For the 100th episode of our HR Break Room® podcast, it only seemed fitting to recognize this milestone by sitting down with the CEO and founder of Paycom, Chad Richison. It’s been a dynamic year for Paycom, most notably with the release of Beti®, its employee-driven payroll experience, and we took this unique opportunity to look at the past, present and future of the industry of HR technology.
Our conversation starts with the early days of Paycom, beginning with its founding near the turn of the millennium.
Payroll’s first steps into the digital age
Our modern-day experience is saturated with internet connectivity, but Richison reminded us that this hasn’t always been the case.
“For business technology, [the internet] was somewhat nonexistent in 1998,” he said.
Leading clients to internet-based software and guiding them through its web-based process was one of the company’s first hurdles. Paycom’s philosophy focuses on empowering employees to own their own data, but in the beginning, the limitations of the internet made that a difficult goal to fully realize.
“We just didn’t have the connectivity or technology to do it back then, but today we do,” Richison said.
The future of employee usage has arrived
Even from those early days, Paycom’s leadership recognized that increasing connectivity would help enable the employee usage they envisioned, going so far as to champion this belief in the slide deck for the company’s initial public offering.
“We predicted that if you look further into the future, you’re going to see that the employees, actually, are making the greatest amount of changes on any of the databases,” Richison said. “And that’s really where we’re at today.”
Richison easily made the case for empowering people with their own information by pointing to everyday instances where we can see similar evolutions at work.
“Before work and after work, we’re consumers. While we’re at work, we’re employees, but before and after, we’re consumers, and as a consumer in our daily life, we interact with a bank through technology. We’re probably not necessarily walking up to the teller line. We buy our plane tickets online. It’s rare that we would walk to the counter.”
By empowering the customer to perform basic, repetitive tasks with self-service technology, the store owners have the freedom to reallocate their workforce toward tasks that do more to drive success for the organization. And the customer has enjoyed a faster, more convenient and hassle-free experience.
What’s next is now
Richison recognizes the importance of self-service technology in the modern consumer experience and believes that employees expect this same level of efficacy in their work-based processes as well.
Nowhere is that belief more evident than in Paycom’s most recent innovation, Beti. By empowering employees to verify their own data, Beti is exactly the type of tech that benefits a company by directly engaging the employee in the payroll process, creating a win-win situation for staff and leadership in organizations of any size.
“It’s a very simple fix when we take the blindfold off and we allow employees to interact with their check throughout the pay period and even approve their check throughout the pay period so that they have perfect payrolls, which is what every HR and payroll department wants. They want a perfect payroll.”
To learn more about harnessing employee usage in your payroll — and other insights from Richison — listen to episode 100 of HR Break Room.
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