/U/People

The outsourcing of your payroll is an alien concept to many. Walking into a world full of acronyms such as ‘Saas’, ‘BPO’ and ‘Cloud’ initially resorts in the apt reaction of ‘wtf!’ Once the linguistic acquisition of the technological jargon has mellowed, however, it becomes monumentally transparent why ‘Out’ really is the new ‘In’.

So what makes a healthy workplace? There is one key word. The most magical word in the world – COMMUNICATION.

Oxford dictionary defines Communication as: The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.

Even deeper defined as: The successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings.

Non-verbal communication, where words are not used, counts for 93% of all daily communication. This is all through facial expressions, posture, hand gestures, and tone. Many studies have been done on non-verbal communication, and it is something the workplace leaders have to really get a handle on. Study the body language of your staff, you’ll be amazed as to how much of their body language describes how they feel. Rolling of the eyes, clenched fists, slouched posture, even finger pulling, are all signs of an employee who is not happy.

A happy employee is the result of a healthy work environment. An unhappy employee is the result of an unhealthy work environment (or the fact that the employee is just an unhappy person – but in this case we’ll blame it on an unhappy work environment).

So here’s where I reveal the key factors of a healthy workplace:

• Communicate with your staff. Tell them what is going on in the business. What are the positive things that are happening within the business? What are the barriers or potential obstacles that may be faced in the business as well, and ask for their ideas on how to overcome these barriers. 
• Tell your employees why they are an important asset to the business. ‘Joe, your IT skills are needed in our company [key word is our – make the company theirs as well], if it weren’t for you our computers would be blowing up and it would be a disaster. Thank you for all your efforts – we all really appreciate it.’ Make it your goal to tell an employee daily why they are vital to the business. 
• Get staff engaged. Get the entire crew engaged. Have regular staff meetings – where each staff member or department gets to have a say. Keep them updated. Start some clubs within the business, yoga on Tuesdays, shared lunch on Fridays, staff drinks on Mondays (or every day). 
• Get to know your staff. Don’t treat staff like a number. Have a chat with them as they pass you in the corridor. Be open. Don’t cross your arms when you talk to them. Smile, invite them into your office, and ask for their opinions. How’s the kids? Did you watch Game of Thrones last night? Little things like that can really make an employee’s day. 
• Let them grow. Employees need to know that they can grow in your business. For star employees, recognise their achievements straight away, introduce some gamification into the workplace and get some healthy competition going. You’ll soon see the seedlings blossom, and the ones that do, offer services that will aid in further developing their skill set. 
• Have fun. No description needed. Get some ideas together on how to make the workplace fun and happy. As said before, a happy employee equals a healthy workplace.

The old approach to managing employment required each business to invent its own HR resources, employment practices and systems with the support of an expensive in-house HR team. In smaller businesses such employment materials and systems were often non-existent because the business did not have the time and expertise to create them or the money to pay for an in-house HR resources.

Modern cloud technology allows employment management materials, resources and systems to be scaled, centrally maintained and easily distributed nationally or internationally. Such economies of scale make everything a business needs to manage employment easily accessible and affordable, even for the smallest employers.

What the cloud has done for financial management with products like Xero and MYOB is now happening for employment management with new products like Employment Hero entering the market.

The Journey

Bare Essentials 
Small employers scrape together the bare essentials for managing employment. Basic employment contracts borrowed from friends, policies drafted in response to a crisis and paper based systems for managing performance reviews, timesheets, employment files and leave. Payroll is run in-house by combining a basic accounting system and spreadsheets. If lawyers are engaged to produce compliance materials they rapidly become obsolete as laws and circumstances change.

Big Solutions for Big Business
Larger businesses can afford in-house HR resources, systems and expertise. Starting with a single HR generalist they quickly grow into a multi million dollar team with payroll, safety, recruitment, training, industrial relations and legal expertise. Unfortunately these high value and high cost teams are dedicated to a single business.

Everything Your Business Needs in the Cloud
Cloud technology makes the product of full-service employment management team ubiquitous. Every small businesses can access and afford the resources, expertise and systems that were previously reserved for top 500 ASX listed companies. HR generalists can now move away from transactional tasks and start working on the higher value strategic projects they have not had the time to complete.

“Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things” Peter Drucker

Is your business ready to manage employment more efficiently?
Business owners and HR managers who do not embrace the cloud will be left behind.

The average hospitality and retail business can save 4-5% on wage costs by moving to a smart cloud based time and attendance system. A white collar business with 25 employees can save up to 90% of the cost of managing employment and payroll by moving to a cloud HR solution and outsourcing payroll processing.

Every entrepreneur can sleep more soundly by reducing their exposure to fines of up to $33,000 per breach for poor employment practices. 

The advantages of a cloud-based, modern approach to employment management
A single cloud based employment management program can provide your business with all these advantages and features:

✓ Stay compliant by getting access to employment contracts, employment policies and HR checklists that are kept up to date with Australia’s employment laws

✓ Relax with the knowledge that your Award or Enterprise Agreement is interpreted and updated by lawyers and automated in the payroll process

✓ Switch from paperwork to paperless with digital signatures on employment contracts, Tax File Declarations and superannuation nomination forms.

✓ Let new starters maintain their employee files with employee self service access to bank details, payslips, leave balances and timesheets

✓ Deliver all HR materials to employees electronically and receive confirmation that have read and acknowledged them

✓ Easily run a business wide performance management program with company, team and personal goals tracked online

✓ Increase profits and save time by using a smart rostering and time capture system

✓ Keep a central record of all safety incidents online

✓ Offer your employees access to an employee benefits program with discounts from leading retailers, gyms, banks and other services

✓ Automate your organisation chart as employees are added and removed from your organisation

✓ Outsource payroll administration and sleep easier knowing payroll experts manage it

✓ Get unlimited phone support from HR advisors

✓ Access HR consultants, employment lawyers, safety advisors and migration lawyers as and when you need them

✓ Get back to doing the things that matter most in your business

Still think managing employment the old way makes more sense? That’s like using paper based journals to manage your business finances.

If you’re ready to make the change, start the transition with Employment Hero.

The world that we live in is a constantly evolving beast, and within this beast we must continue to evolve; or simply be left behind. As was stated by Confucius, “Study the past if you would define the future”, and it is by studying the past that you can see the inevitable shift into outsourcing that is happening right before our eyes. Did people believe in banks when they first came into existence? Of course not. Was the internet widely embraced when it was created, less than half a century ago? No. And finally, was it ever believed possible that you could access both your bank and the internet via a phone no larger than the palm of your hand? That’s laughable! And yet, these three examples are now part of the day to day life of people the world over.

We live in a ‘right now’ culture. Paperwork is a hindrance to the necessity of immediacy that engulfs 21st Century living. Gone are the days where it could take weeks or months to converse through letters to loved ones overseas; nowadays you can communicate as if you were sat in the same room. The past is a place where a family meal was an occasion, a long spanning event that stretched throughout the afternoon; now it is instantaneous, sporadic and on the go. The one hundred mile an hour world of 2014 doesn’t want or need to be spending its precious time and money on the monotonous task of payroll. Don’t think of it as outsourcing, think of it as ‘smartsourcing’.

Like every technological advancement, companies emerge offering Outsourced Payroll at an exponential rate. The answer is not to run and hide from competition, it’s to embrace it. It is to learn from, and improve on, any ideas or teachings taught by the opposition. Sun Tzu in The Art of War summed up the importance of not only knowing, but utilising competition impeccably; “If you know the enemy [competition] and know yourself, you need not fear the result. If you know yourself but not the enemy [competition], for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” At Employment Innovations there is no underhanded ethos of a complete extermination of other outsourcing companies. There is an appreciation of the work that they do; in fact, a thirst for it. If we are able to grasp a new idea that is beneficial for the evolution of our own product and place our own unique spin on it; then that is exactly what we will do.

But what exactly is our product? How does it fit in to this new world boom of outsourcing products? The answer is simple; we don’t. We don’t ‘fit in’ because we are not a run of the mill outsourcing platform. Employment Hero is a fully immersive and integrated powerhouse. By fully outsourcing your payroll with Employment Hero you are promised a comprehensive, first class and all-inclusive end-to-end solution that can be shaped to your needs. Your business will be assigned a specific payroll account manager under the HR central, account management team & payroll consultant, ensuring that the person with whom you deal has a complete understanding of not only your payroll requirements, but also of your organisation’s culture. Superannuation Payment Service (SPS) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) transfer both Super and wages into your employee’s bank accounts, as well as individual emails being automatically sent out as confirmation of payment.

There is also no need to ever feel like you don’t have control over the whole process, with a plethora of reports available to you in an instant. The Standard Suite of Reports include:

• Reconciliation- Breakdown of wages and superannuation by department 
• Pay Journal- Breakdown of wages for Full-Time, Part-Time and Casual employees, allowances and PAYG 
• Payroll Costing- Hours and wages by department 
• Bank Transfer Reports – Breakdown by banking institution 
• Standard Pay Advices- via Employee Self Service (ESS) or hard copy
• Leave Liability Reports 
• Standard Pay Advices 
• Superannuation Contribution Reports 
• Additions and Deductions Reports 
• Custom Reports Defined as Standard End of Process

So, why spend excess time and money dealing with payroll when you could be concentrating on what you do best; running your business? The logical solution is right before your eyes. The logical solution is Employment Hero.

What is a healthy work place – and how do I get one? By healthy I don’t mean clean, green, and having an office full of chi (even though that is a contributing factor a healthy work environment) – I’m talking about a work environment where staff want to come to work, they want to work their hardest, and at the end of the day feel good about what they are doing. A work environment that they brag about, and one that they never want to leave!

Plenty has already been written about the risks of accidentally creating the stuff of highschool nightmares, but even if you dodge those bullets you’re in for a little discussed treat: full out mutiny of your team.

Granted, if you do consumer or pure-SMB products, you might avoid this fate. The easiest form of innovation is “scratching your own itch”, and so long as you represent your own idealized customer, more sophisticated innovation might not be needed. But if your product is relevant to mid-market and true enterprise customers, then you will inevitably be faced with a very difficult moment that will shake your company to the core: the moment your first customer 10x larger than you expresses serious interest.

Prior to then, management is actually very easy — superfluous even. Everybody just does whatever feels right, and so long as you are disciplined about hiring smart people who work well in teams, “what feels right” is near enough to “what the customer needs” that there’s little reason to try harder. But scaling your product up to address the needs of a significantly larger company requires addressing needs that your team doesn’t have. This means if you want to get that customer, you need to scratch someone else’s itch. And a purely flat structure is notoriously ill-equipped to handle this. In my experience, it goes down like this:

Sales: “OMG I think customer X will actually buy us, but only if we do Y.”


Engineering: “Even though Y isn’t actually that hard, building it means over complicating the product and ruining our culture, so no.”

Sales: “…”

Handled poorly, this can lead to a full blown mutiny where your salespeople feel betrayed by your engineers, your engineers feel sold out by sales, and everyone starts drawing hard lines backed up by serious threats. And because the flat management structure has no… structure, the tools at your disposal to quiet the mob are very limited. It’s a pretty horrible experience, all resulting from the grievous sin of successfully creating something of significant value to unexpectedly large customers.

Having gone through the valley of death and come out the other side (multiple times), here are some common patterns I’ve seen that you might look out for:

1. Your people are awesome, it’s your structure that sucks. It’s hard to remember this when people start raising crazy and irrational objections to each others’ reasonable (or even obvious) concerns. But never forget that flat management is a conscious choice to not create a well defined, widely accepted vision based on a shared set of complex assumptions. Said another way, flat management is about avoiding the need for agreement on a huge range of issues by just accepting (and indeed thriving) on disagreement: when everybody just does what they feel is best, there’s no incentive to really care if anybody else agrees — or a process to achieve it if they did care. Flat management encourages creative disagreement and, in my case at least, mission accomplished. 
2. Mutiny strikes without warning. What makes this whole circumstance especially complicated is it comes like a lightning bolt, out of the blue. Everything is fine and everyone is happy one day, and then suddenly you’re faced with an unexpected but very significant choice: do we do what it takes to get this larger customer, or not? But even though you didn’t ask to make this decision, you’ve got to make it — and no matter which way you go, people will disagree. Vehemently. 
3. There is no such thing as “status quo”. The fact that you are making this decision indicates that a change has already happened. Yesterday taking on a 10x larger customer was just a hypothetical possibility. Today it’s a realistic opportunity. There’s no undoing that change. 
4. If you don’t take the opportunity, your salespeople will hate you. They spend their every waking moment trying to convince someone to use your product, against all odds. And it’s one thing to try and fail. But to succeed and be denied support? Your best people will quit. 
5. If you do take the opportunity, your engineers will hate you. They spend their every waking moment trying to improve the product as best as they can imagine, no matter how grueling, and how difficult. And it’s one thing to struggle building something they believe in and use. But something they don’t believe in and will never use? Your best people will quit. 
6. The longer you delay, the more everyone hates you. Even those who aren’t especially passionate one way or the other (and these are often your best people), they are passionate about working someplace they enjoy — and nothing about a mutiny is fun for anybody, including the mutineers.
7. Once the mutiny has been quelled, it just happens again. Whether you take or pass on this opportunity, more opportunities will come your way (hopefully). And each time you get an opportunity an order of magnitude larger than the ones before, the cycle repeats. 

So what to do about it? I wish I knew. We’ve experienced this cycle about three times so far, and I’m anticipating a fourth as we start engaging our first 100K employee accounts. But luckily, each time gets a little easier, because in practice: this is a great problem to have. The fact that you’re facing this is a sign that your team is great and you are on the right track — and when those things are true, the rest sorts itself out.

Granted, it doesn’t always sort out as well as you’d like: no matter how you decide, some people just can’t get on board and will either leave or need to be removed. But if properly managed, your best people will stay and you will leave the chaos a stronger, more talent-dense, and better team than you entered. Great teams step up to any challenge, and that includes adjusting for new realities.

Because at the end of the day, the whole “flat management structure” you thought you had was actually a mirage all along: there was always a power structure, just not one you formally recognized. Use this opportunity to recognize your best and brightest, lean on them to help you make things right, and like bones forming they’ll get stronger the more weight they carry.

It’s not a fast process: you can’t drink Skele-Gro and get a hardened management structure overnight. (And unless your team has the healing powers of Wolverine — or can’t find better jobs — injecting a structure from the outside is a recipe for instant death.) Just be patient and use your position of authority to clear away the smoke, engage your natural leaders to put out the fires, and slowly step back as they slowly step forward. Over time you’ll graduate from “flat management” to becoming an “agile enterprise” organization that can scratch its own itch and address the critical, repeatable needs of ever-larger customers.

It requires patience and resolve. But the earlier you start on a gradual path of controlled evolution, the better prepared you’ll be for sudden, unexpected revolution.

A lot of that energy is directed toward refining the hiring process itself, with a major recurring topic being: what makes someone great?

Last week we had a long conversation on this within the engineering team, and the main conclusion was — there is nowhere near consensus on this topic. Strong, conflicting opinions were held across the team. I don’t know that there was a single tangible item that everybody agreed was a true minimum requirement, or a true showstopper.

Accordingly, so far as our “official hiring policy” goes, we’re still far from having a checklist evaluation of candidates. For better or worse (and I’d argue “for better”), everybody is evaluated on an individual basis, and pretty much any single attribute is fair game. However, it seems to me that there are three general themes we use to assess the “minimum viable employee” — whether someone meets the most baseline requirements for us to say yes:

Aspires to Excellence

In our team conversation last week, we reviewed a series of programmer applications to share thoughts on each. To everybody’s surprise, by far the most discussion was on something that seems so trivial on the surface: grammar, punctuation, and capitalization of the cover letter. Everybody kept saying “ok, we’ve talked about this enough”, but then everybody kept talking. It was strange, and we intentionally stopped to meta-discuss why we were so concerned by this. We tossed around a couple possible explanations for why this seemed so important (to some of us), and like everything, there was no consensus. But my view is this:

Someone who doesn’t proofread and spellcheck something like a cover letter simply isn’t trying their hardest. Whether they don’t care enough to try, or don’t try even when they do care — either way, this is someone who isn’t putting in the effort to excel, and that’s not someone we want on the team.

To be clear, this isn’t to say that grammar is the sign of excellence. It’s only saying that poor grammar signifies a lack of excellence. Other items can too, including:

• Being late for a call (even by a few minutes)
• Being slow or failing to respond to an email
• Inconsistent indentation and other style
• Poor variable nomenclature
• Terse answers to open-ended questions
• Lack of enthusiasm or curiosity

Note how none of this relates to skill: everybody “knows” how to do all these, and to not do them is a choice. Because in practice these aren’t individual choices, but one large choice — and this decision to consistently excel in everything under your control is very nearly an innate quality. Either you do it, or you don’t, and no amount of cajoling is going to change that (at least, not fast enough for our needs). And for this reason, I’d say any indicators about the candidate’s aspiration to excellence weigh extremely heavily on my go/no-go decision, and for many others on our team. 

Knows Enough to Learn Fast

It’s hard to say that this second item is less important as the first, as both are necessary but insufficient: you need to both demonstrate that you aspire to excellence, and have also acquired the basic skills to enable you to achieve it. As for what exactly those minimal skills are is a subject of intense debate. Most of the team would generally say we shouldn’t hire anyone with less skills than they had when they joined, and some would even say their own skills are too low a bar. But from where I sit, I think the minimum set of skills – for a programmer, at least – is something like: 

• Can create something from scratch. There are a surprising number of pretty good programmers that haven’t ever started a project from scratch, and don’t actually know how. This means setting up some kind of development environment and getting “Hello world” to successfully run in some relevant language. 
• Doesn’t need a framework. Don’t get me wrong, the right framework can be a huge accelerant to a project. But it’s important to avoid becoming overly dependent on any particular framework otherwise you lose objectivity – and use it not because it’s actually right for the problem at hand, but because you simply can’t do anything else. So knowledge of a framework gets bonus points, but the ability to work outside a framework is a prerequisite. 
• Successfully finishes the challenge. It sounds obvious, but if we give a programming challenge with an unlimited timeframe, we expect the candidate to deliver a functioning result. It’s amazing how many people send something that simply doesn’t work. 
• Actually writes their own code. Additionally, it’s clear that many applicants just copy/paste snippets they found online, without even the decency to hide it by reformatting it into a consistent style. Certainly, the ability to leverage the internet to help you solve problems is a great skill. But learning and applying a lesson is different than copying a code snippet without understanding. 
• Reuses code appropriately. It’s not enough to create a functioning result, it also needs to be done in a way that minimizes redundancy. This means pulling out shared code into reusable functions, reusing rather than recalculating outputs, etc. Great people are naturally efficient, making minimal, deliberate actions to achieve their goals. 
• Makes sound layering decisions. Knowing where to solve a problem is at least as important as knowing how. The ideal candidate intuitively recognizes those areas that are tightly coupled and should be kept together as a single unit, from those that are loosely coupled and should be isolated through formal interfaces. 

And for me, that’s really about it. I think a fantastic application is one that has a solid, obvious solution, with consistent style, good layering, and appropriate reuse. A great application doesn’t need to do much. But what it does, should be done right. This shows the candidate has a solid, clean foundation on which new skills can be quickly learned. Because in the fast-changing world of computer programming, how much you can learn is far more important than how much you know.

Knows Little that Needs Unlearning

This last item is at least as important as the first two, and since those were deemed “necessary but insufficient” I’d say the same about this. Even more important than what you need to learn, is what you need to unlearn. It’s at least twice as expensive (but probably more like 4x) to unlearn a bad skill than to learn a new skill from scratch. This is because the cost to learn the skill is the same, but then you need to add the “unlearning cost” — which is probably more expensive than what it took to learn in the first place. Here are a few hard habits to break for which we’re always on the lookout:

• Overengineering. Defensive programming to anticipate and handle a wide range of scenarios can be great. But it’s easy to go too far, creating custom logic for scenarios that are extremely unlikely in practice, complicating the solution (and often introducing bugs) for the much more common cases. 
• Excessive encapsulation. Abstraction is a powerful tool for reuse, as well as to create layered decoupling. But done poorly, “unused reusability” can add such bloated and complicated overhead so as to leave the codebase larger, more fragile and less understandable than before it was “simplified” with abstraction. 
• Premature optimization. It’s good to be efficient, and to naturally take advantage of low-hanging-fruit performance opportunities where convenient and clear. But the most important thing to optimize for is code clarity, and that should only be compromised when genuinely necessary. 
• Unnecessary cleverness. Modern languages have a huge range of esoteric features that enable for enormously powerful and succinct solutions. But great candidates amaze with simplicity rather than sophistication.

Admittedly, all of those bullets are really just different flavors of the same thing: solving problems that don’t actually exist, while creating new problems in the process. It’s insidious, as good programmers can imagine a wide range of potential future problems – ranging from performance, to maintainability, to extensibility, and more – and the temptation to solve them all right now can at times be overwhelming. But we need people with strong impulse control who can remain focused on solving the problems of today, without adding to them unnecessarily. 

Anyway, I think these are three high level themes we use when evaluating a candidate. So if it wasn’t already apparent, note that where you went to school, what degree you have, where you’ve worked, who has referred you – none of that matters, at all, and I think that’s the one thing we all agree on. However, getting more detailed than that is extremely contentious, and despite how helpful it would be, there really is no such thing as a clear “minimum viable employee” so far as we can tell. 

So if you want to impress me, keep the above criteria in mind. But in all honesty, I’m not the only one (or even the most important one) you want to impress — so view my suggestions above as “necessary but not sufficient” to get the job.