At Journyx, we speak to many professionals who deal with payroll on a day-to-day basis.  Our customers have an easy time submitting data to payroll, but other companies that don’t have a solution like Journyx can have a harder time.  Payroll can be a huge headache, especially for a CEO of a start-up.  Take, for example, the CEO of Tasting Table:

Being without a bookkeeper, Geoff Bartakovics needed to process payroll ASAP.  I find it interesting that Bartakovics felt such pressure to get payroll done on time because of his employees.  He believed that distributing his team’s paychecks late would make his employees doubt his new company.  The faith that his employees had in the business wasn’t something Bartakovics would sacrifice.

When I hear this story, I wonder if I take my on-time paycheck for granted sometimes.  As a young worker, I sometimes read horror stories on Facebook of friends who aren’t paid on time.  I can’t imagine the stress they’re going through with a late paycheck; how is that affecting their ability to support themselves?  I can remember a former job where I experienced something worse than a late paycheck—a bounced paycheck.  My trust for my employer was shaken during that time, and rightly so.  It was a clear sign that something was seriously wrong with the company and shortly after I left, the company folded.

In this stressful economic time, are you making sure that your employees are paid on time?  Is payroll a total nightmare for your company or a breeze?

It may seem a little counterintuitive, but tracking time can actually be used to strengthen employee morale at the office. When viewed through an automated system wherein employees track time to tasks, it can readily become apparent where employees are spending the majority of their time, but more importantly, it can also demonstrate where they are spending their time most efficiently. These two metrics can be referenced together to gain insight into what employees are assigned to do, and what they actually enjoy doing.

Let’s break this down a little further with an example. Say John is in charge of managing his company’s website. Viewing the hours he has tracked over a set period of time, it is obvious that he spends the majority of his time cleaning up bad code, refreshing links, and performing mundane site maintenance.  However, as an occasional side assignment, John also works on building code for his company’s software. His timesheet indicates that he spends far less time on this.

However, the savvy manager looks at the time spent on both of these tasks and compares completion rates to find that while John spends much more time on maintaining the website, he actually completes a greater percentage of work in less time when working on the software. The manager checks the software and finds the work is good, thus negating the possibility that John was simply speeding through the task to get it done. On these grounds, the manager decides he has enough information to speak with John about a shift in responsibility since it appears that John is better at programming software, and thus might enjoy that work more.

This example might seem simplistic, yet you would be surprised just how often circumstances like these appear in an organization, and how often they goes unnoticed. Employees working on tasks that they view as mundane will become dissatisfied in their job roles very quickly, increasing employee turnover unnecessarily. With a little insight it is possible to increase employee morale without necessarily spending more money or offering incentives. Simply giving workers responsibilities at which they excel creates the groundwork for increased satisfaction and productivity long term.