Flexible working… and its payroll challenges
In January 2023, new research from HR expert MHR Global, revealed that a greater proportion of employees would prefer to work in the office with flexible hours (51%) than work from home with structured hours (41%).
Full time office workers across the UK were surveyed, who drew on their experiences working remotely during the coronavirus pandemic compared to their usual work practices. Many workers remembered negative aspects of working remotely, such as a decrease in support from management, a lack of conversation, and less productivity.
In addition, with one in ten employees saying that working from home had a negative impact on their career progression, it is clear from the research that UK businesses will see more success from offering a flexible working framework.
However, whilst flexible working puts employees in control of their own hours/work environment and therefore increases engagement (and in turn, the company’s bottom line), it does cause headaches for payroll staff.
The impacts range from none at all (for a simple working-from-home or compressed hours arrangement), to needing to carefully calculate holiday entitlement for part-time workers, to the more complicated detail for workers who work annualised hours for example.
In short, allowing employees to work different or fewer hours is going to change things for payroll.
It is expected that, as increasingly more employers listen to employees and move to offer flexible working, they will also choose to move to outsourcing their payroll in order to ensure that all workers are being paid correctly.
In-house payroll teams are simply becoming unable to process varied pay within the same time as they could process ‘the norm’ for their workers. This is where using the expertise of an outsourced payroll team becomes the more cost-effective option, especially when weighing up the cost of increased staff, training or software resource.
DT Payroll is our outsourcing service, serving businesses of all sizes across the UK. Here, the DT Payroll team offer some tips for offering flexible working – and processing the correct pay for it.
- Ensure that the finer details of a flexible working arrangement are clearly stated in an employment agreement (and shared with your in-house or outsourced payroll team).
- Make the process easy for you. For example, we offer a simple process for providing us with payroll information, but it is ALWAYS customised to your business, for maximise efficiency.
- If not outsourcing payroll, find a way to stay up-to-date with current payroll legislation, so that compliance is not a worry within your payroll process.
For more tips, trends, and information, please visit our dedicated payroll site www.dtpayroll.co.uk.