Most business owners understand that their most important assets – their employees – are uninspired by traditional compensation models.  Hours worked x hourly pay fails to take into account that discretionary effort of employees can have a game-changing impact on the outcome for businesses.  Revenue generated x commission rate adds a level of incentive but begs other questions about how credit for revenue segments are allocated, tracked and reported.

Practically every business owner would say they’d be happy to pay for success.  But every incentive, even the smallest alteration of the standard variables, adds a layer of difficulty on how to determine payroll.  The complexity of calculations, the manual labor of information collection, manipulation and formatting and the challenge of simply describing that sausage-making process, raises the chances of making the final gross payroll number unintelligible to the employees you’re trying to motivate.

How work turns into payroll – There are four steps to get from work done to payday.

Compensation Model – Even if it’s a simple two-variable formula like hours worked x pay rate, that’s the compensation model. Things that create value for businesses, like items sold or speed of delivery or attendance, often get factored into the compensation model with good intention, but the business may not know if their pay for performance model drives performance.  For sure, it drives up the level of difficulty and cost of “doing payroll.”

Payroll Calculation.  – When the payroll period ends, that starts the “doing payroll” process.  Data has to be manually downloaded from multiple sources such as POS systems, usually presented as heavily formatted and requiring conversion and multi-step manipulation into a usable form and then correlated with data from other incompatible systems such as time clocks and scheduling software.  Like the mythic character Sisyphus, condemned for eternity to push the rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again, every two weeks or twice a month or once a week, the doing of the payroll starts, finishes and then the manual labor starts all over again.

Information Transfer – The third step in the process is the migration of the calculated gross payroll data to a payroll processor or payroll software which calculates taxes and benefits.  This is almost always an entirely manual process.  Data transfer is not as complicated as calculating payroll.  Breaking rocks isn’t complicated either but who wants to sit at a computer screen, for hours at a time, doing manual data entry.

Payroll Processing – This fourth step is almost always an outsourced service.  Tax laws and benefits laws are changing rapidly and becoming more and more complex.  Outsourcing the fourth step in the process makes life easier for businesses and adds a lot of value, especially in benefits management, but it is only one of four steps and handing it off to someone else doesn’t address the three things every business has to do before it gets to this last step.

The fourth of the above four steps is a $30+ billion-dollar tech-intensive industry.

The first three steps, performed by businesses just to get ready to transmit gross wage for processing, have been largely untouched by technology, until now.

Let’s get started

The PEER4MANCE process starts by understanding the compensation model that your business already has in place.  Once we understand it, we’ll check in to make sure you’re happy with it.  If Yes, we’ll reduce the different ways everyone in your organization gets paid down to a set of algorithms that can be expressed as software code.  We identify the sources of all the variables in the equations and determine how far we can go in automating the data intake.

We’ll ask questions about your satisfaction with your current model.  Without disclosing any confidential information, we’ll consult with you about what we’re observing as highly effective practices by businesses in your peer group.  You may decide to adopt some of those practices.  At the end of the process, your payroll will be readable online as a daily and pay period report in a mobile and desktop format for you and your employees.

The game-changing piece of the equation is the way we present the data to each employee as an easy to read correlation of payroll data compared to data you want to share with them about business results.  They will also be able to answer the question, “How am I doing compared to my peers?”  You’ll decide if that is a person by person league table or a percentile ranking.  The owner and manager roles can be assigned more visibility as well as visibility to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).