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National Payroll Week 2023, which takes place from the 4th to the 8th of September, is a week dedicated to highlighting and promoting the work that payroll professionals do for companies. It also highlights the impact on the economy that the work of payroll professionals has.
There are many ways that you could celebrate national payroll week with your employees and the right ones for your company will depend on the needs of your company. Some ideas include hosting a lunch or breakfast, giving small gifts, sending out a grateful email or newsletter, arranging training opportunities and reinvesting in your payroll process.
Five ways to celebrate with your team
There are many ways you can celebrate National Payroll Week 2023 with your company and the right ones will depend on your company and its employees. However, hosting a lunch or breakfast, giving back with payroll training, sending out a grateful newsletter or email and re-investing in your payroll processes are a few of the top ways to celebrate.
1. Host a lunch or breakfast
There will be at least a handful of your employees that you will want to celebrate on national payroll week and trying to do this individually could get difficult. When it comes to getting things done, the team will have worked together so it makes sense to bring them together to celebrate.
Hosting a lunch or breakfast as part of your National Payroll Week 2023 celebrations gives your payroll team the chance to come together in a more casual setting, celebrate their successes, hear from you how appreciated their hard work is and enjoy some delicious food!
Celebrating success is a big part of creating a well-working team that are productive and satisfied with their role and working for your company. Read more in our blog about building team spirit.
2. Give out small gifts
Another way you can celebrate your payroll employees is by giving out small gifts to individuals to say thank you for their hard work.
This should be easily distributable like a small plant for their desk or a mug.
Another consideration to make is whether you have members of the team that work remotely or on a hybrid schedule. Think about how you would get these gifts to those employees too. One option is of course mailing it, but if possible, you could also take a visit to meet the individual in person and hand them the gift, this adds more of a personal touch to the gift and gives you the chance to verbally thank them for their work too.
3. Send out a grateful email or newsletter
Whilst you as the employer will be grateful for the work of your payroll team and want to thank them, there might also be other members of the organisation that would like to take the opportunity to thank the payroll team too.
One thing to keep in mind when looking at celebrating your employees during National Payroll Week 2023 is how you can encourage other employees to share their gratitude too. When it comes to building good working relationships amongst colleagues, appreciating each other’s hard work is vital and sending gratitude to our colleagues can help with this.
Sending out an email or newsletter to the whole team that either includes a section dedicated to thanking your payroll team or is completely dedicated to that will allow other employees to be involved in the celebrations.
This kind of communication is easily sharable too and could potentially trigger them to send their own message of gratitude off the back of receiving your email. Showing the payroll team that their work is not only appreciated by you as their employer but also other colleagues.
The work of the payroll team directly benefits other employees by ensuring that they get their pay when and how they expect to. Other teams may not appreciate how much time and effort goes into this so you could highlight within the email or newsletter some of the responsibilities that the payroll team have.
4. Give back with training
Whilst it’s nice to appreciate the work that your payroll team do together, it’s also important to remember that the team is full of employees that have their own individual goals and reasons for doing the work they do.
One of the goals is likely to be career progression, whether that’s in the role that they’re in currently or in a new role. When you’re looking at ways to thank your employees during National Payroll Week 2023, you could look at how you can cater to employees on all different journeys of their career progression.
This may be an employee that is new to the team and therefore needs some support and training on the fundamentals of working in payroll or someone who has worked in the same role for a while and is looking for some sort of progression, either a promotion or new role entirely.
Providing your employees with a wide range of training opportunities will help ensure that they can find something that is suitable for where they are in their career and where they want to go.
Read our blog ‘7 ways that training improves employee engagement’ for more information on the importance of giving your employees regular and relevant training opportunities.
5. Re-invest in your payroll processes
The work that a payroll team does is vital to the operations of the business which is one of the things that National Payroll Week sets out to highlight.
Whilst your payroll team will be trained and highly skilled in their role and have a tight process down to ensuring that all the required work is done, there may still be ways in which the work they do can be made more efficient or easier for them.
Looking at re-investing in your payroll processes and seeing where you can tighten things up or change processes to make them easier for those involved will help to make the work of your payroll team easier, whilst also meaning that work gets done more efficiently. Being able to do their regular work more efficiently and easily will surely help to keep employees satisfied and engaged with their work.
Involving your team in this process is important too. Find out what their pain points are, and where they think the most effort needs to be placed. This will help ensure that the changes made will benefit the team and avoid the risk of getting rid of a process that is working.
Why it’s important to celebrate
The work that your payroll team does is vital to the operations of your company, and also helps to make sure that these processes are done securely to help you avoid any potential security issues. All of which helps to make sure things can keep running smoothly.
Due to the nature of the work, their role also helps to ensure that your employees getting paid is as easy a process as possible for them. This helps to keep employees satisfied and motivated to keep engaged with their work.
Whilst the ways you celebrate your own employees should be personal to your company, there are some other ways that you can get involved with the activities surrounding National Payroll Week 2023.
- Make sure to plan ahead: Depending on how much activity that you decide to do for National Payroll Week 2023, some level of planning will be involved. This might include things like booking venues, buying gifts, or even sorting out the opportunity for your payroll team to attend other National Payroll Week events. To make sure things go smoothly, start planning these activities as soon as you can so they go ahead as planned and can be enjoyed by the payroll team.
- Get involved with local events: When it comes to celebrating National Payroll Week, you don’t have to organise everything yourself. As this is a nationwide event, there will likely be local events that your payroll team can get involved in too. Do some research and highlight ones that you think it could be possible to send your team to and then let them decide which to attend. This could be a fantastic opportunity for the team to network with other payroll professionals, learn more about any exciting updates in the industry and potentially learn more about any products that could help make their work easier.
- Use social media to celebrate whatever you do: Most of the events that happen during National Payroll Week are likely to happen internally, but there are things you can do to that helps spread the gratitude for your payroll team to people outside of your business. Posting about National Payroll Week on your company’s social media accounts will help to spread the gratitude further. It will also give you the opportunity to dedicate posts to highlighting the work that a payroll team does, which fits in line with the aim of the week being to highlight and celebrate the work of payroll teams.
Get involved in National Payroll Week 2023
National Payroll Week 2023 is set to be the biggest one yet, with lots of activities going on up and down the country to celebrate the work that payroll professionals do. One big event that is running is the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals event, Access People are Gold Sponsors of the event. We’ll have members of our team at the reception after the event in the Sky Garden, for you to speak to about our payroll software and how it can support your team.
Another great event we have coming soon is a webinar with the CIPP on 7th of September at 10am ‘The Modern Payroll Revolution: Unlocking Efficiencies through Automation’ which will explore:
- How automating payroll helps save time and reduce risk
- Balancing affordability with functionality: How self-service and mobile functionality presents opportunities for smaller businesses or those with limited in-house payroll expertise to manage their payroll more easily and cost effectively, and with remote teams
- The importance of localised payroll support from a provider - 35% of UK businesses cite poor customer support as a reason to switch payroll providers
- How automated compliance features can help handle increasingly complex regulations such as IR35 reforms, auto enrolment and other HRMC changes - such as Making Tax Digital
- Why payroll integration with other HR functions is mutually beneficial
Visit the CIPP webinar page to find out more about the upcoming webinar and to sign up.
