What happens when your payroll tech doesn't work? At scale? Dan Richardson investigates.
Plus, Apple drops its mask mandate. And more news besides...
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Listen above or read an excerpt from the transcript beneath, which has been edited for clarity. We join the conversation as the two co-hosts discuss Apple’s latest moves when it comes to masking up…
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Jon Kennard: I think Apple has the advantage of many of its staff being able to work remotely and hybrid. So the mask mandate either way isn’t going to make that much of a difference. But it is good in terms of what we perceive the direction of COVID going it’s like you say it’s following other large companies in the space.
Interestingly, a friend of mine who works in TV and film as a grip has been working on shows for Netflix and stuff like that. And he’s saying it’s all still totally masks on, and very rigorous. And you think, Well, it depends what’s at stake, doesn’t it, you don’t want a production at incredible cost to be shut down. So you want to do everything you can to provide the regulations and the safety. So the filming can continue. Whereas with a company where you don’t necessarily need so many people in close contact, it’s a lot easier to kind of lift these mandates, I think.
Dan Richardson: Yeah, and I think the real debate is, this was really the latter half of the article, is [that] they originally wanted everyone back in the office, ASAP. And that’s not worked out and people have pushed back. And I think that’s where it’s really insightful. As we’re all thinking the masks might be a big deal if you didn’t have a huge amount of employees who are like ‘actually, I can just work from home anyway’.
JK: Yeah, I think despite protestations from a lot of companies, I think we know that it’s going one way and I would say, the right way, personally. Moving on to the next story, you published a really good piece about payroll problems, and what you can do about them, essentially, this is off the back of a few high profile, FUBARs, or cock ups or however you want to put it, from large companies. What’s been happening here Dan?
DR: Yeah, it’s been surprising and interesting. So, you have a lot of frontline workers, that was the first story that kicked off this saga of payroll issues, and with them, they underpaid some stuff by up to 500 pounds. Obviously, if you’re on minimum wage, or close to minimum wage, that’s a significant amount of money and a lot of staff has said, oh, I have to go to food banks now. Because my benefits that I was also claiming on top of my part time work, have been messed up and they’re out of whack.
So yeah, that was a real high profile issue that affects 1000s of employees. Next have now had a similar thing, not quite the same amount, but about 250 pounds has been missing from certain employees paychecks and EY, a completely different not-front-facing company, actually paid all their staff and then withdrew the money that they paid them a week later because of an accounting error and 55,000 people were like, where have my wages gone? Which, as you can imagine, if you have a bill waiting…I don’t think anyone would believe you if you said I got paid, but then it just disappeared. They’d think, oh you’ve gone to the pub or had an absolutely outrageous weekend.
So yeah, it all seems to be kicking off. Interestingly, though, it’s all different issues. So all of these payroll issues, there’s no commonality, where it’s like, oh, this payroll provider is causing a huge mess up – it’s incidents within each organization. And that’s why we wanted to speak to some professionals really, and see how everyone can shore up their payroll, if it’s such a common problem. I don’t want to give too much away but I think what I found interesting is there’s a lot of talk about real-time everything. So real time analytics, and having a problem with the system and something acting in a non-compliant way. Then the other side is real-time cash payments. So oh, there’s been a mistake, but we can rectify it quickly. So you got two approaches there, the proactive and the pragmatic.
But as long as you get the meaning, I think the tidbit I would give for the podcast, that we didn’t really touch on in the article is actually visualizing your real-time data and your real-time situation. So it’s not saying I have all this data and look everything’s going wrong. It’s being able to clearly see who’s been affected, what’s the scale, and then you can essentially message and communicate properly….
