Every year, Canada celebrates a unique week-long event dedicated to payroll professionals, people who are rarely in the center of attention in their own companies. National Payroll Week will be officially recognized from September 10th-14th 2018, and will include a wide ranging awareness campaign designed to promote several key objectives. The event is supported by the Canadian Payroll Association and traditionally represents the opportunity to shed some light on new practices and smart ideas that can make the process of getting paid faster, easier and more reliable. Every year, new themes are added to reflect the current legislative and policy changes, so HR professionals need to do their homework before they can organize local activities.
With the date just around the corner, now is the right time to discuss some of the key points that would be suitable to include into the celebration of National Payroll Week at your company:
Focus on education
One of the major goals for this year’s National Payroll Week campaign is to raise the level of financial literacy among the working population. The employees should be briefed on their financial rights under the law, the amount of their salaries that goes to cover the taxes, and a number of other issues that workers might be ignorant about. It’s particularly important to educate new members of the workforce, so they can start their careers on equal footing with more experienced workers. HR managers can use a variety of tools to reinforce key messages, including interactive multimedia and mobile apps that present data in a visual format and are better accepted by the younger employees.
Stimulate engagement
The whole point of National Payroll Week is to promote participation and facilitate exchange of knowledge, so one of the primary goals is to get the employees involved. For this purpose, Canadian Payroll Association has prepared a few handy tools that could cause a wave of interest around the office. New 2018 poster for National Payroll Week is a good start and should be printed out and hung in a prominent place, while the photo contest inviting companies to share their pictures from NPW events could inspire a few bold office party ideas. It might even be possible to make payroll management look fun at least for one week!
Pay Yourself First program
Most companies in Canada support Pay Yourself First program, but quite a few employees are not familiar with its purpose and dynamics. This program is designed to stimulate savings, and basically redirects a portion of each pay check directly into the designated account before the employee receives the rest. Participation could increase significantly if the workers were made aware of the long term advantages of this approach, and National Payroll Week is the perfect time to popularize this concept and recruit new people to sign up. This way, NPW can truly be all about workers and their long-term interests, with educational aspect complemented with practical gains.
Deeper involvement with analytics
Statistical analysis is growing more important within the framework of HR practice, and National Payroll Week is a good opportunity to emphasize it. HR departments now routinely track a number of payroll metrics and invest a lot of effort to quantify their work. Use of analytic techniques should lead to more objectively based financial reimbursement, which generally benefits both employers and the most deserving team members. That’s why National Payroll Week should be used to demystify use of analytics in payroll management and explain the value of this approach to the rest of the company, especially to the members of the management involved in financial planning.
