'Didn't believe it': Dayforce optimising people management

When Nicole O'Dowd Martins, Group Head of People and Pay at Retail Apparel Group (RAG), sat down with a Dayforce representative at a coffee shop, she had no intentions of becoming a customer.

She was looking for a polite way to excuse herself and get back to the office.

Instead, she was immediately impressed with what Dayforce could offer a company that badly needed to consolidate its payroll with time and attendance.

Manually adjusting timesheets and fixing pay discrepancies after a worker had absentmindedly forgot to clock in or out of a shift was becoming a significant drain on resources.

There was no functionality to nimbly make adjustments, causing angst for employees who had to wait for the next pay cycle, with the manual process becoming cumbersome and time-consuming.

With a transient workforce, mostly made up of younger workers, who were sometimes being sent their rosters via WhatsApp, the company required a solution that could handle its people management functions.

So when she heard what the Dayforce solution had to offer and how effectively it could optimise RAG's systems, she was sold.

"They didn't beat around the bush," Martins said.

"As soon as they said the words that time and attendance and payroll sat in the same system, I was so intrigued. I didn't believe it. 

"That was definitely the hook, because anyone who works in that payroll space, they know the pain points of that. Having everything within one system absolutely caught my attention."

Once the team were able to utilise this new solution, there was a big uptick in morale. The time taken to manually adjust rosters and timesheets was significantly reduced. Staff were empowered to take more meaning from the data and apply it to human applications.

Numbers in spreadsheets became the basis for optimising workflows as the team could draw significant conclusions, and identify weak spots. 

"It was very important for us, because we had no visibility of what our teams were being asked to work on or what they were actually working until the end of the week, when timesheets came through," Martins said.

"Even then, we had no time at all to review any of that information before we were in the next weekly cycle of pay.

"Being able to set up scheduling rules, timesheet rules to control a little bit of what the team were doing and make sure they were doing the right thing at all times was incredibly important to us.

"Being able to move data right through from time of attendance into payroll was so important, because any organisation that's got retail team, very young workers, they forget to clock in and out of shifts, being able to refresh data live in a pay run, to be making adjustments to prior week time sheets in the pay, then refreshing it and having all of that pull through instantaneously was such a powerful time saver for us."

As in many industries, AI and automation is experiencing significant growth within people management. The scale at which AI can digest and interpret data is unmatched by human capability, freeing up team members to focus on the people side, rather than the numbers.

Effective utilisation of AI will allow staff to make use of data and get insights into the human behaviour that's behind the data - where are strengths, where are weaknesses and what's the cause behind each. 

"I think now it's just a matter of really unlocking all that capability that we're built into the system. We have so much in Dayforce, and a lot of the challenge we face now on a daily basis is really directing them, or teaching them how to navigate their way to it.

"Having AI embedded in the system, I think that will absolutely unlock all of that potential and all of that capability that already sits within the system. 

"It will help our team to genuinely self-serve a lot more effectively. It's exciting for us, because that will be the next very significant jump for us in our Dayforce journey."

People management will soon experience significant regulatory change, with the introduction of payday super reforms. From July 1 (the first day of the new financial year), companies will be obligated to pay employees their legislated super entitlements at the same time as wages.

While employers were previously only required to pay super on a quarterly basis, although many employers would pay monthly, the new protocols are widely regarded as a win for employees, providing more scrutiny for companies that fail to meet their financial obligations to workers.

Some critics, however, have pointed to the lack of notice given to businesses as an issue. The changes are overall positive, but implementation could have been a smoother process, according to Mark Maybury, Group General Manager, People and Culture at Belgravia.

"My view has always been that super belongs to the earner," Maybury said.

"The opportunity for that to grow interest for employees in real time makes a lot of sense,  but I think the timeline for implementation has caught a lot of businesses off guard, and I think that that is not well received when you think about all the other regulatory complications with more of a runway given.

"We don't see an issue, we have only just started, we wanted to go early. We wanted to go much earlier. We've only just managed to sort of kick it off, and the things that keep us up at night around Payday Super are not getting the funds to the employees' accounts on time. 

"It's where employees might give us wrong information, or we're chasing up defunct funds or super funds have merged, and employees are required to give us new fund information. That can be difficult to coordinate."