0:10
Hello, I’m Chris Howard from LACE Partners and I am talking to you today about our LACE executive and payroll networks and that’s why I’ve got the two Simons from our payroll team in.

0:21
It’s Simon Bunday.

0:22
You’re all right, I’m good.

0:23
Yeah.

0:23
And Simon Puryer, how you doing?

0:25
Good.

0:25
Thank you, Chris.

0:25
So gents, so just going to talk for a couple of minutes about the LACE payroll community and Executive Payroll network.

0:33
I think really what we’d probably want to do just to kick it off, maybe I’ll start with you, Simon, is let’s talk a little bit about what it is and why we’ve decided to set it up.

0:41
So I think we largely we’ve set it up because a lot of clients were talking to us about the fact that they wanted a sort of safe space to kind of get together pure payroll people, not where they were going to have, you know, suppliers or anything like that.

0:55
And they could kind of talk openly about some of the challenges they’re facing.

0:59
Because I think often when you’re faced with some of these problems that our clients are often, you know, working through, you tend to think you’re the only one kind of going through that.

1:09
And then actually when he starts to talk to other people, you realise other people are experiencing just the same thing.

1:14
And that’s kind of quite reassuring.

1:16
So we were keen to sort of set up this community as a as a sort of safe space to somewhere where people could come together, as I say, sort of, you know, tackle different ideas, talk about different challenges they’re facing in a very sort of safe, non-threatening environment.

1:29
So that was the kind of real context behind it.

1:32
Yeah.

1:32
We’ve had a payroll community network of sorts for a while, but I think we’re just trying to formalise it.

1:39
Is that the right word?

1:40
Yeah, no.

1:40
And again, I guess, yeah, just kind of get a bit more of a drum beat to it really.

1:44
So that we, you know, we’ve kind of set up the WhatsApp group.

1:48
We have kind of, you know, regular get togethers.

1:50
Then we have more formal kind of dinners.

1:52
It’s just a way of people knowing that I suppose we’re always there as opposed to perhaps being a little bit more sporadic.

1:58
Yeah.

1:59
And I guess that was going to be you’ve sort of stolen my question.

2:02
Simon.

2:03
Just talk a little bit about the types of things that we’ll be doing.

2:06
Perhaps also talk about what we’ve already done so far this year and what we’re going to be looking to do to support people moving forward.

2:11
Yeah.

2:12
So as I said, as Simon said, we have the WhatsApp group, which is continuous in terms of people.

2:16
So it’s not necessary us putting content in there and promoting content is more a safe space for people to sort of collaborate and ask questions and amongst themselves to get those answers.

2:25
What we try to do is bring those people together and create a forum for that.

2:29
So outside the WhatsApp group, we’ve done dinners where we’ve hosted a dinner and we would bring a number of subjects and topics to the table to discuss.

2:37
And on the back of white papers that we’ve launched, we’ll perhaps look and talk about that, or maybe we would look at getting some insights from the group to put into our white papers.

2:46
So it’s a mixture of things.

2:46
So it’s, it’s that we’ve also done sort of virtual events where we kind of have sort of touch points and allow people to come together with us.

2:53
And then separately, we, we do a number of sort of events where we collaborate with our HRSS community as well, bringing together sort of HR and payroll, all those people with the touch points of payroll to talk about various things and have round table discussions and panel discussions to sort of promote the things that are happening in the payroll world.

3:09
Yeah, and it’s quite interesting, the shared services stuff because there are quite a lot of similarities there.

3:13
I’ll start to stick with you, Simon, because I want to talk about the types of things that you have been talking about with clients just to maybe whet the appetite.

3:20
And then, Simon, if you can build on just any topics or themes or something we’ve got in the pipeline.

3:25
Yeah, well, AI is the big thing now.

3:27
Everyone’s talking about AI and how AI can help with payroll.

3:30
Now, I don’t think AI will ever take over in terms of what the payroll function does.

3:33
I think it will be a tool to assist payroll.

3:35
So what we’re finding is that there are things that accelerate the sort of day-to-day sort of jobs that AI is bringing to the table.

3:42
So things like validate and check in and exception reporting, analytics are getting much faster in, in terms of helping those people sort of run the payroll.

3:51
So AI is a big topic of conversation.

3:53
We’re also seeing a lot of integrations.

3:55
So at the moment, people are still relying on sort of data being transferred from their HCM system into payroll very much manual.

4:03
But we’re seeing a lot of progress in terms of trying to integrate that and make that as seamless as possible because a lot of the inefficiencies that we’re seeing in the payroll community or the payroll processing space is, is around that sort of manual work of bringing data from one system to another.

4:15
Lovely.

4:16
Simon, is there any other bits that you’ve kind of heard people talking about in previous communities or bits that you want to see and you’d think clients are particularly interested in with all pay payroll teams are particularly interested in?

4:26
Yeah, I mean, for me, I think the kind of common theme that always comes out is people sort of saying I’ve got a problem, but I don’t actually know what the problem is.

4:35
So it’s kind of getting to that, you know, what’s the root cause of driving this?

4:38
Is it, you know, is it my system?

4:40
Is it my processes?

4:41
Is it my people?

4:42
And actually we find that the community is a great way of trying to kind of explore and perhaps expose almost what some of those challenges are.

4:51
So, you know, systems is always something that comes out around, you know, whether it be the provider or the solution they’ve chosen or the way they’ve set it up.

5:01
But process I think is the other thing because actually, you know, people think of payroll as almost just this one element, but it’s so reliant on, you know, data coming in and data going out that actually thinking of that broader end to end process is so important.

5:16
So actually the process is always a challenge and to Simon’s point of kind of thinking about, you know, as technology moves forward, it’s about thinking about the kind of manual element as well as the automated element.

5:26
So I think that’s always those kind of themes are what we’re seeing, you know, very commonly.

5:31
And I think they’re really good examples of where people think they’re the only people experiencing them, but actually when they start to kind of discuss it as a community, they realise that everyone’s kind of experiencing the same sort of things.

5:42
OK, so I want to talk a little bit around our LACE executive payroll network, which is something that we’ve set up.

5:49
Just want to get your views or tell us a little bit about why we’ve set up the executive payroll network and some of the bits that it includes as well.

5:57
Yeah.

5:58
So what’s different about the executive network that we’re setting up here is that that we recognise that there’s a new sort of role that’s existed within payroll sort of within the last sort of five, maybe 10 years where we used to sort of have payroll managers.

6:09
We’ve now got a very much more strategic role that exists, which is like a director of, head of, global head of type role, which is, which is much more, as I say, strategic more than less so than the transactional.

6:20
So whereas our community network is a mixture of people in, what we’re looking for within the executive network is those sort of global heads of those, those sort of director sort of level people.

6:32
Because we recognise it’s a lonely place, right?

6:34
There’s no one else that knows what you do in the businesses.

6:37
And you probably report to somebody within HR or finance who doesn’t necessarily understand the day-to-day sort of challenges that you have within payroll.

6:44
So this is a this is a forum to bring peers together in a trusted and build a trusted relationship to sort of extend upon what we did with the community with that sort of more executive senior level sort of role.

6:56
OK, Simon, just to wrap that up, any kind of thoughts around the differences?

7:00
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if you’re operating in that kind of global head director of sort of payroll, you’re probably faced with, you know, you’re managing potentially multiple countries, multiple people, a combination of maybe some in house payrolls, outsourced payrolls.

7:17
So you’re kind of day-to-day challenges will be quite varied, but also quite significant.

7:21
And I think if by allowing us to set up this pure network of exec type payroll people, you’re going to be all facing the same challenges.

7:31
And therefore, it provides that opportunity for those people to talk about those very specific elements they’re facing, whereas the kind of broader community can discuss a much broader range of challenges.

7:43
This will be a bit more focused, but it will also again, still be that very safe environment, an environment where you can kind of peer-to-peer talk about those challenges you’re facing.

7:52
So I think it’s a really great opportunity to kind of get that senior level of network together.

7:56
And it’s something that we’re, we’re continually being asked for, which is what’s led us to set up this specific network.

8:02
OK, brilliant.

8:03
So if you want to find out more about the executive payroll network, there’s a form on this page.

8:08
You can just fill that one in and then you’ll get through to a member of the team, one of the Simons, or another one of the payroll team.

8:14
But yeah, let us know and we’d love to hear from you.