To be a successful employer, you must have an engaged workforce and to achieve that you must be an engaging employer. Our two-part article series discusses six critical touch points in the employee lifecycle and strategies to effectively engage your remote workforce at each of those points.

Part 1 addressed talent acquisition, benefit management and performance management. Now we’ll take a look at the latter three touch points in the employee lifecycle – payroll, time and scheduling, and offboarding.

Payroll

The pandemic has had a tremendous effect on payroll for many reasons, including increased employee financial stress, a greater remote workforce and many legislative changes affecting payroll, among others. What was once a tried and true process is being forced to evolve.

While some organizations may be resistant, eliminating paper will simplify payroll for employers and employees alike. Direct deposits and pay cards are two options, both of which will get employees their money faster and without a trip to the bank. Employees may also be resistant to the change at first, but if they understand the benefits and if the enrollment process is simple, they will in all likelihood be grateful for the switch.

Another offering to consider is an “early access to pay” benefit. Unfortunately, what used to be living paycheck has become living day to day for many. Not surprisingly, 72% of Americans want access to their wages early. An early access to pay benefit can help ease your employees’ financial stress. With this benefit, employees are given early access to up to a certain percentage of wages they’ve earned in a pay period. Essentially, they’re borrowing against their own paychecks. Typically, this benefit can be offered at no cost to the employer, and the employee fee is usually very small.

Payroll Case Study: A restaurant needed to go paperless with their payroll, but they couldn’t because some of their employees would not get a bank account. We partnered with the client to develop an email and text campaign to promote the direct deposit and pay card options, highlighting that these payroll methods increase the speed with which they get paid and save them a trip to the bank. Both options had a very easy “click here to enroll” feature; this simplicity was critical in getting employees to take action.

The many recent legislative changes that have impacted payroll are elaborate and evolving. For guidance on navigating these complex payroll issues, click here.

Time & Scheduling

As if managing time and scheduling with an expanded remote workforce isn’t a large enough challenge, in today’s environment, employers are also dealing with very high levels of unplanned absenteeism, a greater volume of FMLA and long-term leave, and increased use of banked PTO hours for companies with “use it or lose it” policies. All of this can have a huge impact on productivity.

As a result, employers will need to be flexible with their time and scheduling systems and processes, and managers will need to up their engagement in and ownership of these aspects of workforce management.

Some solutions for consideration include:

• Explore contactless solutions for clock options.
• Introduce a mobile device for tracking time, as well as manager-employee communication.
• Encourage all time transactions be done in your workforce management technology solution (e.g., punch in/out, shift change and time off requests, etc.).
• Create dashboards for managers to easily track anomalies in attendance.
• Implement technology to manage and track FMLA.

Time & Scheduling Case Study: An in-home nursing facility was struggling to stay connected with their nursing staff who went from location to location. Prior to our engagement, the nurses completed paperwork at the end of the day to track hours per patient for proper billing and for their own time cards for payroll. We implemented a mobile solution that also incorporated GPS tracking for verification by indicating exactly where the punch occurred, solving the problem real-time.

Are you interested in more best practices for managing a remote workforce? Read our guide here.

OffBoarding

The importance of this stage in the employee lifecycle cannot be emphasized enough. You always want to end on a good note, as this is part of having a positive organizational culture. However, the importance of a positive offboarding experience is brought to the forefront in these times where the employee very well may be asked to return.

Make the process as painless as possible for the employee, while also ensuring you are getting all of the information you need and meeting all compliance requirements. To start, eliminate paper. No different than onboarding, offboarding should be driven through some type of mobile device or, if necessary, through a computer. The employee should be able to easily provide all of the information that you need.

When conducting the offboarding process, consider what online review you want left for your business. Whether the employee chooses to actually post a review on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed or the review is simply the feeling they are left with once terminated, you want it to be positive. This will benefit your new hire attraction efforts and make it more likely for your top talent to return if you offer them to do so when business conditions allow.

Logistically, COBRA will be a major task without a COBRA administrator providing the necessary technology solution. There are a lot of compliance issues, paperwork, being able to pay online with a credit card and manage that with the carrier, tracking, and more. Fortunately, COBRA is a very inexpensive solution to outsource.

Offboarding Case Study: A manufacturing facility had just gone through a massive layoff and was preparing for another. They couldn't handle the COBRA volume. We engaged our benefits team to implement a solution within a few days that allowed for all proper compliance notifications and paperwork to be sent electronically or to the individual’s home and allowed for online premium payment options.