100 percent accuracy and full compliance, that’s just business as usual, which is why payroll teams deserve National Payroll Week (NPW)!
Every year at the same time around Labour Day a national awareness campaign is hosted by the American Payroll Association (APA) in the United States, the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP) in the UK and the Canadian Payroll Association to encourage employers and employees to show respect and appreciation for their payroll people.
Everyone loves peer recognition – see if your management will send out a ‘Thankyou payroll!’ message to all staff, identifying the payroll team members and reminding everyone what they can do for the payroll team to make life work better. If they’re really kicked some big goals this year, has your organisation thought about entering them into payroll industry awards?
What about an education campaign to remind employees what they can get out of the payroll system (apart from their earnings)? Aurion offers our customers marketing assets they can use to educate their employees about self-service with the Aurion app.
Payroll shifts from backroom to boardroom
Like financial auditors, payroll specialists like our Aurion Consultants have a feeling for payroll that can allow them to identify exceptions and clear out non-compliance before it has a chance to metastasise into a chronic underpayment.
Payroll teams are trusted to process what’s usually an organisation’s largest expense. Although Aurion pays over 350,000 customer employees and more than $33 billion in payments every year, that still represents less than 3 percent of the Australian workforce.
As workforces around the world adjust to more remote work, payroll teams must navigate many complex challenges. Major legislative and regulatory changes like STP2, new rules for casuals, annualised salary reconciliation, and Australia’s ongoing underpayments crisis are a wake-up call for organisations to increase expenditure and oversight of payroll systems and training.
“Increasingly, boards are viewing payroll as a high-risk area, to be continuously managed, supported and monitored, in a similar way to Workplace Health and Safety risks. They are requiring their leadership teams to take proactive steps to ensure that payroll is adequately supported and that the risk in payroll is managed.” Rohan Geddes, PwC Australia National Leader – Payroll Consulting Practice (Feb 2020)
Find out more – see our blog Emergency Payroll Support and read how we saved ‘grandpa’ from a flood; and read A Plan To Advance Your Payroll Career about how payroll specialists can develop their skills and raise their professional profile.
#NPW21 #WhoPaysYou #PayDayHeroes
