What is Single Touch Payroll (STP)?

Awards & Rostering    |   

Want to retain frontline employees? Pay them properly

Eat out at a trendy restaurant or stroll into a store for some window shopping and the first person you encounter can set the tone of your interactions with the business as a whole. The demanding job of pleasing paying customers falls squarely onto the shoulders of frontline workers. They’re the first touchpoint someone has with a business and could be their last. You can be a loyal customer to your favourite brand for years and never interact with someone who works behind the scenes, at a desk in the head office.  Numbers support the value of a well-trained frontline workforce providing high-quality customer service. According to a HubSpot research, people no longer trust businesses as they used to, preferring the opinion of family and friends. But who influences that opinion? Around 90% of the research participants consider an immediate response from customer service support very important, while 72% expect a response within 30 minutes. And they aren’t afraid to spread the word about their experiences, good or bad.  So to keep doing good business, you need to retain your best-performing frontline employees. How do you make them stay?  Give frontline workers their due Sometimes struggles with employee retention can be traced back to the basics. Are you paying them the right way, with the right wage, at the right time? Wage compliance is a big deal for frontline staff, most of whom are casual workers.  When managers are too busy chasing down employees to wrangle data on clock-ins, overtime, and leave balances, and payroll managers are unavailable for hours every pay period, they lose precious time that could have gone to improving employee engagement (understood to be a key factor in retention).  A few employee engagement strategies managers could be missing out on implementing: Instituting more transparency Creating programs for appreciation and recognition Professional development training and career planning Regular communication and candid feedback The Australian award system can be a roadblock to this, however. It has been steadily undergoing review since 2014, and businesses can expect many policies to change this year. While the review’s main aim is to simplify the language used in regulations to make them easier to understand, there’s also the possibility of slight changes in rates. These award changes are yet another factor businesses need to adapt to—and combining that with an already-complex system means without the right workforce management tools, administrators may make mistakes.  Streamline pay processing with an online payroll calculator  When manual payroll errors hold you back from improving frontline engagement, it’s time to find automated tools to do it for you.   Save time by avoiding the need to encode each clock-in, set up spreadsheets, and manually calculate staff wages. Using an online payroll calculator makes it easy. Just input your employees’ start and end times, their hourly rate, and any breaks they’ve taken and the online payroll calculator will automatically present their final wages to you.  You can add as many employees as you want and print the completed calculations when you’re done. With an automated tool, not only do you reduce time manually calculating, you can also be more assured that what you’re paying staff is accurate. Timesheets shouldn’t take days on end for any company, and software is taking care of these tasks to give back time to many HR and payroll officers. Is an online calculator not enough for your more complicated wage calculations? Then it might be time to invest in a workforce platform with more features.    For more extensive payroll automation, Tanda’s Award Interpretation Engine automates rostering and payroll for any business, taking into account overtime, allowance, and higher duties. It also automatically updates for any new Fair Work regulations. Try Tanda for free, for 14 days, no credit card required.