Global Payroll: Building Trust With Employees Through Moments That Matter

Trust is a scarce and valuable resource. It accumulates slowly and can be lost overnight. However, it is incredibly important: employees that feel trusted are 260% more motivated to work and have 41% less absenteeism than other employees.

Building trust with employees happens in their day-to-day work through fair and competent management. Work is also punctuated by regular and one-time events that significantly shape your relationship with your employees. These are the moments that matter most for building trust.

These moments include everything from viewing schedules to enrolling in benefits. The most frequent—and often, the most important—is receiving a paycheck. This is why payroll and human resources professionals are so important: accurate pay can make or break trust with an employee.

The moments that matter most on the employee journey largely fall under the domain of Human Capital Management (HCM) and Workforce Management (WFM). That's why it's important to have payroll software that can interface directly with each of these. Our global payroll platform, UKG One View, offers a single source of truth for all related information, ensuring that you can execute moments that matter with accuracy and ease.

Moments That Matter on the Employee Journey

On the standard employee journey, employees engage with the company at several points of contact which are important for building trust. These events include the following:

• Applying for the job. Hirees will remember how they were treated prior to being hired. First impressions are everything.
• Viewing their schedule. Their schedule should always fit the parameters that they agreed to, which could include factors like union rules and time zones.
• Enrolling in benefits. Depending on the stipulations in their work agreement, employees will expect seamless onboarding to immediately avail of certain types of benefits, such as healthcare benefits.
• Onboarding to a new role. New hires are in a vulnerable position without experience in their new job and company. Set them up for success through great onboarding and training programs.

• Setting performance goals. Regular evaluations are another vulnerable situation, and it is easy for employees to feel unfairly criticized. Set clear goals, ensure regular check-ins and keep feedback balanced, realistic, and constructive.

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• Submitting a timecard. It should not be a hassle for employees to submit the hours that they worked.
• Getting paid accurately. Although employees may love their job, they will not show up to work without a paycheck. Pay them accurately to make them feel valued.
• Taking care of a life event. Family emergencies, sudden illness, childbirth and more, are all serious and sudden life changes that require adjustment. As their benefits provider, your company may be expected to support them through the transition.
• Complete training for development. Training to improve on-the-job skills is a regular feature of the modern workplace. Providing training programs and opportunities to upskill demonstrates your investment in their development and supports their growth and ongoing career goals.
• Enjoying time off and taking a vacation. Time away from work is not a loss for the company, but a way for employees to rest and recuperate so that they can perform better afterward. Employees need to enjoy that time fully, without being interrupted by work.
• Changing personal information. People change their addresses, phone numbers and even names on a regular basis. In the 21st century, these actions should take seconds to perform, usually through some kind of self-service online portal.
• Doing meaningful work. Every moment at work is a moment that matters if you can make work meaningful and fulfilling. Although not always attainable, the best way to secure your employees' trust is to ensure they value their own work.

Every single one of these moments is an opportunity to build trust you have with your employees. If you want a committed, reliable workforce, it is imperative that such events are organized and arranged fairly.

Improving Moments that Matter for Employees

The most important thing to consider is the voices of the employees themselves.

Improving the employee experience means asking frontline employees and individual contributors questions that let them honestly tell you how their experiences with payroll, WFM, and HR technology are working now.

For example:

• How easily can you check or change your schedule?
• How do you feel about our benefits enrollment process?
• How simple is it to do day-to-day things like track your pay or request time off?

Make technology choices, such as your choice of HR and WFM software, based on employee feedback. Integrated systems enabling employees to perform multiple tasks through one platform are ideal. The goal is to take away stress and administrative hassle so that employees can do meaningful, fulfilling work that positively impacts your company's business goals.

The Role of Payroll in Moments That Matter

Payroll is central to the employee journey. While some moments that matter happen just once, or at irregular intervals, employees get paid on a regular schedule. Thus payroll directly impacts the most frequent moments that matter for building trust.

Payroll also matters to many of the one-off or irregular events in the employee journey:

• Taking a vacation requires payroll to accurately assess how much paid and unpaid leave employees have left.
• Accepting a job offer requires the employee to be inserted into the payroll system, with the correct pay rate attached.
• Changing personal information, such as bank details, is directly related to payroll. Such changes need to interface with the payroll department to fully go into effect.

Ultimately, payroll is something that you can't get wrong if you want the trust of your employees. There is little leeway with paycheck-related moments on the employee journey.

Maximize the Impact of Your Payroll Technology on HR and WFM

The goal of a good multi-country payroll platform is to serve the people at the organization deploying it. By understanding the moments that matter to your employees, you can ensure that your technology works for the most people possible while seamlessly fitting into their daily lives.

One important feature of effective payroll software is that it can seamlessly integrate into your existing HR and WFM systems. Many of the moments that matter for employee trust depend on payroll, pay-related information should be easily accessible to human resources as well.

With the right system helping your employees succeed, everyone will be able to focus and innovate on business strategies, do engaging work, and build an attractive company culture.

UKG One View is a global payroll platform that offers a single source of truth with upstream integration to HCM, WFM, and more. This ensures accuracy with all information flowing into payroll from HR, meaning that you can enable payroll-related moments that matter with ease.