3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat with Jeanniey Walden, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer of DailyPay

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3Sixty Insights welcomed Jeanniey Walden, chief innovation and marketing officer of DailyPay, Inc., to the latest episode of #HRTechChat, where we explored the idea that the act of paying employees is much more than the operational aspects of running payroll. Any employer that solves frustrations related to pay can be exceptionally effective in influencing employees’ feelings and, related, their motivation to be productive. Following are a few of the interesting ideas we covered during our illuminating conversation:

  • The exchange of physical or mental energy for pay is arguably the single most important aspect of employment.
  • Even so, employees have for years experimented or interacted with pay very little on a daily basis. Limitations of technology have been the largest impediment.
  • Mobile technology and social media have played a key role in catalyzing an expansion of our attitudes toward pay — and can make getting paid a sharing experience not unlike getting coffee. (Jeanniey explains….)
  • Put differently, pay can be much, much more than a number to set and forget, more than an event that takes place in the background every one or two weeks.
  • Pay can and should also be an experience, and a good place to start making pay more than a number is to make the receiving of it as flexible as possible.
  • There is very little excuse today, with the state of technology, for the operational aspects of pay to be rigid.
  • COVID-19 has helped show just how much flexibility is necessary in pay.
  • The focus of regulations today in the realm of pay is mostly on more concrete aspects of it, and that is because society prioritizes the idea of getting paid on time.
  • It will be interesting when and whether regulatory bodies decide that humans are entitled to more abstract aspects of employment in pay and elsewhere.
  • Everyone is always fighting extinction or moving forward; this relates profoundly and inescapably to pay.

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Brent Skinner 00:03
Hello, everybody, welcome to HR tech chat, the latest episode with 3Sixty Insights. And today we have with us, Jeannie Walden, who is chief innovation and Marketing Officer for DailyPay. Yeah. And, and great logo, by the way. I love it. I love it. And yeah, and we had a couple conversations recently. And they were super interesting. And we thought, why don’t we sort of start off where we left off around some of these ideas. And there were a lot of ideas that we, that we discussed. But one thing that sticks out for me, is this, this idea that, and I want to give you the floor here, is this, this idea that that pay is so much more than a number? Maybe we can start there?

Jeannie Walden 00:54
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you summed it up perfectly. Pay is such an important element of who we become as people in the workplace. I mean, after all, it’s the reason that we are working, not necessarily to get the most amount of money, because in many aspects, we work for reasons related to social good, but it does enable us to support ourselves, to support our families, to support family and friends. And that puts a big burden on us. So when it comes to pay, it really is something critically important to us. And the experiences that we have with our pay can often create additional stress if they’re negative, or can relieve stress that we have on the burden of taking care of ourselves and our family and create more happiness and in the workplace, even more productivity. So we are daily pay love to look at pay, not just as a thing, but as the pay experience.

Brent Skinner 01:56
Pay experience. That’s the term that that really resonates with me. And I think you really hit it on the head, you know that PE is it, it is the reason when it comes right down to it. There are a number of reasons, all sorts of reasons why we work, you know, we want to we have these, you know, what we’re passionate about. We want to derive meaning from it and all these sorts of things. But, there is that exchange of labor or thought or contribution for pay. And so when it really comes down to it, it is a number two, one of the things that we talk about at a 3Sixty Insights is this idea that that HCM comprises concrete and abstract elements, right? There are some things that are very easy, straightforward to understand that even accounting can understand it, maybe if you want to put it that way is that you know, okay, yes, I have to pay my employees so that they’ll stay and they won’t go someplace else, right. But then there’s, there’s this whole idea that that pay is perhaps the most abstract element of HCM as well, because there’s so much riding on, getting paid. But also, there’s so much, there’s so much potential to expand our understanding of how employees think about pay and can interact with pain. I think that’s what we get to when we when we start talking about PE experience. So what are your thoughts around PE experience? What can what are some ideas or examples of what a would PE experience can be like?

Jeannie Walden 03:49
So I think to wrap your head around what a PE experience actually is comprised of that I’m going to give you one name and that name is Maggie. Right. And that’s the name of the representative employee that we created a daily pay to remind us how to think about pay from an experiential standpoint. So Maggie’s are millennials and Gen Z workers who get instant everything. They’ve grown up their entire lives in a digital world. If they need a car, they click on a button, Uber Lyft. Automatically, they’re your place to say VRBO. Airbnb, everything is just a click with food. You’ve got 1000 different options, including Uber Eats. to them. Everything in life is an instant experience. when they need it when they want it. It’s available to them, so why not pay so on. So when you think about paying not just as in once a month, once a week, once every other week event and you think about it as an experiential element. It really takes it down to something very simple. Your Money That you’ve earned needs to be available when you need it, not when the company decides that you need it. But when you need it when you want it. And to access it, it should be very simple like the click of a button, just like getting a ride share. That makes it an experience that you control, and that you manage. And it makes it a very positive experience. Your roommate calls and says, Only the pipes burst, we need to get a plumber today. I know payday for us isn’t until the 15th. No problem, that’s a potentially negative experience and can stress you out at work, we’ll open up your app, you click on daily pay, you get the money that you need, you pay the plumber, all of a sudden you have a great experience when you come home. That’s how pay creates a really great experience. And that’s part of the pay experience. And for us to figure out how this really, really works, we thought isn’t really like a stretch to think of pay being an experiential element. What’s the most mundane experience you could think of? And how do you turn that into something phenomenal. So we thought about coffee. like think about it for for you and I what’s coffee, you wake up in the morning, make some coffee, you may or may not realize that you made it because you don’t awake. If you drink it, you put it either in your car or you put it in the sink and you move on with your day. coffee’s done, and you want coffee, you know if there’s coffee in the house, you can get a walk to Starbucks. But what if coffee was an experience like most millennial and Gen Z workers have created with our lives, coffee is very different. You wake up, you think about it, you go on social media, you figure out where the best coffee places you ordered online while you’re getting ready. So it’s seamless doesn’t interrupt your day, you order the best thing that you could possibly think of based on reviews that you’ve seen from the coffee store, you roll into the coffee place, you pick up your mobile coffee, but you don’t drink it yet. Because it’s part of an experience you want it to last because now you’ve got anticipation about how amazing this choco lako multicloud coffee is going to be with an extra shot in there

Brent Skinner 07:07
sounds really good.

Jeannie Walden 07:08
You take you take a picture, because you want to share the experience and how much joy it’s bringing you online. And you wait until your friends right back to you and say oh my god, I’m so jealous. I wish I had my coffee. Haven’t had coffee yet. Oh, no coffee for me. And now you’ve got a social experience where even the most simple thing is coffee has turned into an experience that brings you joy and happiness. And if you can do that with coffee, you absolutely should do it with pay. Because pay can bring so much joy and it can bring families together, it can bring groups together, it shouldn’t be this thing that becomes this cold hard element that happens once a week or once every other week. It has to be something that’s there when you need it. And it can bring you joy and happiness.

Brent Skinner 07:50
You use maybe think of so many things. First off, just to get a little bit of a tangent. I love my coffee in the morning. And I actually have like a like a total process related to it. I do I do the French press coffee, I actually look forward to it when i wake up. I go in there easily have one of one of our little baby girls with me. So that that’s an additional element. But um, but yeah, I sit there and it is a process for me. My wife, she’s different. She wants her coffee, she doesn’t want to think about it. There’s a separate machine that she makes her coffee on and she just presses a button takes it and then goes back to something that she doesn’t want to think about. So it’s interesting, different ideas around coffee, and how we interact with it, but I like the analogy. So one of the things that that occurred to me with is two things. One is this idea that that technology right to it. I’d like your take on this. It’s because it just occurred to me pay before all of this instant technologies, cellular phones, smartphones, the internet and all that I mean, I’m dating myself before the internet. I mean, some people don’t remember what that

09:10
was the dinosaurs getting just

Brent Skinner 09:15
Yeah, they the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs did have wireless though. But in any event, before all of this. I don’t think there even was the fathoming that, that pay could be more than just something that you received once every week or every two weeks. Right. That was that was just okay. Yeah, that’s su pay. Right. But with technology, actually, these two ideas kind of go together with technology. It seems like all of a sudden it’s opened our eyes to the idea that pay can be a lot more than that once a week or once every two weeks thing and it is something that we can have control over and that that’s something As you know, technology, millennials and Zoomers, you know they that’s what they know isn’t an instantaneous having control over things that that Gen Xers or boomers or whoever didn’t in the past. So that’s that. And then there’s the idea that the pay should pay is, at the end of the day going back to something we talked about a few minutes ago. It is it is the main it is the crux of why we’re working. You know, it is some people, you know, they they’re independently wealthy, and they decide to work anyway, because they’re doing something that they love that they’re passionate about. But for the vast majority of us where we’re working, that that is like a fundamental reason that we’re working in, why should it be? It’s so fundamental to working? Why should it be just something in the background? That’s not even almost not even spoken about? You know, like, like politics and religion? You don’t talk about them at the dinner table? Thanksgiving, right? You’re not supposed to talk about pig? No, let’s talk about pay with their employees.

11:04
Yeah, yeah.

Jeannie Walden 11:05
I mean, and you talk a lot about control, which is fabulous, because we have technology has enabled us to give control over when and how you access, you pay it back to the employee where it rightly belongs. But it’s also about choice. And when you talk about with you and your wife a copy of her choices, to have quick, fast coffee, your choice is to go through a process. And everybody’s different. Same thing with pay, you know, back before World War Two, everybody got, hey, when they worked, it was just the way thing happened. It wasn’t until the government looked to make some economic related decisions that we started to get rules and regulations around the way that pay is handled. And that was for taxation purposes. So it wasn’t like all the sudden, you know, companies decided they wanted to remove choice and control from their employees. The government, you know, made some rules and regulations and started to take that away. But even in those early days, when ADP came in, and provided the first outsource payroll opportunities, we’ve looked for a way to transition back, and what better way to transition back to choice and control, then to leverage the advent of technology, and certainly this entire digital transformation, and push into the future of work that COVID has enabled us to capitalize on and really make the most out of it for all of us. Because we deserve that. And you know, daily pay, we offer on demand pay, but we go so far beyond on demand pay with just the ability to unlock all of the different ways that pay works, and not just what you get in your paycheck on the 15th. But how you get off cycle payments, how you get reward payments, bonus payments, all of those things should be given to employees with the same choice and control that we’ve enabled now for just your traditional paycheck.

Brent Skinner 12:58
How much do regulations slow that? Or? Or do you find that the regulations that are in place are an impediment to being able to offer flexibility and pay? Are they are they ultimately just another swim lane? Or how does that all?

Jeannie Walden 13:20
Yeah, everything that regulators are doing is being done for the good of the employee. And we are big supporters and fans of that, in the on demand pay industry. It’s not as highly regulated yet, as other industries that relate to access to money are like the payday loan industry, not an industry that we’re in, but very highly regulated. And I think that industry has restructured themselves to be in line with the regulation that’s out there. For the on demand pay industry, the regulations in place are absolutely wonderful. They’re looking to safeguard and make sure that people have the money to pay back taxes, child support, other things that they truly need to pay. And I think that that’s fantastic. I do expect that we’ll see more regulatory kind of interest popping up over the next few years as more and more companies adopt on demand pay as just the way that their employees get paid. So I think it will continue to evolve. But as long as it’s supporting the best interest of the employer, I think that’s fantastic.

Brent Skinner 14:28
Yeah, yeah. I want to throw a thought out here that I think relates to what we were just talking about. So I’ve thought this through quite a bit, you know in terms of okay what is getting back to this idea of concrete and abstract HCM concrete gaps again, for people listening, concrete dates CME being this idea that, you know, these are the basics, the most you know, the basic essentials of HCM, right I have to pay my people, I have to have a time and attendance solution in place so that I can track their hours and, and I need to be able to plan their schedules. And yeah, I have to give them benefits because the law says I have to and so the bare essentials, you know, of employing people looking at that as a possibly a caustic contain and then there’s the idea of abstract HCM, where are there all these things that I can do, I can make schedules very flexible for my employees so that they can balance their, their family and non work lives with their work lives, right, and so that they can maybe not have to call out as much and I might be able to retain them longer and, and of course, extending to pay was, like we’ve been talking about for the past several minutes here. So there’s that idea of concrete and abstract dates. And I thought, okay, there’s this idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where a lot of people have heard of that. But just to give some people sort of a background, super quick societies, this guy in the 40s, I don’t know his first names, names, mass, low last name, he came up with this idea that, that we have physiological and safety needs that we have to satisfy first, and then after that, we have a desire for love and belonging, and then esteem and then and then if we achieve all these things, then we can start to achieve self actualization at the top of the pyramid. And it’s actually a pyramid. Right. And I was actually brought to the it was brought to the attention of this recently by fellow I really respected this idea. Well, you know, Maxwell’s Hierarchy of Needs is, there’s a better theory out there, I’d never heard of it. This guy by the last name of elder for came around in the 60s, I also don’t know his first name, either. I just knew these guys last names. But anyway, elder first is idea that there’s is a simplification of the heart of the hierarchy of needs and mass flow, where we talk about just existence, existence, relatedness and growth. So growth, sort of coincides with the top two rungs, esteem and self actualization. There’s some overlap with relatedness with esteem and also with love and belonging, and then the lower to the existence and, and physiological needs, those are all about existence. Okay? And that you can in a work environment, an employee is thinking about all these things at the same time and trying to achieve all these things simultaneously, not sort of, you know, one after the other. And that’s pretty interesting. So if you think about pay, it’s, we’ve thought about pay for so long is just an existence. Right? But when you’re talking about pay experience, you’re talking about relatedness, and, and even growth, but especially relatedness. And that that’s what’s so interesting to me around pay experience. And you think about compliance around pay, it’s all been compliance around pay has really been compliance around anything around employment has all been focused on the existence, part of employment for the vet for the most part, right. But when we think about F, LSA, and all this kind of stuff, it’s all around existence. And so it would make sense that there’s maybe less of a regulatory framework right now, around the relatedness. And so the reason the regulations have been in place, in my opinion, is because rightly so we as a society have seen that existence, it’s really important to ensure that, that if someone is doing their fair share, to provide for their own existence, that whoever they’re dealing with in relation to that also hold up their end of the bargain, right. So be interesting to see, you know, whether relatedness and growth may eventually be seen as necessary. You know, in terms of, you know, if you’re working, then you also deserve relatedness and growth, not just existence. Yeah.

Jeannie Walden 19:08
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, like, I think that’s where employee engagement comes from, and the important factor of employee engagement. Yes, you can come to work every day. And you can do a certain set of tasks and get a certain dollar amount for it. But where’s the personal value in that where do you find the joy from there that enables you to make the most out of your life to be the best person that you can outwork. And when you leave at home, we’ve all had jobs that we have not really enjoyed coming to and think about yourself. When you leave from a job like that you’re sad, you’re frustrated, you’re angry, you’re upset, and it takes a while to decompress and get back to your family and provide them with the love and support that they need. So you know, anything that we can do when we’re spending eight out of the 12 to six waking hours day that we have at work or potentially even more, to make that an enjoyable place where the experience of your job points to all positive things. So, you know, you’re talking about Mao’s love, I hate to get way, way down to Freud, in his psychoanalytic theory, everyone is either alive, to move ahead, or avoid extinction. And that’s why we work. I mean, yes, if people are working is because they either need to provide for their family, or they need to avoid getting kicked out of their house. Like it’s pretty cut and dry. So when you’re going to a place of employment, and you and you want to look at more opportunities to make more money, you have to improve at your job. In order to do that, you have to capitalize on the environment, you’ve got to learn more skills, you’ve got to network better, there’s a lot of things that you need to do that you can’t do, if you’re having a horrible, awful day where your work experience is so restrictive that you can’t move forward. So when pain becomes an experiential asset, that you can make the most out of, it actually helps you to move into that next role, the next level, the next status level, at your company, because you can make most out of that and turn it into something very positive, not just for you, but for your family and home as well.

Brent Skinner 21:27
Yeah, and this apart that last bit, which is really interesting to me, because it’s this idea that, well, if you’re if you’re completely spent in just sort of cowed or whatever from your work experience, and that possibly being, you know, at least in part because of your pay experience, right, then you’re actually being you’re actually not being your potential best for society, you know, holistically, outside of outside of work. So this is really about it’s really about the idea of, of enabling people who have to work anyway. Yeah. Being as, you know, realizing as, as much of their potential as possible. From a from a, an experiential standpoint, in work, a positive experience, positive, positive experience, that they can be as full as possible in their work life balance.

Jeannie Walden 22:37
Yeah. And think about it this way. You know, if you’re, if you’re at Kroger, target Dollar Tree, you work there, you come in, and you’ve got a great pay experience opportunity by working there, like having daily pay accessible to you, you feel good about yourself, you’re excited to work because you know, when you need that money, if you need that money that’s going to be available for you, you are more prone to provide better customer service to the people that you interact with. happier customers means more revenue to the company, more revenue to the company means either promotion for you more benefit opportunities, more profits for the organization, so they can put in more programs and benefits that make it an even better place to work. And it’s really a cyclical piece of work. And it’s a cyclical initiative. But even if it You weren’t thinking about the customers, you work at, you know, Taco Bell, or Arby’s or Wendy’s, and you decide to leave, you’ve got a great opportunity somewhere else. On your last day of work, the company says to you, we’re going to have to mail you your check. And then there’s a crazy snowstorm like we had in Texas, and unfortunately, the mail gets delayed, and you have a negative experience with your last check unrelated to the company. But it’s still a negative experience. You think about that. The next time you want to go out to eat, you may have different choices, because you’re thinking, Oh, it took me X number of days to get the check. You’re not thinking because of the snowstorm, you’re just going back to experiences that you have. So you know, when companies can you know, like those fast food companies can offer pay experience like they do and provide you your final day’s pay electronically through our cycle product. Your last day at Taco Bell is an awesome day, you know, you bring you bring home some Taco Bell, you bring home that party pad, you’ve got your check in your hand and you’re ready to move on to your next role. And everyone’s happy. So you know, it’s just really working and pay is such a basic need of all of ours. Why not make the most of it? Why not make it a great place and employers benefit? employees benefit customers benefit? We’re all happy.

Brent Skinner 24:42
Yeah, yeah, I love that cut. You know, and in the, at some point if you feel the urge to go to Chipotle is you may feel bad about it and not go and go to Taco instead, right? Are you retaining customers, if you’re not if you’re not retaining your own, your own employees in some inst in some industries as in as customers, then then then you’re doing it wrong, I think of all sorts of companies like, you know, car, automobile manufacturers, there’s all sorts of things that you can do for your employees to help them feel good about buying from you as well, obviously, not a not a forced thing. But you know, because that, because of that sentiment, you want another thing that you bring up, that’s super interesting. And I know we’re kind of running low on time. But it made me think of this is that everything, especially in some industries, more than others, and some of the industries that that you that you sort of alluded to there, that the frontline worker really is the face of it. I mean, you know, you can do all of your advertisements and your jingles and you know, you can have good food or some other good product or, or whatever it is about the product. That’s, that’s good, whether it’s convenient, or whatever, and then what it’s known for, but at the end of the day, if you have employees that are not at their best, because they just intrinsically want to be because you’re treating them. Right, you’re giving them the best possible work ecosystem to operate in, then your brand is going to suffer. And how do you measure that? It’s very tough to measure, but at the same time, you’ll definitely be able to measure when you’re out of business, right? Is that zero? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, good stuff. Good stuff. Thank you so much for joining us, Jeannie, really appreciate it. This has been a super interesting conversation that I love this idea that the pay is so much more than a number that it can meet, it can really, really be sort of the, the, the basis for experience or work environment.

Jeannie Walden 27:00
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And your insights and the research that you and your team do are so fantastic in this area is really inspirational for us DailyPay and you know, we love reading what you have to say and figuring out how we can make an even better product. So thank you.

Brent Skinner 27:16
Well, thank you very much. Thank you, wonderful. Take care you

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