HRIS & Payroll Excellence - October 2022

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Nancy Romanyshyn, Director,

Partner Success, Syndio

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- Brett Farmiloe, Founder and CEO, Terkel.io

- Brian Kasen,

Andrew Sallee, People Analytics Consultant, Trakstar

- Melvin J. Muskovitz, Senior Counsel, Dykema

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Deepa Damodaran Editor, HRIS & Payroll Excellence

Avoiding Payroll, and Other Mistakes, This Compensation Season

The payroll team is one of those invisible functions that runs quietly in the background of a business, not attracting much attention unless something goes horribly wrong.

When it does, the impact on the business can be severe, ranging from angry employees who didn’t receive their correct salaries on time, to penalties for late or incorrect tax submissions or heavy losses, to fraud.

Remaining compliant and optimizing efficiency in the payroll is a journey without end. But keeping ahead of the admin need not be difficult or stressful.

AWCape’s Jeff Ryan, Top 6 Ways To Take The Pain Out Of Payroll, in his article, lists some steps companies can take to assess the status of their payroll function, tighten compliance, and remain on a path of continuous improvement.

As we enter the annual compensation cycle, there are many factors that HR need to take care of. Check out Syndio’s Nancy Romanyshyn’s A Comp Cycle Like No Other: Here’s What Pros

Need To Know, to understand what you need to know going into this year’s comp cycle to make sure you can prepare for the long-term, while also meeting shorter-term needs.

In Top HR Analytics Predictions For 2023: Part II, Terkel.io’s Brett Farmiloe shares how HR and people managers foresee the future of people analytics.

Also, read HR Must Lead With A “Digital Mindset” by Brian Kasen and Andrew Sallee, and Telecommuting: The Reality Of Employee Expectations by Melvin J. Muskovitz.

That is not all! We have featured several other articles this month, and hope this edition of HRIS & Payroll Excellence will help you achieve excellence in your HRIS and

processes.

Disclaimer: The views, information, or opinions expressed in the Excellence ePublications are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of HR.com and its employees. Under no circumstances shall HR.com or its partners or affiliates be responsible or liable for any indirect or incidental damages arising out of these opinions and content.

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Top 6 Ways To Take The Pain Out Of Payroll

Assessing the status of payroll function and tightening compliance

By Jeff Ryan, AWCape

The payroll team is one of those invisible functions that runs quietly in the background of a business, not attracting much attention unless something goes horribly wrong.

When it does, the impact on the business can be severe, ranging from angry employees who didn’t receive their correct salaries on time, to penalties for late or incorrect tax submissions or heavy losses, to fraud.

Payroll teams work hard to avoid these outcomes, often without access to the tools and technology that can help them keep the organization compliant and efficient. In today’s complex environment, they need all the help they can get. Sage research shows that 77% of South African small and medium business (SMB) employees with responsibility for payroll consider payroll taxes to be complex.

Remaining compliant and optimizing efficiency in the payroll is a journey without end. But keeping ahead of the admin need not be difficult or stressful.

Below, we list some steps companies can take to as sess the status of their payroll function, tighten com pliance, and remain on a path of continuous improve ment.

1. Audit Your Payroll Regularly

All sorts of potential problems could be brewing beneath the surface, if you are not conducting payroll audits at least once a year, especially if you run your payroll manually. In the worst case, the lack of effective controls might result in incorrect tax submissions or payments, or create openings for fraud.

For example, someone in the finance function might be paying ghost employees or working with other team members on fraudulent expense claims. Even if that is not the case, it is good practice to ensure that you regularly scrub terminated employees’ data

from your systems, verify tax calculations and look for errors made in manual data capture and calculations.

2. Educate and Empower Your Team Members

Most employees do not know what the codes on their payslips represent or understand the finer details about the formulas applied to get to their final salary or wage. It is worth taking time to educate them about codes for different types of remuneration and how statutory deductions are calculated.

This empowers them to be another line of checks and balances since they will be informed enough to query any obvious mistakes. Plus, if all colleagues understand their payslips, payroll teams will spend less time answering questions about travel allowance calculations or why the income tax rate seems so high in a month a bonus is paid. True empowerment of employees (and time-saving for the payroll team) would be direct access for employees to data via an “employee self-service” portal.

3. Stay Ahead of the Proposed Regulation

Automated software can do the heavy lifting of applying new tax tables or regulations to your payroll. But it is important that payroll teams and business owners keep ahead of the new regulations introduced at the beginning of each year, as well as laws and regulations that are likely to be introduced in the short to medium turn.

For example, employers should already be thinking about what the proposed “two-pot” system for retirement savings will mean for their employees and payroll. Getting ahead of these changes gives you time to prepare for them.

4. Think About Coaching and Mentoring in a Hybrid World

The move towards remote and hybrid work has had a profound impact on teams in the workplace, including the payroll department. One of the major challenges is the absence of the informal knowledge transfer and mentoring that happens when people work together in an office.

There is no correct answer that works for every business, but the question is worth asking.

Many small and medium businesses might prefer their small finance and HR teams to focus on more strategic tasks. Outsourcing can enable them to improve efficiencies and free up time and resources to focus on the core business. Others might want to keep in-house control over their data and processes.

6. Optimize and Automate

Whether they are running payroll in-house or outsourcing it, most businesses that are still using internal, manual, and offline systems to manage their payroll are at risk of making small mistakes that have big repercussions. A simple data capture error or an incorrect Excel formula can result in an employee not being paid or their tax being misrepresented.

This is not an insurmountable challenge, provided you put processes and policies in place to facilitate the sharing of information.

For example, it can help assign junior employees to a ‘buddy’ they can contact if they need help with a process or a problem. Also, ensure the right collaboration tools are in place for “virtual” chatting and knowledge sharing.

5. Evaluate Pros and Cons of In-House Versus Outsourced Payroll Management

Running the payroll is a time-consuming admin function. It is an essential operational function with no margin for error, yet it does not help your business differentiate itself from the competition. For that reason, it is worth periodically reviewing whether you are best served running this function in-house or outsourcing it to a specialist company.

What is more, this manual work consumes time that could be spent on business development, strategic planning or honing your talent acquisition and retention strategy. Moving to an automated system will vastly simplify compliance, speed up processing, reduce errors, and provide rich, real-time data to inform business decisions.

It can take hours to prepare a payroll from Excel spreadsheets, but you can calculate statutory deductions and generate compliance reports with the push of a button with today’s cloud-based solutions. A modern solution makes it easier to comply with tax regulatory requirements, such as compliance reports, with automatic updates to the latest tax laws and regulations.

Jeff Ryan, MD of AWCape, is a leading Sage business partner for HR, payroll and financial solutions.

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Time Is Money: A Quick Wage-Hour Tip

Avoiding common California wage and hour mistakes

By Amy S. Ramsey, Epstein Becker Green

Employers based outside of California can suffer knockout blows if they enter the ring as employers in California and operate under the mistaken assumption that adherence to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is the same as complying with the California Labor Code and Wage Orders.

Below are the main ways (but certainly not the only ways) employers are “caught cold” because they do not receive or apply California wage-and-hour training and learn the hard way that the plaintiffs’ bar will not pull any punches.

1. Minimum Wage

The federal minimum wage is $7.25, and it has not changed since 2009. California’s state minimum wage and its regular increases are well publicized. Currently, the state minimum wage is $15 per hour for employers with 26 or more employees. However, employers are often unaware that many California cities and counties have their own minimum wage laws,

and of those, some have separate rates for certain types of workers, such as hotel workers.

Also, indexed rates apply to many of these laws. This means the minimum wage rates will increase based on the applicable Consumer Price Index, instead of on a set schedule.

2. Daily Overtime and Double Time

Just as under the FLSA, California employers must pay an overtime premium of time-and-a-half the regular rate to employees, who work more than 40 hours per week. However, California also requires employers to pay an overtime premium of time-and-ahalf to employees, who work more than 8 hours per day, and pay twice the regular rate, or double time, to employees who work more than 12 hours per day.

On the seventh consecutive day worked of the workweek, employers must also pay a premium pay of time-and-a-half the regular rate for the first 8

hours of work, and double time for all hours worked in excess of 8.

3. Meal and Rest Periods

The FLSA does not require meal or rest breaks, however, provides that short breaks taken during the workday (usually between 5 and 20 minutes) are compensable work hours. In contrast, California has strict requirements for meal and rest periods. When employees work longer than 5 hours, California law generally requires employers to provide an unpaid duty-fee meal period of at least 30 minutes in length before the employee begins the sixth hour of work. When an employee works more than 10 hours, the employer must provide a second meal period before the employee starts the eleventh hour of work.

For employees, who work more than 3.5 hours, employers must provide a paid ten-minute, duty-free rest break for every 4 hours of work (or a major fraction thereof) to be taken in the middle of the four-hour segment to the extent possible.

Employers who fail to provide the required meal and rest breaks must pay premium pay valued at one hour at the regular rate of pay (not the base hourly rate) and can be required to pay one premium for a meal and one for rest each day.

4. Flat Sum Bonuses

Employers, who are FLSA-savvy, are well aware that they must include non-discretionary bonus amounts in the regular rate of pay when calculating overtime. The overtime premium on a bonus will be computed by dividing the total pay by the total hours worked to get the regular rate, and the overtime premium is paid at 5 times the regular rate for each overtime hour worked.

California applies this formula, too, but not to “flat sum bonuses.” A flat sum bonus is one that does not increase or has the potential

to increase roughly in proportion to hours worked. For a flat sum bonus, the regular rate is computed by dividing the total pay by the non-overtime hours worked, and the overtime premium is paid at 1.5 times that amount for each overtime hour worked (or twice that amount for each hour worked in excess of 12 per day).

5. Employee Classification

i) Independent contractors

Although the federal Department of Labor has announced that it is developing a proposed rule for determining independent contractor status under the FLSA, the law currently involves application of a multi-factor test that examines the “economic reality” of the relationship. California, on the other hand, has codified the “ABC” test, strictly requiring that the relationship satisfy three specific factors in order for an individual to be

deemed an independent contract rather than an employee. It is a difficult test to satisfy.

ii) White collar exemptions

Under the FLSA, employees might be exempt from overtime under one of the following “white collar” exemptions: executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, and highly compensated.

To be exempt under the FLSA, an employee must earn at least $684 per week on a salary basis, or $35,568 per year (and $107,432 in the case of highly compensated employees). Other requirements must also be met, including in most cases, that the employee’s “primary duty” is exempt work.

Under the FLSA, the primary duty is the main or most important duty, which might not be the duty the employee spends most of the time performing. California law also recognizes exemptions from overtime. Just some of the critical differences between federal and California overtime exemptions are as follows.

To be properly classified as exempt, an employee must earn a monthly salary equivalent of at least twice the state minimum wage, which is at least $62,400 for employers with 26 or more employees. California does not have a highly compensated employee exemption. Also, an employer must establish that the employee spends more than 50% of the time performing exempt duties.

ii) Paystubs

The FLSA does not require employers to provide employees with paystubs. The California Labor Code, on the other hand, requires employers to furnish employees with accurate itemized wage statements on payday, which must include all of the information specified in the Labor Code.

A failure to provide this information will subject an employer to damages and penalties.

iv) Travel time

Under the FLSA, hours worked ordinarily do not include travel time spent beyond normal work hours. However, California

law considers all compulsory travel time to be compensable travel time.

v) Paid sick leave

The FLSA does not require employers to pay employees, who do not work because they are sick. California law requires employers to provide at least 24 hours of paid sick leave per year, which can be accrued under one of two specific methods. Cities and counties may require additional paid sick leave.

vi) Payment upon termination

Federal law does not require payment of final wages to terminating employees any sooner than the next regular payday. However, in California, an employer must pay all final wages, including accrued and unused vacation, to terminating employees as follows: (a) employees who voluntarily resign must be paid final wages within 72 hours of resignation; (b) employees who are involuntarily terminated must be paid on the day of discharge. An employer will be subject to “waiting time” penalties, which can be up to 30 days’ pay, for failing to comply.

vii) PAGA

The California Private Attorneys General Act allows an individual aggrieved employee to file a civil lawsuit as the proxy of the state to recover civil penalties that otherwise could be recovered only by the Labor Commissioner. Unless the Labor Code provides a different penalty, the default penalty is $100 per employee per pay period for initial violations,

and $200 per employee per pay period for subsequent violations. These penalties are usually many times greater than any actual damages arising from the violations.

The differences between the federal and California law listed above are just some examples, and the examples listed are far more nuanced than indicated in this post.

Even employers who are champions of FLSA compliance will find themselves unprepared in a completely new division without California-specific training. Employers confronting these issues in litigation feel like they have been sucker punched. But it is the law.

This article first appeared here

Amy Ramsey is Employment Litigation Attorney at Epstein Becker Green. Amy partners with her clients to develop innovative and practical solutions to employment-related issues, leveraging more than two decades of legal experience. Would you like to comment?

A Comp Cycle Like No Other: Here’s What Pros Need To Know

Are you prepared for the long-term and shorter-term compensation needs

By Nancy Romanyshyn, Syndio

We are entering an annual compensation cycle like no other. Compensation (comp) survey data is showing the effects of the many job changes and resulting salary changes, including the highest estimated merit budgets we have seen in decades. In fact, September may not be the first time you are administering increases this year, which is also new territory for comp pros.

In the midst of it all, you are now being asked to be transparent about pay and show you pay employees fairly. What used to be a nice-to-have is quickly becoming table stakes as a result of new and emerging pay scale disclosure legislation, higher demand for pay transparency from employees, and shareholder pressure for greater disclosures.

That is a lot. On top of an already turbulent business environment, comp pros are having to plan for these changes in new ways. Here is what you need to know going into this year’s comp cycle to make sure you can prepare for the long-term, while also meeting shorter-term needs.

Focus on Pay Transparency

Compensation season can be overwhelming. I know, because I have been there — managing the annual

comp cycle at my first job nearly 30 years ago, and for many years before joining Syndio, helping companies around the world design and implement effective compensation programs. And if I were a Compensation Manager in today’s market, I would direct my focus to one major priority: preparing for pay transparency — because it is coming, and quickly.

Employees are sharing salaries, have access to information like never before, and are demanding more visibility into pay policies. In fact, our internal analysis shows that by 2023, one-third of all U.S. workers will be under some form of pay transparency legislation. With the rise of legislation (including California’s groundbreaking law) requiring pay range disclosure for applicants and employees, your employees, applicants, and competitors for talent will soon know what you pay for your roles.

The external pressures are real. But there is another compelling way to look at this: at its core, pay transparency is about how you tell your employees that you value what they do. And at a time when finding the right people for your company continues to be a challenge, this is foundational to how you engage with both prospective and current employees — and gain a competitive edge.

If pay transparency is the target, how do you get there? Knowing time and resources are limited, here are three steps to take – starting this comp cycle.

1. Evaluate and Set Pay Ranges with More Robust Analytics

You are probably already analyzing your pay ranges from an external market perspective. Starting this year, you should also conduct both a pay equity analysis and a position-in-range analysis by individual employee and by job. Bringing these analyses together will help you more quickly understand the patterns of how employees are paid so you can prioritize jobs and employees for adjustments.

This will also help you evaluate and refine your ranges in anticipation of job postings. If what you are paying current employees does not match the ranges you are posting publicly, you will have a major communication problem on your hands.

With insight from these analyses, you will also be in a better position to balance external market com petitiveness with internal pay equity for your pay ranges. For example, you will be able to judge whether bringing on a new hire at an external range could

potentially exacerbate or create a pay gap if it differs significantly from internal pay for a similar position.

Done manually, this level of analysis can feel daunting. But technology is your friend and can help you conduct analyses quickly — even in time for the annual review so you can embed adjustments into your merit increase budget. Doing this now will put you in a better position to share more precise ranges with the talent acquisition team to operationalize effective compensation decisions moving forward.

2. Get More Specific in What You Say About Pay

You probably have some established communication around how pay is determined, such as “We pay competitively based on the market, your skills, experience, and performance.” But, is that accurate?

Now is the time to assess whether your pay policies are working as intended and if you are truly paying employees fairly and consistently. A pay equity analysis can help you do this: You will be able to test whether the things you say you pay for — performance, experience, etc. — are actually impacting what you pay employees.

No Other: Here’s

Starting this comp cycle, be prepared to answer the following questions to help people managers and employees alike understand how you determine pay and develop ranges:

● If you say you pay competitively, what does “competitive” mean?

● What market data are used to determine ranges?

● What is the pay range for each employee? Where does each employee sit in that range? Are you paying someone the same as another employee with the same skills, experience, and performance?

3. For the Board and Leadership, Prepare Metrics Covering Both Pay Equity and Pay Gap (Opportunity)

In anticipation of increasing shareholder and regulatory pressure on disclosing human capital metrics, coupled with commitments to ESG, leaders are becoming deeply interested in metrics related not only to pay, but also to opportunity and financial wellbeing. Be prepared to share the following metrics with executives and your board:

● Representation by function and level

● Adjusted pay gap (pay equity) and unadjusted pay gap (mean/median pay gap) — both overall and by various demographic groups

In the longer term, you will need to unpack what those metrics — including representation and the mean/ median pay gap — are telling you about opportunity. Here again, technology will simplify and streamline the analysis and also make it easier to work with your colleagues in DEI and talent management to understand:

● How are employees leveled? Are there hidden biases in how we level, and if so, what can we do to correct them?

● How quickly do employees progress through levels over time? Is it at the same rate across demographic groups, and if not, why? What can we do to correct this?

● Where do we observe imbalances in representation across functions and in job families?

● What opportunities exist to open career pathways? Where are there available talent and opportunities for building skills, mentoring, and development?

The Stakes Are High

Recent lawsuits, like the one against Google for systemic under-leveling, indicate that the stakes are high for companies to better understand what is driving opportunity inequity and take steps to change it.

And everyone is watching — employees, leadership, boards, and the public all want to know that you are engaged in a process for improving metrics over time. Comp leaders will play an important role in clearly articulating the process — the methodology you are using and how you are scaling it over time — and helping them understand that this is a thoughtful and well-planned journey that will continue to drive improvements.

We know this is a comp cycle like no other. That is why you have to be prepared to think about it differently. Taking these actions now will help you build out the analytics and processes you will need to manage what is ahead.

Nancy Romanyshyn is the Director of Pay Strategy and Partner Success, at Syndio. Nancy is a fair pay thought leader, speaker, and compensation expert. With 25+ years of experience, both in-house and leading compensation design engagements, she joined Syndio from Willis Towers Watson where she led their North America Fair Pay team. Would you like to comment?

Copyright For The Digital Age

By Glyn Moody, Walled Culture

An important concern for any company is to ensure that their employees are not breaking the law in their work. That includes laws that are indus try-specific, as well as ones that apply to every company. Among

the latter, a problem that has risen to prominence in recent years is copyright infringement.

A few decades ago, it was difficult for employees to infringe on copyright because it was hard for

ordinary people to make copies of physical objects like books. Photocopiers could be used to make copies of a few pages of a book, or of drawings, but they were generally of poor quality, and certainly no substitute for the original.

Why every employee in your company is breaking the law every day and what can be done about it

Today, we live in a world of digital documents, books, photographs, recordings and videos. One of the defining qualities of digital files is that it is easy to produce perfect copies of them for almost no cost, using a computer or a smartphone. Moreover, the rise of the Internet means that most people in Western societies have a quick way to share those digital copies around the world. In many cases, that will represent an infringement of copyright, since the owner of the copyright rarely allows copies to be made and shared freely in this way.

The problem was recognized some time ago. In 2007, John Tehranian, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, calculated that a typical Internet user would be liable

for $4.544 billion in potential damages each year as a result of normal Internet use. If anything, the situation today is far worse. Back in 2007, there was no Instagram or TikTok; Twitter had only just been launched, and even Facebook had fewer than 100 million users. Now, most people online use one or more of these social media services many times every day.

The urge to post online –comments, pictures, videos, songs – is now so reflexive that most people are unaware of it: it is simply part of their everyday lives. Equally, most people do not think about whether they have the legal right to post the material they send to family, friends, colleagues and strangers.

They probably assume that it’s fine because there is no money involved. But the history of digital copyright over the last 30 years shows that companies believe that any unauthorized copying is unacceptable, whether or not it is done for profit.

The ubiquitous culture of digital sharing is a serious problem for companies because it is not restricted to external social networks. The urge to pass on interesting or amusing emails, images, videos, and articles to colleagues over internal company networks is too strong despite strict bans on doing so. The net result is that the potential damages for such actions are probably even higher than the eye-watering $4.544 billion in 2007.

Policing such bans is problematic. Even judges and lawyers find it hard to distinguish between material that can be lawfully shared, perhaps as a matter of fair use, and things that cannot. That means it is even harder to encode those subtleties in algorithms that could be used to keep a watch on the files that employees share. If a company implemented a network filter system to prevent copyright infringement by its employees, the risk is that legitimate material would be blocked, with possibly serious negative consequences for a business’s operation.

Stopping people sharing copyright material is a hopeless task because of the clash between copyright and the Internet. Copyright was devised in 1710 with the Statute of Anne. It was designed for an analog world where copying was hard, and required specialized equipment like a printing press, that was easy

to find and impound. The Internet is, at heart, a digital copying machine. It works by making multiple copies of files and sending them around the globe across interconnected networks. The computers and smartphones that people routinely use to copy files cannot be simply confiscated because modern business – and society – depends upon them.

Faced with that challenge, the copyright world has lobbied for and obtained ever-harsher copyright laws aimed at discouraging people from making unauthorized copies of digital material. The fact that the industry has come back many times for yet more serious deterrents proves that no matter how stringent, the laws against digital sharing simply do not work.

The way to address this problem – and the consequence could be huge if companies ignore the

risk of being sued for the illegal actions of their employees – is to make copyright fit for the digital age. At the very least, that would entail recognizing that everyone, everywhere, is sharing digital material without permission, and adjusting the law accordingly. Ideally, it would involve a complete re-imagining of copyright –perhaps even its abolition.

The resistance from the copyright world would, naturally, be immense. But maybe it is time for the business world to demand saner laws in this area, rather than just carry on turning a blind eye to this massive and pervasive law-breaking committed by every employee, every day.

Glyn Moody has been writing about copyright, digital rights, and the Internet for 30 years. He is the Editor of the Walled Culture project and author of the new book ‘Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor’.

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Top HR Analytics Predictions For 2023: Part

By Brett Farmiloe, Terkel.io

Lexy Martin, Principal, Research, Visier

1. People Managers Will Use People Analytics to Guide Workforce Decisions

Advanced organizations more frequently serve people managers directly with people analytics (50% versus 28% among organizations just getting started with people analytics). Fifty six percent of these have achieved the business outcome level of value compared to 25% in emerging organizations. Those enabling people managers use nine analytics topics, often ones focused on optimizing costs, such as span of control analysis, and some that provide specific support to people managers, such as compensation analytics, total cost of workforce, and even ensuring pay equity as they also strive to improve diversity, equity and inclusion. These and other analyses enable people managers to make optimized decisions about their workforce.

2. Massive Increase in People Analytics When Recruiting

I expect a massive increase in data analytics to improve recruiting outcomes. Companies are desperate for talent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we currently have 11.2 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. This is not only a historically high number, but also a 50% increase from the pre-pandemic record of 7.2 million unfilled jobs, recorded in 2019.

The best way to improve hiring outcomes is to track the efficiency of your new methods so that you can see where you are getting the most bang for your buck and then double down on what works. One private equity portfolio company I worked with was spending massive amounts on job boards. Every hiring manager had a story of their favorite job board producing a good hire. Once they applied the right people analytics, they saw that the vast majority of their qualified applicants were being produced by three job boards. By reallocating their budget to the most efficient job boards they increased qualified applicants by 347%.

Atta Tarki, Founder & Author of “Evidence-Based Recruiting” (McGraw-Hill), ECA Partners

3. Managers Will Rely on Shared Scorecards to Improve Retention

Employee retention is a big deal right now.

At the end of May 2022, there were 11.3 million open positions in the United States, significantly more than the 9.3 million positions which were unfilled in April 2021. Moreover, no industry is spared from “quiet quitting” characterized by disenchanted, marginally productive workers. Employee activation is a team sport requiring alignment on goals, insights, and retention actions between HR and functional business units. After all, it is managers who have the greatest impact on employee work-life.

In 2023, democratized data insights with shared scorecards powered by AI will inform both HR and business leaders alike with talent insights on how employees are fairing relative to burnout, career stagnation, disconnection, compensation, and recognition. Action able talent risk root causes with retention playbooks will improve retention, tracked in real-time with shared scorecards.

behavior. The use of people analytics to identify and address unconscious bias in the workplace is the thing for 2023.

As employers strive to create more diverse and inclusive workplaces, people analytics will play a key role in helping to identify unconscious bias in hiring, promotion, and performance management decisions.

Martin Seeley, CEO, Mattress Next Day

5. Increased Focus on HR Data Privacy and Security

● Increased focus on HR data privacy and security

As more companies adopt people analytics, the issue of data privacy and security will become even more important. HR leaders will need to ensure that their data is properly protected and that only authorized personnel have access to it.

● More use of AI and machine learning

AI and machine learning will become increasingly important tools for people analytics. These technologies will help organizations to better understand and predict employee behavior, identify potential issues, and make better decisions about staffing and development.

● Greater use of mobile devices and apps

4. Using People Analytics to Identify and Address Unconscious Bias

As more and more organizations adopt data-driven approaches to their HR strategies, people analytics will become an essential tool for understanding and predicting employee

More and more employees are using mobile devices and apps for work purposes, and this trend is only going to continue. HR leaders will need to make sure that their people analytics solutions are mobile-friendly and accessible from any device.

Louise Ogilvy, Recruitment Director, Propeller-Tech

Ken Klein, Co-Founder, Praisidio

Michelle Berg, Chief Visionary Officer, Elevated HR Solutions Inc.

6. Measuring Productivity

I believe measuring productivity will be one of the top trends. As we are now moving from The Great Resignation headline to beyond the Quiet Quit headline, we still need to understand how productive people are - and if hybrid supports it or hinders it. So many people have their opinions and research has been done, but it is not a black-and-white answer, nor is it a one-size-fits-all.

Productivity for John is different from that for Shahzia. We have to recognize it and have the right data to help us navigate workplace planning.

Leah Carr, CEO, tilr

7. Understanding the Skills of the Workforce

Understanding the skills of your workforce will be the top trend in 2023. The skills for jobs are changing and this is going to be the year that organizations realize they can no longer do anything about this. So adapting to a skills-first strategy, where you can easily identify training needs is key to remaining competitive.

Most companies only understand what they hired someone to do, not what this individual can actually do. At the same time, most companies do not monitor how the skills are changing for roles in their organizations. This results in inefficient deployment of the workforce and time and money being wasted on training and upskilling.

What we are going to see in 2023 is a shift to understanding the skills and aspirations of each team member and strategically linking this with the present and future needs of the company.

Brett Farmiloe is the Founder and CEO – and currently CHRO - of Terkel.io. Brett is an SHRM Influnecer and has also been a keynote speaker at several state SHRM conferences around the topic of employee engagement. Would you like to comment?

Optimizing Workforce Reporting While Maintaining Employee Privacy

Accessing, reporting, and presenting people data securely

By Tom McKeown, isolved

Workforce reporting is essential to any business looking to succeed. However, when working with people data, leaders must balance the value of analysis against the data privacy of their employees.

An accidental revealing of personal data by an organization can be as detrimental to an employer and employee as a cyber-attack. Take as an example when in early 2022 the City of Boston accidentally communicated the identities of workers. who tested positive for Covid-19.

Personally identifiable information (PII) is the most delicate with regard to workforce reporting. These data points can identify any individual directly or when combined with other information.

Direct personal identifiers, such as social security numbers, driver’s license, or employee identification numbers, are rarely used in any type of business analysis because they carry neither performance nor segmentation value, but there are other germane organizational data points when combined can be both identifying and exposing.

Forty-nine of the fifty U.S. States have pay equity laws prohibiting employers from discriminating against workers based on gender, ethnicity, age and other designations. This makes it important to be able to run reports that compare compensation across and between such groups.

However, too many segments and filters pose the risk of exposing individual identities. If there is only one African American female accountant in the Boston office, a report drilling down to this level should not be shown too widely.

Assuring that PII or any other sensitive employee information does not get revealed when producing workforce reports should be a priority for any organization. Below are some recommended guidelines that can help ensure that internal people’s information is accessed, reported, and presented properly.

1. Set Up Secure User Access to Data and Reports Based on Managerial Levels and Responsibilities

Three levels of user security should be considered. The

first level is for administrators or super-users. These types of users are individuals, who have a need to see data for everyone, everywhere. Individuals who fit this profile are usually C-Level or senior leaders within

the organization and certain key individuals in the human resources (HR) department. Administrator or super-user privileges are usually the least difficult to set up in a system as they have no restrictions.

The next level that requires access, but of a more limited type, is line managers. This group usually needs to see all or most people’s information, but only for employees in their span of control or reporting structure. This can be accomplished using hierarchical security, which secures access to employee data for every manager from their level downwards in the organizational structure. This type of security is available in most systems that connect employees to managers.

The third level of secure access is more of an ad hoc collection of individuals who might need access to certain segments of the population for oversight or administrative purposes. A good example would be an HR business partner who might be assigned to a certain division or location. This person would need access to the people data of that limited group despite having no managerial authority or responsibilities. Some systems provide this level of security by allowing configurable user profiles to be set up.

2. Define What Data Points Are and Are Not Necessary for Each User to Access

After it is established who can see and report on which employ ees, the next step is to decide if any information is off limits and to whom. The above-mentioned HR business partner may need access to reports in a certain region or division, but might need to be precluded from seeing certain fields, such as compen sation or performance. Being able to filter out certain fields from

reporting access can also allow administrative personnel to run reports for senior executives with out seeing what may be deemed sensitive information.

3. Control How Data Is Presented

The main consideration when presenting workforce data is to remember that it should be aggregated. When audience is a large group, such as an employee meeting or a public entity, there should absolutely be no links to any employee-level information. All metrics and analytics should be presented in graphical formats with the labels displayed in percentages rather than employee counts. Also, it is best to cluster smaller segments under a certain percentage as small percentages may also divulge individual identi ties. Using designations, such as other or multiple, are common for such purposes.

4. Anonymize Records

if Employee-level Detail Reporting Is Necessary

For the rare instances, where individual-level of data needs to be revealed, or where you fear that it will accidentally be revealed, some organizations choose to anonymize their entire employee data set before running certain reports or analyses. Examples of such instances would be in the collecting of survey information

on employee culture and happi ness or information on why someone left the company. Any recorded information regarding complaints of harassment or discrimination should be kept anonymous but analyzed to see if certain patterns emerge that need to be addressed. Safeguarding employee privacy and providing people analysis for business success should not be conflicting goals. Do not let all the positive steps being

taken to improve culture and engagement get wrecked by careless reporting. By using some simple steps, organizations can ensure that people’s data does not get exposed while continuing to do the proper reporting and analysis necessary for growth and profitability.

Tom McKeown is the former CEO and Co-Founder of TrenData HR that was acquired by isolved. He is now a Product Owner for Predictive People Analytics, intelligently connecting the full isolved People Cloud platform. Tom is a senior executive with over 25 years of experience in bringing innovative software to market.

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HR Must Lead With A “Digital Mindset” In 2023

3 core practices that HR can support in 2023

By Brian Kasen and Andrew Sallee, Trakstar

Whether the Great Resignation is diminishing or simply giving way to the epidemic of Quiet Quitting, one thing is clear: we have entered a new period of competition and care for talent, one complicated by economic stressors for both businesses and employees.

It has never been more critical for organizations to develop new ways of demonstrating the value they place on people. Sustaining meaningful connections for employees in an increasingly geographically dispersed workforce is an opportunity ripe for data and digital tools, but the success of these efforts arguably relies upon the right organizational mindset.

In their new book, The Digital Mindset, Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley make a case for leaders and companies to embrace digital tools and data skills in the workplace in meaningful yet balanced ways. Leonardi and Neeley offer a roadmap for business leaders and HR practitioners to maximize the potential of digital and data, while also watching out for possible pitfalls. Ultimately, the “digital mindset” is a growth mindset that leans into a practice of continuous learning in order to thrive in a world of continuous change.

Continuous Learning Led by HR Requires Expanding Key Practices

HR practitioners not only have an opportunity, but also the responsibility, to lead alongside business leaders in the landscape of continuous learning amidst continuous change. Three core practices can be driven or supported by HR in 2023.

1. Adopting new technology and practices around business processes

Leonardi and Tsedal emphasize the opportunity to take advantage of new digital technologies that accelerate response to challenging business circumstances or create competitive advantage. Adoption of new digital platforms requires intentionality and advocacy.

2. Analyzing data generated by employees and their engagement with technology

Adoption of new digital technologies brings with it a whole new realm of data generated by the activities of end users within the workforce. New employee data will be generated passively (“digital exhaust”), such as usage or log data generated by digital tools. Active employee data is collected through intentional processes and efforts such as performance reviews or engagement surveys.

An HR practitioner’s ability to effectively identify and leverage these two types of data will unlock new, meaningful ways to understand and support the needs of the organization’s people

3. Supporting a culture of transparency and trust in the organization’s digital transformation

Leonardi and Tsedal give considerable attention to company culture as fundamental to the successful growth of the digital mindset. Fostering several dimensions of psychological safety around data analysis and digital experiments is necessary when companies want employees to share themselves (i.e. their data), while also participating in evidence-based analytical pursuits that will create failed experiments alongside successful discoveries.

Translating all of this directly to the HR context, opportunities for advancement of a digital mindset emerge around topics, such as hiring and onboarding, employee engagement, and performance management—all involving potential for leveraging a growing number of purpose-built tools, whether freestanding or integrated within the HRIS.

Speed to Hire with Digital Platforms

Efficiency and quality of the hiring process is important to maintain workforce capacity. But ease

and speed of the hiring and onboarding process also contribute to higher employee engagement, positive sentiment around new employment fit, and stronger employee retention

In order to maximize efficiency and effectiveness around hiring, HR must lead:

● Digital Platform: Modern applicant tracking systems and sourcing platforms create opportunities for HR and hiring managers to connect directly to the world of professional social networks and global job sites to quickly build pipelines of good-fit candidates.

● Data Analysis: Digital tools make it possible to measure how well an organization’s hiring practices work compared to those of organizations in other related fields. Purpose-built tools that offer insight into time-to-hire, cost-of-hire, and average volume of candidates and applicants can aid in understanding, where a company is doing well and what aspects of the hiring process might be working against their goals for talent acquisition. Benchmarks related to hiring shed light on norms within today’s competitive landscape.

● Transparency and Trust: Today talent acquisition leaders can leverage modern systems that help bring clarity and process to the hiring process, but now more than ever, choosing tools that allow unbiased hiring and collaborative feedback when selecting candidates are essential to building a high-trust organization.

Cultural Reinforcement and Employee Listening

Tsedal Neeley has also written in greater detail about the specific challenges and opportunities of creating strong teams in the world of remote work Digital tools give employees and leaders the chance to cultivate a virtual presence as never before, while at the same time allowing employees to share opinions and feelings about their teams and organizations in ways that can catalyze meaningful action from leaders.

In order to enable a virtuous culture in a remote/hybrid world, HR must lead:

● Digital Platform: Opportunities abound for leaders to communicate with whole employee populations by cultivating an asynchronous digital presence. Ranging from videos in shared digital spaces to leader spotlights in LMS-delivered onboarding content, HR practitioners should encourage business leaders to be known by their employees. At the same time, purpose-built platforms to survey employees at regular intervals make it easy to ask for employee feedback.

● Data Analysis: Analyzing employee sentiment in the form of well-designed annual engagement surveys and more frequent pulse surveys is an important way to know how key talent segments feel about the work they are doing and the direction of the company. Trust in

senior leadership is steadily a top reason for employee satisfaction and retention.

● Transparency and Trust: Demonstrable digital presence from business leaders is one way to encourage an open culture of sharing from employees. But it is more important that employees see action related to sentiment (data) that they offer. The best way for employees to feel safe and interested to share their opinions is to publish aggregate analysis and show that employees are being heard

Perpetual Performance Management

For the past several years, performance management has shifted to an ongoing conversation that centers on development toward personal goals as much as it does accountability to company goals. Peter Cappelli and Anna Tavis charted this transformation in recent years but it has become all the more compelling in the age of hybrid and remote workforce opportunities

HR must lead:

● Digital Platform: Performance management is no longer simply an annual conversation and rating. Regular interaction among managers and employees that focuses on professional development alongside accountability is enhanced by digital tools that offer all parties the chance to easily record point-in-time thoughts and nudge steps toward the next key milestones.

● Data Analysis: Compelling data stories can connect employee performance to business outcomes and employee retention in ways that business leaders, HR practitioners, and employees can view together. Patterns in performance and productivity across the competitive landscape are increasingly surfacing with modern digital tools in performance management.

● Transparency and Trust: Similar to employee listening activities, employee trust in privacy and processes surrounding performance conversations is crucial to enabling stronger, more meaningful participation in performance discussions and collaboration. HR has the responsibility to set new tones and practices around performance management to ensure that managers and employees adopt new practices.

New digital tools for performance management help this process by nudging both managers and employees toward ongoing dialogue, and sharing meaningful feedback regularly through a secure, trusted system.

Purpose-built digital tools and people analytics offer many new possibilities for effective work and collaboration in 2023 and the years to come. HR must make the most of new opportunities in leading change by exhibiting the new digital mindset. Leonardi and Neeley offer a fantastic framework that HR can bring to bear to drive business forward. Adopting new digital platforms, analyzing data, and ensuring transparency & trust are key competencies for HR practitioners of the future.

Recommended Resources:

● The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI

● Developing A Digital Mindset

● To Retain New Hires, Spend More Time Onboarding Them

● Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere

● The Performance Management Revolution

● Adaptation, agility and experimentation are keys to business success in the hybrid work era: Anna Tavis — People Matters

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Brian Kasen is Director of Business Intelligence and Andrew Sallee is People Analytics Consultant at Trakstar

Data Science For HR: Barriers To Overcome In 2023

3 fundamentals for success in the journey to data-driven HR

By Littal Shemer Haim, Littalics.com

People Analytics as a discipline has existed for over a decade, or a few decades, if you consider the traditional practices in organizational research. Moreover, the HR-tech industry has brought some brilliant solutions in the last couple of years. And yet, people analytics is still not an established practice in many HR groups, either by embracing tech solutions or impacting the business with actionable insights derived from analytics projects.

So, what holds back the maturity of people analytics, and what should HR leaders do to overcome this in 2023? How can they go the extra mile beyond reading dashboards and reports? Here are three fundamentals for anyone on the journey to data-driven HR.

#1 Have Clear Expectations When Working with Data Professionals

First, acknowledge the differences between data analysts and data scientists. Though some role

descriptions may overlap, a data analyst generally spends more time on routine analysis, providing reports regularly, and typically using BI tools or Excel. However, a data scientist may design how to integrate data from different sources, then manipulate, analyze, and sometimes productize it, leveraging advanced analytics and typically using programming languages like R.

The practice of data science is multidisciplinary. It encompasses three general skills – the business domain of expertise, statistical modeling, and programming. Therefore, a crucial part of your challenge in People Analytics is the effort to establish communication between professionals with different skills

I believe you have heard a lot about the People Analytics journey that enables HR professionals to become more strategic because they speak the language of the business and impact using the right questions and insights derived from people’s data. But they can support decision-making only when they communicate those questions to the right data professionals or tech providers.

#2 Understand Your Essential Role in a Successful Project

If there is one message I hope you would take, this would be it: Ensure that the data scientist understands the business needs in workforce-related analysis. In addition, it would help if you articulated the right business questions so the research findings yield the best data storytelling you can leverage to impact.

Beyond that, let me shed some light on all data science projects’ processes while taking the data scientist’s perspective. First, you always start with a business question, sometimes titled research objectives. Then, based on a specific concern, goal, or challenge for the business, you create hypotheses about how human attitudes, behavior, or performance impact that key concern.

Only when you define what you need to measure to test your hypotheses can you source the data from any department that holds it. But then, you must ensure that there are no missing values in people’s information, typos that corrupt categorical variables, wrong labeling, duplicate records, neglected records that were not updated, or any other issues with messy data

Then you reach the phase of Exploratory Data Analysis (briefly, EDA), which sometimes proceeds with selecting variables for prediction models and then modeling. These steps beyond EDA are called feature engineering and practical machine learning. Eventually, you communicate the results, focusing on actionable insights from the findings, and sometimes implement models into products.

As an HR professional, you have a crucial role in this process. The data scientists can’t maintain the data for you. Also, remember that while you may lack experience in data science, your data scientists may lack an understanding of people’s processes. Your responsibility is to ensure no gap between the analysis made for you and the business questions and actionable insights.

#3 Be Proactive When Dealing with Findings and Results

Occasionally, findings are boring. There are cases in People Analytics where statistically insignificant results are the desired outcome. As with equal pay, sometimes organizational groups shouldn’t be significantly different. However, these insignificant results may only be the beginning of the exploration. You can always try to enrich your analysis and reveal additional insights.

For example, you can explore the interactions of variables. Multivariate statistics can raise new perspectives. You don’t have to go back to your notebooks of statistics fundamentals. Instead, ask a data scientist about interactions. So, if a comparison between groups does not reveal striking differences, adding a single variable to the analysis may uncover some hidden patterns.

From a data scientist’s point of view, your proactivity is invaluable. When you ask “why?”, suggest hypotheses, and challenge explanations, you leverage your domain expertise and complete the data scientist skills. Moreover, when you stick to the business questions and research objectives, you may be surprised that the sponsors of your analysis project embrace the so-called boring story and may even be thrilled to have it. Finally, insights confirming a known

fact or domain knowledge may validate your data integrity and maintenance procedures.

To conclude, having clear expectations when working with data professionals, understanding your essential role in a successful project, and being proactive when dealing with findings and results are three fundamentals for your success, either in making or buying the solutions of People Analytics.

A version of this article was originally published on Littalics.com

Littal Shemer Haim helps organizations improve business performance by making informed decisions about people. She offers executives guidance in the journey towards a data-driven HR and conducts People Analytics projects. Littal sources innovation in the HR-tech industry and advises start-ups in this ecosystem. She writes and lectures about People, Data, Ethics, and the Future of Work. In addition, she leads mentoring and learning programs for various industries, in which she shares her knowledge and more than twenty years of experience in People Analytics, HR Data Strategy, and Organizational Research. Littal’s blog, also known as Littalics, is one of the first and most influential blogs in People Analytics.

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Telecommuting: The Reality Of Employee Expectations

By Melvin J. Muskovitz, Dykema

Telecommuting is not a new phenomenon. Whether on a full-time, part-time or sporadic basis, telecommuting has been voluntarily offered by employers, and in some cases, required as an accommodation to an employee with a disability for many years. And, of course, for many employers telecommuting became a necessity during the pandemic.

Employers are returning to more traditional work arrangements, however, many are faced with employees who wish to continue working from home. The push to normalize remote work is not, however, limited to employees. Many employers are taking the initiative to make this option more permanent as well in an effort to attract and retain talent.

Whether the impetus is employee or employ er-driven, or both, employers should review their policies and practices to avoid risks associated with telecommuting. Remote work, like other flexible work options, should be governed by a formal policy that addresses legal issues that can arise with a remote workforce, including the following:

1. Compensation/Hours Worked

Hourly employees, both those who telecommute and those who do not, are entitled to overtime compensation for all hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a work week. One of the attractions of

remote work – the flexibility it provides to employees – creates a work-schedule challenge for employers.

Employers, who allow telecommuting, should establish a mechanism to track hours worked and create clear guidelines for employees to follow regarding adhering to work schedules, working overtime, etc.

2. ADA Accommodations

For employees, who are expected to work onsite, an employer may have to allow working from home as an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on business operations. The potential health risks of working onsite for employees with certain underlying health conditions have added new elements to the “disability” analysis.

3. Criteria for Selection

Inevitably there will be situations in which an employer will not agree to an employee’s request to work from home. A policy that establishes criteria used in determining who will be allowed to telecommute is essential to defend against a claim that the policy is applied in a discriminatory manner (e.g., favoring younger over older employees, favoring one gender over another, denying requests from minority employees, etc.).

Employers need to form right policies to address legal issues that can arise with a remote workforce

4. Data Security and Confidentiality

Whether an employee is using his/her or company equipment, steps must be taken and guidelines established to guard against data breaches and to protect confidential information, including guidelines regarding the secure destruction of hard copies of documents that may be printed at home.

5. Tax Considerations

If a telecommuter’s home office is in a state other than where the employer’s business is located, both the employee and employer should ascertain whether there will be any adverse tax consequences as a result of such arrangements.

6. Work-related Injuries and Safety

The fact that an employee works from home does not shield the employer from workers’ compensation claims. Employers in most states are liable for injuries that occur to an employee in the course and scope of employment, regardless of where they occur. Employers should verify with their workers’ compensation carrier that injuries occurring at an employee’s home will be covered. Employers should

also establish reporting procedures and workplace guidelines to minimize the chance of work-related injuries, incorporating any guidelines established by the carrier.

7. Preventing Virtual/Remote Harassment

Although harassment typically brings to mind inappropriate physical touching or verbal remarks in an in-person workplace, a hostile work environment certainly can exist in a remote workplace.

Cyberbullying via email, text, or private group chat, verbal bullying, and inappropriate comments or conduct during virtual meetings can and do occur, and can be actionable even when the conduct does not occur in a traditional workplace.

Employers should review (and revise, if necessary) their existing anti-harassment policies to ensure that they cover conduct expressed through virtual mediums and communication, in addition to training managers to look for signs of virtual/ remote harassment.

8. Use of Company Equipment

When an employee is provided with a company computer, guidelines should be established restricting its use to the employee and only for work-related matters. Further, employees should either be prohibited from using personal computers for work or strict protocols should be established, including installation of anti-virus and anti-malware software, prohibition against downloading documents, remote swiping, etc.

9. Limitations on Remote Work Functions

Issues, such as limitations where remote work can be performed, whether the employee can conduct work-related meetings at their remote work-site, etc., should be addressed.

10. Policy and Agreement

The above issues, along with others that are relevant (contact information, compliance with all company policies, mandatory attendance at meetings, paid time off, accessibility, insurance, and the ability to end or modify a remote-work arrangement) should be addressed both in a telecommute policy provided

to employees and a telecommute agreement entered into with employees, who are approved to work from home.

This article first appeared here

Melvin J. Muskovitz is Senior Counsel at Dykema. He brings several decades of experience in counseling and assisting employers with respect to issues arising under state and federal employment laws, assisting in drafting employment policies, preparing and enforcing confidentiality, non-solicitation and non-competition provisions, and negotiating employment and severance agreements, including with senior corporate executives. Would you like to comment?

4 Tips To A Stronger, More Attractive Retirement Plan

How to leverage your employee retirement plans to engage and retain talent

By Shaya Rose, HUB Group Retirement

According to one survey, Canadians will need to save roughly $1 million before they reach retirement age. Yet with many unable to save as much as they would like, 20% of Canadians are concerned they will outlive whatever savings they do have.

Enter: The savvy employer offering a modern retirement package. Not only can retirement plans be used to attract new talent, but they can also support current employees searching for guidance. Those nearing retirement may need direction on how to spend their retirement savings. Younger employees may need incentives to invest in the plan in the first place.

What’s more, employers looking to cut costs to ensure the sustainability of the plan may need to revisit their offerings. Group retirement plans must be regularly monitored and updated to achieve compliance and encourage employee participation.

Follow these best practices to achieve all your goals with your Canadian group retirement plan:

1. Offer tiered contribution design. If you’re looking to increase employee loyalty and retention, a tiered contribution plan can help.

Many employers have offered to match employee contributions up to a certain amount, such as 5% of salary. In a tiered contribution, employers match employee contributions up to 3% of salary in the first five years but may match contributions up to 4% or 5% in years six through 10 or beyond 10 years.

This increase in matching rewards employees for their loyalty and also encourages them to increase contributions over time. For many employees, this may be an incentive to stick around.

2. Introduce a deferred profit-sharing plan A deferred profit-sharing plan (DPSP) gives employees the opportunity to share company profits. A DPSP brings many benefits to the table, including

● A vesting period of up to two years, encouraging employees to stick with the organization.

● The company recovers 100% of its contribution if the employee leaves before the vesting period is complete.

● Tax savings for the employer, as contributions are paid pre-tax and are tax deductible.

● Employees who leave the company after the vesting period can convert their plan into a RRSP, tax-free, or another investment vehicle.

3. Include target-date funds as an option. Employees like easy options, and target-date funds are one of the simplest to use and understand. Target-date funds mix several types of investments, from stocks and equities to bonds. The asset allocation changes over time to become more conservative and risk-averse.

Usage of target-date funds in Canada has grown from 7% of workplace retirement plans in 2010 to 30% in 2020, and its popularity continues to grow. These funds make it easy for employees to hold a balance of investments to better prepare for the future – without investing a significant amount of time in those investments.

4. Support retirement planning As earners approach retirement age, the biggest shift is yet to come. Envisioning the retirement years can be a challenge for those who have spent their life working. They may have questions about taxes including

● What happens to retirement accounts in retirement?

● How do retirement accounts translate into income that lasts?

● What is most tax efficient?

● How do workplace retirement savings mesh with Canadian Pension Plan and Old Age Security benefits?

Organizations can provide added benefits to their employees by offering educational resources to guide them through their post-working years. These resources may include workshops, webinars, and even simple printed materials that offer support in managing income during retirement.

Shaya Rose is an account executive and production leader for HUB Group Retirement, with nearly 10 years of consulting experience in group retirement plans. Shaya has expertise in cross-border strategies for both Canadian group retirement plans and U.S. 401k plans. Would you like to comment?

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Informing,