Organizations: Start Building Trust Through Payroll

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(Editor’s Note: Today’s article is brought to you by our friends at Paycom, a leading provider of cloud-based human capital management software. Paycom was ranked among the best companies for women to work at by Comparably. Congrats to them! Enjoy the read)

If you’re not familiar with it, the Edelman Trust Barometer reports on the public perceptions of trust within four institutions – government, business, non-government organizations (NGOs), and the media. The Edelman Trust report has been around for about 20 years and that’s one of the reasons I like it. It’s a long-running piece on a topic that’s incredibly important (trust).

In the 2021 report, only one of the four institutions moved into the “trust” category – business. Granted, business just barely moved into the trust category with an index score of 61. (Side note: trust is defined as an index score over 60.) The report said that businesses are more trusted than the government in 18 of 27 countries and that business is now seen as both competent and ethical. While this is great news for the business sector, it also shows that we still have a lot of work to do when it comes to building trust both inside and outside organizations.

Payroll Mistakes Erode Trust

When it comes to building trust specifically inside the organization, a place to start could be the payroll process. In a Harris Poll survey commissioned by Paycom, 91% of respondents said that when payroll is incorrect, it breaks the trust employees have in their employer. This should not be a surprise. Of course, organizations aren’t intentionally making mistakes with their payroll. In addition, I’d like to believe that when mistakes are made, they are fixed quickly.

But instead of being reactionary when it comes to payroll, why not take a proactive approach? Organizations can create a payroll process that helps prevent mistakes from happening in the first place.

Paycom’s employee-driven payroll experience, Beti^TM, is an opportunity to create exactly that – a proactive approach to payroll. We’ve talked about Beti before here on HR Bartender. Just as a reminder, I like to think of Beti as self-service payroll. With Beti, employees can review their preliminary paycheck details and ask any relevant questions before payroll runs.  Employees can’t change any of their payroll data. That still must be done by a payroll administrator or HR. And in addition to payroll, employees can make sure that hours worked, benefit deductions, expense reports, and paid time off (PTO) is reflected as it should be.

What Beti does is proactively keep payroll mistakes from happening by bringing employees into the process, which in turn helps to maintain that trust relationship we’re talking about.

Now, some people might say, “Employees don’t want to do this.” I could see that argument, except for the fact that double checking a preliminary paycheck only takes a few moments. While Beti offers so much more than a paycheck review, the employee’s involvement isn’t lengthy because they know what they’re looking for. For example, when an employee uses self-service functionality to enter their own benefit selections and request PTO, they’re then able to ensure the changes they submitted are appropriately reflected on their paycheck via Beti. If someone said to me, “Hey Sharlyn, could you take a quick look at your preliminary paycheck before it goes out?” Why wouldn’t I want to do that?! I know what my paycheck is supposed to look like, and it would prevent it from being wrong.

Plus, the prompt to review my preliminary paycheck comes via Beti as a notification on my phone. This isn’t an extra step for managers, payroll, or HR. Let’s face it, we get notifications on our phones to review stuff all the time. This is a natural extension of what we do in our personal life. The results from the Harris Poll I mentioned earlier support this type of payroll process. 74% of employees were okay with reviewing their own paycheck.

Build Employee Trust with the Right Payroll Process

Building trust isn’t an easy thing to do. Trying to repair trust when it’s broken is even harder. So why not create a payroll process that builds trust. That trust is an essential part of the employee experience and leads to better engagement and retention.  

If you want to learn more about Beti and how it can help your payroll process, check out this Paycom on-demand webinar “See It in Action: Beti – Now Employees Do Their Own Payroll”.

As the demand for hiring continues, the last thing that organizations want to do is hire new employees and get their payroll incorrect. It’s doesn’t help build a positive working relationship. Set expectations with employees that they will be able to get correct paychecks by becoming a part of the approval process.

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