Pete and Julie unveil and tour the newly published Payroll Profession Confidence Index (PPCI)!
The first-of-its-kind sentiment analysis dedicated to the payroll profession shares insights into the current state of the profession, the health of payroll operations globally, and how executives can best champion and invest in payroll for increased value and impact.
Our HR & Payroll 2.0 Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:
Apple iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hr-payroll-2-0/id1643933833
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/10HlnoTCwGPVQEtUHNcCWl?si=197255cea5e949be
Audacy: https://www.audacy.com/podcast/hr-payroll-20-aa809
Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/podcast-show/649858828/HR-Payroll-2-0
Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/dir-ur5np-280b3e
Transcript:
Pete Tiliakos 00:00
Welcome, everyone to a very special episode of HR and Payroll 2.0. I’m Pete Tiliakos. As always, I’m joined by the legendary Julie Fernandez. Welcome, Julie.
Julie Fernandez 00:16
Thanks, Pete. We’re always trying new stuff. So yeah, let’s just take a go. Yeah.
Pete Tiliakos 00:20
So this is a special, I don’t know that we’ve done, we’ve only done one video episode. And that was with Jason Lee and the team at Salt labs. That was awesome. We did that at HRTech. But this one, we’re going to do very special, I thought we would give a tour of the payroll profession confidence index that is newly out. And yeah, just give everybody a look at what it’s what it says.
Julie Fernandez 00:40
That’s right. And so instead of having a whole team of production specialists, like we had with Jason, right, we’re gonna do our usual do it yourself, let’s see what happens here. We just felt like, you know, if you can’t see the report, as you go along, if that’s an option for you to take a look. Doing it all via audio is, you know, could be a little tougher. So yeah, bring it to life.
Pete Tiliakos 01:00
So look, I’m really, really excited. If you’ve listened to the previous episode, or all of my ranting across the internet for months about the payroll profession Confidence Index, I would tell you go if you’d like to go back and listen to that episode, you can hear sort of the origin of this. But fundamentally, the payroll profession Confidence Index is a sentiment based analysis dedicated to the payroll profession, it’s all about understanding how the profession is feeling about the future about technology, the way they’re being treated by their organizations, how they’re being invested in or not, what their biggest needs are, how the impact can be for the organization when payroll is invested in and championed and cared for. And so super excited, and really appreciate everybody taking their time to give us this input.
Julie Fernandez 01:42
Yeah, thanks for some really great response. Pete.
Pete Tiliakos 01:45
Yeah, yeah, we did. We had, we had over 700, I’m just popping up the the Table of Contents here, we had over 700. Folks take it now. I’ll be honest, we had almost 4000 Touch it and come through to it, but not finish it or not started. So we got to work on that. We’ve got to get everybody I want every practitioner around the world. There’s a hell of a lot more than 700 of you. There’s more than 4000 of you. So I want to get every payroll professional on the planet, putting their input into this, and I’m working on something that is going to try to bring this to life permanently. So hopefully, we’ll get there and we’ll have that but yeah, 28 countries as well, were represented five continents. So really exciting. Need a great turnout from Australia, from Africa. Nice turnout from Asia even so very happy with what what we had here. Yeah,
Julie Fernandez 02:28
thanks for everybody who not only completed it, but helped spread the word. Get the word out. Excited to kind of see it and then see how it’s gonna live on right.
Pete Tiliakos 02:38
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so look, what I thought I’d do is just do a little tour today and just talk a little bit about what we saw. Maybe you could I know you’ve got some questions, Julie, maybe we could go through that a little bit. And then yeah, wrap it up and get ready to go off on this holiday weekend. All
Julie Fernandez 02:51
right, let’s call it a tour. All right. Let’s be explorers today. All right.
Pete Tiliakos 02:55
So we’ve got basically, primarily these five sections, right. And really, it’s, it’s it’s three sections, it’s the sentiment based analysis, it’s the operational health of the payrolls out there. And then of course, what impact they’re bringing, and how you can draw that impact out. So you’ll find each of these are, are available here. And then of course, we’ve got an appendix that breaks down various different views of the, of the smaller companies write those below 1000 employees, and then those above 1000, based on a compare to the norm, or the averages. And then of course, we we did that for single country footprints and multi country or multi regional global footprints. So we really tried to give you some some slices and dices here. Before we dig into it, let me just wanna give you a little bit background. So one of the things that we did with this was this was very carefully crafted, we worked with a number of professional researchers to get their opinions, we asked people, practitioners and payroll leaders and professionals, we also asked some payroll executive types that are very high level to to give their input, we asked for some of the payroll associations to help us the payroll org was generous enough to give us their opinions as well. And we had a lot of input on this, it took well over a year, I know you looked at it, Julie. And so what we did was we really built this on kind of an NPS sort of style. So the majority of the questions are single answer questions ranging from one to five, or picking from one to five. And in some cases, there are places where we allow people to pick top three are most impactful in a group. So there’s multiple choice, but primarily, you’re going to see largely, largely that and I’ll explain how we how we reported this out. So again, you’ve got your sentiment, your operations, your impact. And of course, the appendix is going to have all your all your extra details as well as your demographics, which I’m actually going to skip to first if that’s okay, too. I’m gonna go to the end. It’s great. Yeah, I want to talk about the demographics. And then I thought we could come back to the sentiment because the exec summary really kind of summarizes the whole thing if someone only has a few minutes to read three slides, that would be it. But each one will break down and it rolls up to that so so let’s do that. Let’s um, let’s, I’m just going to jump up So let me switch over here when you come over here to the demographics, because this is one of the things that really stood out for me. Here. This is, this is really concerning what what do you see here that makes gives you concern? On the screen?
Julie Fernandez 05:13
Well, we’ve long heard talk about the payroll, payroll and how folks are retiring and aging out of it. Right. Yeah. And concern for the fact that there aren’t enough new new entrants into this field and and a worry about how exactly we’re going to staff payroll and get payroll done. Yeah,
Pete Tiliakos 05:30
look, I mean, we’ve got, I mean, close to what an ad, I mean, you know, 70, some percent there that is, are well over 70%, I should say that is fundamentally above 10 years, right? I mean, 50%, above 20. So we’re going to lose a lot of people in here in the coming years. And I think we’ve got to really prioritize getting folks earlier in their career to come into the payroll profession. So this is something that really, really stood out to me. I just want to show you real quick here to the respondents, again, we have 28 countries represented that is, I think that’s impressive. I don’t know what survey has reached that before, in this space. Maybe there has but but but I was very happy with that. I would have liked to have seen Europe show up a little bit better, we could have used a little bit more help in that area. But otherwise, we did really good and thank you to Australia, they really turned out they really, really turned out in this. So great job. Okay, so also we you know, like I said, we go on into areas of where we’ll look at things like the size of the companies had a nice little swath there. Good, good bit of about half were single country. So we had about the other half obviously, being multi country, multi region, and global, of course, so good mix here.
Julie Fernandez 06:41
That’s important. Folks always want to know, and I think it’s a slicing and dicing, right? Where you you’re able to if you want to get a little bit of like me kind of insights. They’re all there and all available. But these are the things that folks most want to cut. Absolutely.
Pete Tiliakos 06:54
Absolutely, yeah. So let’s jump back on and come back to our sentiment analysis. Now, I want to go back to our sections here. And I want to kind of talk you through the pieces of this, right. So we’ve got the outlook of professionals, you’ve got the respect in perception. And then of course, we’ve got how well executives are engaging them. So let’s jump into this first one. So not so bad, right? I’d say there’s a cautious optimism. If I were to grade this. I think professional payroll professionals are largely excited and cautious, but also cautiously optimistic about the future. There’s a lot of concerns for what AI is going to do. But one of the things that really stood out to me here was just the the unwillingness by organizations to modernize or change. I think that’s probably one of the biggest barriers to payroll right now, in addition to the shrinking talent pool, right? We’re just seeing, it’s what I think is driving a lot of the managed services right now, in addition to some of the innovation, transformation, as well. So positive pretty much here. And of course, empowered by technology. I think most professionals feel that way, as you can see, but there is that there is that sort of hesitation about what may or may be coming. Yeah, and
Julie Fernandez 07:54
I do think you know, in that top concerns where AI and automation digitization show up with aging workforce that we talked about, I mean, it stands to reason that folks that are in the field, and you know, might not be in it for that much longer are thinking, you know, either this is going to take my job away, or, you know, it’s not such a big deal, because it’s all getting automated anyway. So neither one of those ends of the spectrum is really all that that that keen, right? Yeah,
Pete Tiliakos 08:20
yeah. And look, again, I’ll say I think AI is friend, not foe, I think it’s a tool. I think it’s going to be an enabler. And I think it’s going to create some really interesting careers for people if they can lean in and, and become champions of it. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, let’s all right, let’s go, here’s where I really got got upset. This is concerning, right, we’ve what we’ve got about half of the professionals feeling highly or very highly respected. That means less than half or about half, or I’d say less, obviously, or not. And that’s a problem we shouldn’t have, we shouldn’t have that should be a small number, if anything, really needs to be zero, to be honest. And then, of course, just the level of perception for payroll, right, we gave some definitions to this and tried to see how people or operations were being perceived. So you can see less than 50, or excuse me, less than 40%, are seen as a center of expertise or an outlet of proactive engagement, which is concerning, we got a lot of work to do here. And you can see some of the quotes here from around the quad qualitative data that we collected, and some of the things where people are saying, Look, we’re HR just doesn’t know what the heck we do.
Julie Fernandez 09:24
The one immediately to the right, is the one that struck me the most when I had the chance to see this. And that is, you know, I hear a lot of times that it this idea that everything comes together at payroll, and it’s always just in time, you know, there’s not a lot of extra time accommodations when you’re trying to get payroll out on a schedule, and it becomes payrolls fault. Oh, yeah. You know, a lot of a lot of the failures that are happening at that juncture of all of those key processes, don’t the root cause is not payroll, and so that just makes the job, all that more complex, and yet that’s where the symptoms appear and where things get loud?
Pete Tiliakos 10:01
Yeah, look, I’ll go as far as to say it’s a systemic ignorance, if you want to be honest, and I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way, I mean that to say that people just don’t know. I mean, how many times Julie, I know you’ve been there, I know you’ve been there, I’ve worked. I’ve worked in a fortune 100 company as a, as a payroll leader, I have advised many of the biggest companies on the planet around payroll in my consulting days. And I can tell you how many times I sat in conference rooms with major, major decisions or major actions that are happening around the business that were causing impact to humans, which they almost always do. And anytime anything, even sounded remotely close to payroll, most of HR was shoving their fingers in their ears running for the hills, you know, your thought we’d have dropped a bomb in the middle of the room or something, right? It’s like, I mean, in what drives me crazy about that, and I posted this the other day is that I know, as a leader, my team and I, we knew more about HR in the business than HR thought they did. And a lot of times we were coaching them on what they should have been doing, because they had no clue, because they’re so siloed, and so focused in their world. And what they do is so important that they don’t take time to understand any of the integration or synergies with the other other teams. But we don’t have that choice. In payroll, we have to understand the process, everyone’s process, every business process can because it all rolls down to us. And so take a minute and go have a conversation with one of your payroll people listen to them, they actually might know a hell of a lot more than you’re giving them credit for and the less than stuff is just gotta stop. You’re absolutely tying both your feet together. It’s like a one legged sack race, you know, there’s, you know, the sack races at the, at the fair, or whatever you do, or you get with a buddy. It’s that’s what you’re doing, like, take your leg out of a sack and sprint, and that’s help getting payroll involved. Right. And so, yeah, have some respect and start understanding what they do. Because there’s there’s definitely a problem with that. Yeah, you
Julie Fernandez 11:56
know, and that gets more and more prolific, I think the larger the organization gets where you have, you know, discrete roles and handoffs, right, and things, you know, one has to do a part and the other has to do another part. Payroll has a very tangible, you know, quantitative role. And that’s how they understand the data. And HR has, you know, a different role. That’s more people centric and people focused. And so it’s different lenses. As you move down market. Those are in the same person. Yeah. You know, Oh, yeah. Yeah, more often than not, and so, yeah, yeah. So it shows up in different ways in different client organizations and to different degrees. But your survey certainly showed that there are folks that are feeling that acutely, and it undoubtedly affects the way that they the value that they feel they bring to the organization. That’s
Pete Tiliakos 12:48
Oh, yeah, yeah, well, bouncing back to our exec summary here. I put this in there this year, I want to show you this, right, payroll is an iceberg, right? I gave a video on this, it’s a hell of a lot more than what you’re seeing above the waterline. That’s what you see above the waterline employee experience. And mostly only if someone complains, paychecks that come out, and maybe the reports that you get or don’t get for your organization. But here’s what’s really going on. And this has been polite. This is this is I mean, we probably need three or four pages for this. And you know, focus down there on the on the bottom right, it’s pretty much in addition to the mammoth task that they have. It’s probably also any and everything that anybody doesn’t want to do. That sounds like payroll because HR has got their fingers shoved in their ears. So yeah, wake up. There’s a lot more going on below the iceberg and you don’t want to be the Titanic and sink because a payroll All right. Let’s come back. Hey, they need to hear it. We need to hear
Julie Fernandez 13:40
it. Okay. I can hear ya have to temper your temper my fingers and tempers visual because yeah, it’s really not that bad all over, right? There are places or that’s Oh, no, yeah, like you’ve given me, Julie, that’s given me the
Pete Tiliakos 13:54
am I exaggerating in your career? Am I exaggerating? You’ve sat in front of so many different executives and so many rooms for transformation? How many times have you seen it? You know, it
Julie Fernandez 14:03
depends. I’ll tell you. Yeah, totally depends on the culture of the org. Yeah, that’s also think about sometimes HR owns payroll, you know, they’re all routine, and sometimes they don’t and so those different nuances make all the difference, right? In Oh, yeah. In that visual that you’re painting,
Pete Tiliakos 14:17
which is the less than stuff, right like that. There’s a systemic less than problem. I mean, I would argue that with anybody, I feel it, I’m payroll famous, and I feel it. So I felt it my entire career. I’ve seen it. I watched I watched people struggle through it, and it’s um, it’s just unacceptable anymore. It’s really isn’t acceptable. Yeah,
Julie Fernandez 14:35
I think a lot of that stems from what the job came from. It came from a bookkeeper job and how the job has evolved over decades and how it’s so far from being you know, a bookkeeper and a calculator. Yeah, puncher, that it’s just a very different skill. It’s a different job and it’s much more elevated. Yeah, there’s a lot more required. And not all comp structures, not all organizations have kind of evolved. Not all job descriptions have evolved. Oh, yeah,
Pete Tiliakos 15:07
I would argue there are a lot of organizations whose HR hasn’t even evolved even catch up to payroll. Right. So yeah, but look, go and listen to the, to the episode we deal with here and right. I mean, in Australia, you can go to prison for payroll, if you do it wrong. It’s actually driving a lot of people to sort of question whether they want to stay in payroll, right, if you’ve got an employer who won’t invest, and now I’m responsible for what happens legally. I don’t know if I want that responsibility. Right. So yeah, it’s very concerning. But yeah, so this is one we did an episode on. Again, it’s shameless plug here. But we did talk about the invested leader versus that leader that’s investing. And as you can see, that’s not exactly where we need to be right, we need to get that much, much higher, I’d love to see two thirds or more, at least at this point. And so this means what we really asked here was is how well, adequately are your organizations in your executives investing in you that would be monetary dollars to do what you need to do? Or the resources to do what you need to do? Versus how well are they invested? How much do they walk the talk in bringing you to the table in championing you as an cultural norm as a priority in their in their HR strategy? And that’s this is again, an area where I think we’ve got to see some change, and the impacts to this, we’re going to talk about later our material when you when you see what comes out of it. Yeah, I’m
Julie Fernandez 16:20
sure as we think about on, you know, just making this available in some form in on an ongoing basis. Yeah, I think we should have a goal here. Yeah. 60% by you know, whatever. And and so more to come on that. Oh, yeah, yeah, challenge that we should rise. We do
Pete Tiliakos 16:36
we do. And this is good. This is the first iteration we’re going to keep this going. We learned some things from this, I have to admit, there’s things I would have done differently a little bit. But I’m very pleased with how this came out. And the reception has been amazing. I’ve had and thank you to everyone who’s who’s seen this and complimented me. I really appreciate it. It wasn’t about that. It’s about the profession. And if that’s if that’s all we get out of this, I’ll be happy. So yeah. All right. Let’s talk operation boxes.
Julie Fernandez 17:02
Yeah, let’s operation.
Pete Tiliakos 17:04
Let’s do it. Here we go operations. So here we’re going to talk operational health, we’re going to talk about the digital technology impact. And we’re also going to talk about what payroll investments are actually key. And there’s some surprising answers here, which I think really came out to me. So let’s talk about first maturity, right, we’ve only got about 12% of the population that responded to a saying they are operating in a fully mature state. And we provide a definitions of what that was mostly around Tech, we couldn’t get so deep with this to get to to to into your all of your operational maturities. But we really just looked at the infrastructure, how harmonized how just how centralized things were. And so we gave that in the appendix. So you’ll see the trends, the levels and the backs, you can kind of gauge yourself if you’d like. centralization is decent, right? We got about 60% saying a centralized now keep in mind, half of these were single country, so I’d have to probably dig later with you to see the centralization with the yeah, there’s a little less for sure. I think it’s in the 50s. With rising
Julie Fernandez 18:00
when you look domestic only So yeah, that’s it. Yeah, slicing and dicing makes a difference. Yes.
Pete Tiliakos 18:05
And that’s gonna, you’re gonna see that here at the bottom. And keep in mind, what we did here was, again, NPs style, we looked at all of the folks that answered again, on a one to five, we said, you know, four, and five being the higher end, one and two being the lower end three kind of being neutral. We were looking at this and saying, you know, fully centralized, right, we’re looking at those that gave fours and fives for those answers. So what I do in the back is I normalize that those against the types of customer as well, or the respondent as well. But really, what we’re looking at is who is operating at the high end versus those that are not. And so that’s how we’ve kind of carved this up, just to clarify. And then one thing I think is really concerning here is the viability, right, we’ve only got about half of the organization saying that they have confidence, a high level of confidence that their operations in payroll are able to support the strategic direction of their business in the next three years. That’s a problem. That’s a problem. And we’ve got to fix that. Because that’s a competitive, competitive gap right there for you. Yeah, all right. Let’s go not
Julie Fernandez 19:04
supporting payroll, not an option forever.
Pete Tiliakos 19:06
No, no, yeah, it’s a Yeah. And it’s more than the paycheck, right? I mean, you can really get in some trouble if you don’t do these things, right, with taxes and other things. So we did only ask one technology question in this in this research. And the reason for that was is because we didn’t want to make it so much about technology. There’s plenty of research on that. We wanted it to be about the practitioner and the leaders that are out there running and managing our payrolls. And so you can see kind of not a huge surprise here. Obviously, AI didn’t jump up to the top. But I think you can see that cloud technology has been the most enabling solution. And these were ones where we asked multiple choice, you’re not going to see a total to 100 here. I should probably note that in our report, revision, but But yeah, so obviously mobile and ESS making huge impact analytics. And interestingly, there were some differences in how these came out for smaller versus larger companies that I’ll point out as we get to the end, but But yeah, just just a quick look at what what they thought about tech. Now, here’s what I thought was interesting when we asked about the most impactful investments that you could have, you know, we asked what what what is it right? I mean, and again, here’s where the you could do top three. So you see, this is not going to equal to 100. But look, what’s what’s first there? Julie? Right.
Julie Fernandez 20:23
I know, education. Three. Yeah. Yeah, I looked at this, just putting those first three together and saying, it’s about the talent and the skills and the respect. Yeah. And the respect and that is just screaming out of these results. Oh,
Pete Tiliakos 20:36
yeah. And Cloud technology popped up, obviously, all the way the right now your transformation was key for the multicountry works. I knew that that there. And I’ll show you that. I’ll show you that later here on our breakdown. So so this was surprising to me, I actually thought I actually sort of thought transformation would have been higher. But this is, this is cool. This is cool to know, this is good to know that our folks are asking for help. And they’re asking for it in an area that I think you should be investing in, in all of your parts of your company anyway. Right? So yeah. All right, let’s talk impact. This is where some eye opening stuff came around. And we asked about things like ROI and value realization. And we define that for the survey takers. We asked about partnerships, how will these, they partner with the other parts of the organization, and then how you could best champion payroll to get the most value out of them strategically. And so here’s what we learned, right? We learned that only about a third of the operations are delivering that high level of strategy impacting value to their businesses. And about three, three fourths, right are not confident that the organization’s are doing enough to actually draw it all out, draw that strategic impact out. And then of course, 66%, are not in confidence, highly confident that their corporate cultures and their executives are aligned to even elevate payroll to begin with. So the eyes off there, they taken their eye off the ball, so to speak, or never put it on the ball, I guess you could say and missing out on a lot of value an opportunity here. Really?
Julie Fernandez 22:08
Yeah. And I think the other the other thing could be in some situations, it could just be that that that message and that importance. Yeah, making its way down to the folks that are actually doing, you know, the work. Yeah, senior leaders, you know, we often in conversations with them, they will poignantly say like payroll can’t go wrong, like we cannot have a big bomb in the payroll space. And so they recognize that at least by narrowly, right, like it’s a critical function. Yeah. And yet figuring out how that how that becomes maybe a more robust leadership Guiding Light, right, and it gets communicated into the ranks into the payroll ranks. There’s a disconnect there as well, for sure. Oh, yeah.
Pete Tiliakos 22:52
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I would be I would love to know, I wish we had enough space and time and effort to, to, to understand to if these organizations across all of these answers are what state of transformation they’re in from a finance or HR perspective, because I think that might be somewhat telling as to how payroll has sort of evolved or not maturity wise. But also, I’d be curious to know the same to have executives take the same survey. And I’d love to know, their I’d love to be able to contrast and compare what the executive said to the people who took it, but that’s almost nearly impossible. So yeah,
Julie Fernandez 23:28
we can toy around with figures. I know, do it with select client, you know, yeah, client situations where, you know, the framework is already here results for comparison purposes already here. Like, let’s, let’s, let’s dig into a couple of case studies. Right. And yeah, that all plays out.
Pete Tiliakos 23:45
I am trying to figure out some benchmarking capabilities with this with this research. So, yeah, we’ll have more on that to come. We’ll find that out. So, okay, let’s go with the next piece here. This is the really key slide to me, this is the most important slide in this in this entire presentation or report, looking at what happens when your strength of partnerships are better, right? We look at the executive leaders on a one to five, we’ve got executive leadership, the lowest in terms of strength of partnership with payroll. Now that sounds like it might make sense, right? I mean, HR and finance being at the top, I’d like to see it a little stronger to tell you the truth. And I’m surprised legal wasn’t stronger as well. And I think you could probably I actually want to go back and do some slicing and dicing on small, big, you know, multi country, small country, or excuse me, single country in order to understand this. But clearly, what we can see here is is that when payroll operations have closer and stronger executive relationships, they’re 42% more likely to have to have that alignment that is prioritizing them. It’s 50% more likely to be viewed as a CEO we are, you know, instead of versus the simple processor, sort of connotation, and they’re 26% More confident their ability to enabled strategic direction while delivering 3x. The value in strategic impact Norrell back to their businesses. So it’s there, right? It’s championing payroll has material business outcomes and payroll outcomes. And those are incredibly important. So I’m hoping that we’ll, we’ll see this as an opportunity to get that three, much higher up in the, in the the fours and fives for for executive engagement. Yeah.
Julie Fernandez 25:17
And I’ll be excited also to see, you know, how can we use some of these findings to figure out, you know, a quantitative impact to business case, for example, because that’s always one of the sticking points and trying to, you know, in trying to get approval or trying to get buy in for some sort of a bigger transformation. And so it feels like we have the, you know, you’ve found the beginnings of, of, of something that might be quite useful.
Pete Tiliakos 25:44
I hope so. And I want to dig down into some of these two, we’re going to we’re going to shape this for next year, in the next year, right, we’re going to continue to figure out what we need to, to dig into, and maybe there’s some pulse surveys you and I can work on on some of this. We can crack this up. I think this would be a good one for us. With your transformation slam, we got to work together on this one. Yeah, yeah, get this number up. Okay. Let’s do one more here and talk about what is it? What What, what are the best ways that leaders can invest, if you will, in prioritizing payroll and how they can they can champion payroll best for success, and look far and away, it’s bringing them proactively to the table, we call it a seat at the table. It’s really just engaging them and getting them involved in strategic initiatives much, much faster, investing and engaging them to prioritize it within your culture, and making sure that they have adequate investment to actually do what they need to do so. Yeah, not a lot of I mean, not surprising here. I don’t know what I was expecting on this one. But I think the things that I expected, the bubble UPS bubble bubbled up well, and I was happy to see that budget didn’t just hit the top because I think there’s so much more to it than just money. That
Julie Fernandez 26:49
was one of my first observations to as well as you know, in the bottom right, you have investments in the payroll operating model modernization, and the top left, like those middle couple are the few are the areas where we actually see the most client work happening, right. So, so actually, you know, hands on, there’s some very tangible things that you can do between the operating model and the integration strategies and kind of figuring out how all the techniques fits together, that that, that that really can start to bring some of this to life. And that’s where I see a lot of clients focusing isn’t in that spot. Yeah, it’s very, it’s very tangible.
Pete Tiliakos 27:28
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s good stuff. And looking at, I think what we’re hearing is payroll, say, give us an opportunity, give us a voice invest in us give us the ability to actually perform our jobs at without one leg and about in the bag, right. I mean, let us run with both legs and let us sprint and show your skill and show your athleticism. And that’s what they want, right? They just want some engagement, they want some respect, and they want some inclusivity. And I think everyone’s asking for that. I don’t know why payroll isn’t part of the priority in that. But that’s it. Right? And I think that I think you can actually, it, you don’t just have to spend money, you can actually just care. Just prioritize them. You certainly do have to keep them modern, you do certainly do have to invest in payroll, just as you do, you know, anywhere, anything else in the business. But I think it’s a lot of it can be empathy, and just understanding them and being able to try to help move obstacles for them to be the best they can be.
Julie Fernandez 28:21
Yeah, so point. Cool.
Pete Tiliakos 28:23
Okay, so I want to let me just give you a couple of little show points here on the appendix. So you can see and they will bounce back to that executive summary, I want to show you what that looks like. So basically, like I said, you’re going to have your maturity scale in here, your demographics, and of course, the breakdowns by type of business. So maturity scale is right here. We shared this when we gave the survey so people had something to look at and benched themselves off of. And again, this is very tech focused, it’s not all that you would need to be a mature operating model, you would definitely need to think about your processes, you’d have to think about your, you know, your staffing, your governance model, there’s so many, many things I know you truly help people with. So this is really just a kind of a baseline to say how, technically infrastructure sound are you? consolidation?
Julie Fernandez 29:07
Right? Yeah. And you’re being harmonized? Yeah, yeah. organized and centralized. Yeah. And
Pete Tiliakos 29:13
then of course, we had the demographics, which we’ve we’ve already kind of shown you. But I’m going to show you this here for what we did for single country versus multi country, you can see some of the differences here. What we did was we basically looked at, like I said, all the high end, four, and five, the most confident folks versus those that are not, and gave you the percentages of those numbers. And so you’re seeing your single country left multi country, right and your overall kind of average down the middle, and where you see gold. In a lead number. That means it’s five points higher than the average. When you see red, it’s five points lower than the average, at least. So yes,
Julie Fernandez 29:48
you can see it’s one being centralization. Yeah. So in a single country model where that’s locations that are centralizing, you’d expect that to be a lot higher, and when it’s a multi country model. It’s not a slam dunk. I think that all of those are coming together under the same. Yeah,
Pete Tiliakos 30:02
I thought that it was interesting. That’s totally true. Totally true. And I think it’s interesting. You see here that the perception is higher for multicountry. practitioners and leaders. So that’s interesting. I mean, not a lot, but but still a good pop there. And then, of course, viability over on the multicountry. side, we got a lot of opportunity there to get to get folks mature. And not just that, but viable, viable. Yeah, exactly. So good. All right, let’s go in here, too. We also kind of broke down some of the top investments, most impactful tech, and then of course, ways to champion again, transformation. And change was maybe the only key thing different for the multicountry. Guys. And then, of course, we did the same thing here for small firms, large firms. And again, you can see, really the glaring piece here is probably that viability, I think you’ve got some, some better viability on your smaller firms, obviously, because they’re dealing with so much less complexity, and often less less chaos. So I think
Julie Fernandez 30:58
it’s also pretty interesting to see the Outlook, you know, larger firms is significantly higher. And I believe that some of that has to do with resourcing, and, you know, probably some of the movement towards technology that has been helpful already. And, you know, I think that’s got a that’s got to play into that. Oh,
Pete Tiliakos 31:18
yeah. And what compliance criticality and other things are much more intense in a bigger company, and much more sometimes public and ramification ramified. So, I would hope that our all of our companies are investing but but maybe what we’re seeing is a little bit more investment by the bigger bigger firms. Actually, not if you look at the transformation, down with a little less, but right, on average, I guess. So. Okay, here’s where we saw a few little differences, your smaller firms actually quite keen on digital payments, more so than others, for most impactful Digital Tech, I think that’s probably because on your smaller firms, you probably might have some of the franchises some of the more frontline type, you know, businesses that may be dependent on keeping people and, you know, earn wage access might be the way they do that. So, yeah, and then of course, integration with HR and broader HCM strategy. That is not surprising to me, I’ve been hearing a lot of my smaller business firms I talked to my wife is a small business practitioner, HR practitioner, where the organization’s are needing to go from fundamentally being a process centric HR, it’s being more of a strategic centric HR, and getting away from just doing payroll time and benefits and getting to more talent science, and, you know, making sure that they are using analytics and data to help them make better informed decisions and talent, you know, more talent and cultural focus. So I think that’s a, that’s a growing, growing issue with a lot of folks out there. Younger younger firms. So okay. And then of course, I give a little thank you here. But let’s go back to the exec summary. And we will pop up, just want to show you what that looks like. First of all, we gave you what I would call the report on a slide. So this is really this report. In one page that you can kind of look at, it’s a nice infographic, we’re going to be sharing. And we’ll be making some more of these as well. And you’re welcome to share it as well, if anyone out there wants to pass it around. If you come here to the iceberg, this will we already saw this, but this will give executives an idea of kind of what what payroll is doing. And then of course, we just sort of summarized and brought up a number of the points across the key points across the report here for you to have a quick, quick four slide read, probably take you 1510 minutes. And you could digest all this pretty quick. So So Pete,
Julie Fernandez 33:32
you think is the most interesting speaking point about the executive summary here is the experience that we had when we were at the executive summit here or a couple of weeks ago. And here we had a forum with 60. Up, I don’t know exactly how many, we had a good number of executives 50 plus 50. Plus, yeah, and so we started the day, you know, really trying to interact with senior leaders around these things. And very quickly, while we pulled a few excerpts from the report, very quickly, the conversation really got very robust around change, change management, and the idea of bringing change to the organization, you know, in payroll, and the payroll touching impacts to that, and, and some of the war stories or the, you know, perpetual mysteries of of doing that. To me, it was just very encouraging to see that senior leaders are engaged and, you know, easily and quickly in thinking about, you know, the challenges that it will involve to, you know, to boost the game. Right. Yeah. To and to engage and to really, you know, make a run at some tangible things in this space. Yeah. And I don’t know, you know, there’s nothing about the data that would have that would have expected us to go there. But, but but leadership is engaged and they are interested in that I thought was, you know, that since this is all about sentiment, to me, that was the greatest enforcement If your work was to see that happen,
Pete Tiliakos 35:01
yeah, yeah. Cool. I appreciate I appreciate it. Yeah, look, I mean, that’s all this is about is just awareness, just bringing people a message to say it’s to help change the narrative for payroll. And I hope that’s, I hope that’s what we’ve done. You know, we had a good turnout, but we got to do a bit, we’re going to do better next time, I’m hoping to keep this thing alive, I really am working to put this online forever, so that people can come and use it. And I hope maybe I can get to a point where I can help you benchmark with it. And if anyone wants to use it with their customers, or they want to use it, what’s your welcome, just download it, I’ll put the links in the in the description. Reach out, if you have questions, you want me to come talk to you about it, I’m happy to do that. And, yeah, just want to get it out there and get more people to be aware of what’s going on. So
Julie Fernandez 35:41
listen, on behalf of everyone, I know you’ve heard this as well, through individual feedback, but thank you, this was a passion project of yours. And, and it’s the first of its kind I know, you know, focusing on sentiment and in a functional area that is so important to all of us and really critical to companies and, and feels like it needs pat on the back end. And also, you know, a little a little cheerleading, you know, a little cheerleading to let folks know that we know the criticality right? of payroll in the organization. So, yeah, thank you for that. Now we actually see, you know, there’s actually something tangible to look at around. Yes. I
Pete Tiliakos 36:20
love it. I love it. Yeah, look, thank you. And let’s think payroll, right? I mean, we couldn’t have done this without payroll, we couldn’t have done it without the associations that helped. Everyone that got involved. Thank you so much. It’s, I’m here to say I’m a servant leader. I’m just here to I’m here to just be a voice. That’s all. So that’s
Julie Fernandez 36:35
Pete saying we love you guys. And I love you.
Pete Tiliakos 36:37
I love you. All right. Well, look. Hey, thank you so much for doing this. Julie. Thank you for all your help as well. Thanks for everyone that listened, go check out the report, share it like it. And let’s do better on the next one. Let’s get more let’s get 1400 1000 whatever it is whatever we got to do to beat the 700. Let’s raise those numbers. Let’s get more people involved and raise the raise awareness for payroll