Preparing for 2025: What HR and Payroll Professionals Need to Know

Preparing for 2025: What HR and Payroll Professionals Need to Know

Hosts: Steve Boese & Trish Steed

Guest: Tom Hammond, Managing Director, Strategy Partnership and Business Development at Paychex

In our latest episode, Trish and Steve brought back Tom Hammond for another year-end prep episode. They discuss everything you want to know about navigating end-of-year and new laws/regulations for 2025 payroll. In this episode, they cover:

• Year-End Preparation and Legislative Changes
• Regulatory Issues and Tax Credits
• State-Mandated Retirement Plans and Auto-Enrollment
• I-9 Verification
• Paid Leave and Minimum Wage Changes
• Year-End Checklist and Employee Engagement
• Paychex Flex Perks and Employee Benefits

Thank you for joining the show today!  Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Download the H3 HR Advisors 2025 Workplace Trends Report and start your year off right!

This episode of At Work in America is sponsored by Paychex, one of the leading providers of HR, payroll, retirement, and insurance solutions for businesses of all sizes. As we wrap up 2024, don’t you just love the feeling of checking off those pesky year-end tasks? That’s where the 2024 Year-End Payroll Checklist from Paychex comes in! Whether it’s important reporting deadlines, necessary tax forms, or compensation updates, it’s packed with all the essentials to help you breeze through those year-end must-dos. Download your free checklist today at paychex.com/awia.

Transcript follows:

Announcer 0:00
Welcome to At Work in America, sponsored by Paychex. At Work in America digs in behind the headlines and trends to the stories of real people making a difference in the world of work. And now here are your hosts, Steve Boese and Trish Steed.

Steve 0:27
Welcome to the At Work in America podcast, the longest running and top downloaded HR podcast for 15 years. We are so happy you’re with us today. It’s a very special day in our calendar. Trish, how are you I can’t wait for the show today.

Trish 0:42
I’m great, and I’m so excited. I mean this, this is the one I can’t remember. How many years have we done this show? But this is the time of year. We’re all thinking about winding things down and planning for the year ahead as well. So perfect timing for today’s episode.

Steve 0:57
Yeah, we’re super excited for the show today. We are welcoming back long time friend of the show with our show sponsor. Of course, Paychex has been so great to us for a number of years now. So we’re going to get to some of the great resources that Paychex has to help you through year end and considering all the changes that are happening legislatively, legislatively and in regulations for this year. So we do this show every year, but I don’t think it’s ever been as important and maybe as exciting as it is this year, we are so happy to welcome back Tom Hammond from Paychexfor the third year in a road Trish to discuss year end prep and how this year is going to look very different. Tom is the managing director strategy partnership and business development at Paychex. This is Tom’s new role, which he assumed in September of 2024 which he is responsible now for shaping and directing the execution of a new strategy that will deliver exceptional solutions to customers and new revenue streams for Paychex. More than 30 years of experience at Paychex Tom has been instrumental in the organization developing strong, intuitive and relevant HCM solutions for America’s small and mid sized businesses and future growth platforms for the company. Tom, welcome back to the HR Happy Hour. Great to see you.

Tom Hammond 2:15
I’m doing great. Steve and Trish, great to be with both of you and looking forward to spending some time today on what we see happening here in the next few months?

Steve 2:22
Yeah, absolutely. We were just talking for a minute or two pre show, and Tom even mentioned a couple of things going on, and we weren’t even aware of that. Would it could impact us in our small business? So this is such an important conversation for HR leaders, business leaders, business owners, small and mid sized companies, of which there are literally millions of them in America, so and many of them, you know, Paychex customers, of course. But, but even though the one the great thing we’ll talk about this, some Paychex makes so much resources available to everybody, the entire HR and business community, which is a wonderful thing. But before we get into some of that, Tom, let’s kick off with just maybe a few notes on how this here’s a little bit different. This is not just, Hey, here’s your checklist. Make sure your you know, W’s get out. It’s all still important. But there’s a lot of other things happening in our climate as we head into 2025.

Tom Hammond 3:18
Yeah. First of all, I love this episode as much as you do, because it really begins to bring the power of looking at what could be happening from a regulatory perspective, together with what I like to think is a common sense approach to year end for both your business and for the employers, employees that we that we all serve. So really looking forward to sharing two concepts today that’s a little bit different than the last couple of years, with the new administration that’s coming into the White House and so many new faces in leadership positions starting in January, it’s going to be a really complex year. So we want to share what we think is going to happen at the federal, state and local level on some key legislation that’s likely to pass, and what that means to businesses of all sizes, and then really spend just a few minutes talking about this, the Standard Year End housekeeping that, least from my perspective, is really critically important to catapult in and have a great start to 2025.

Trish 4:17
Well, thank you again for coming on. And like you mentioned, there are so many things that we need to be paying attention to. So this is one of those episodes I know people can listen once, once through, and then also go back to right over the next coming months and make sure that they’re not missing anything, because there’s a lot of information here. So why don’t we just dive in? I know we’ve got a lot to cover this week, actually, Paychex released the annual tax regulatory issues report that small and mid sized businesses need to be watching in 2025 why don’t we start there, and maybe we’ll just dive into some of the highlights and then dig deeper as we go along.

Tom Hammond 4:55
That sounds great. Trish, the thing I want to start with is like to get. Some some relevance here, from Why should you listen to what we have packaged? And I think what’s probably most important, and what many HR practitioners might not know about Paychex, is we have a team of well over 100 individuals who come to work every day, and their function is to have one on one dialogs with the federal the state and the local government, relation experts. So we really take that seriously to meet our objective of helping businesses succeed. So as you said, we released the top regulatory issues. I’ll hit a few of these. So the first one that I think was really brought to light during the recent presidential campaign are taxes and potential tax credits. So many of you guys probably remember the tax cuts and Jobs Act that passed back in 2017 those provisions are set to sunset at the end of 2025 and that really set off a larger tax debate. There’s probably two different ways to look at the provisions. I think what’s most relevant to HR practitioners is the potential for a mid year income tax withholding change. And I think every HR practitioner hates getting a call from an employee that says, Hey, I’ve been paid the exact same dollar amount all through the year, and now it’s changed. You messed up my payroll, and when you have a tax withholding change, you can guarantee that if you haven’t prepped your employees on the implications of that, you’re going to receive a lot of potential calls. So keep your eye on this. We expect this will happen. We’ll get some news on this in the first quarter to the first half of the year, on what may change. But for an HR practitioner, really, that’s about a mid year tax withholding change. Best practice for that is be proactive. You guys can probably close your eyes and think of the number of employees who plan their income tax withholding work with an accountant to get it completely accurate. And if that thing changes and they didn’t get in an update that that was coming, it’ll be irritating to them and start some with some morale issues. There’s some other pass through income tax deductions that will have an impact on LLCs. There’s some corporate tax rates. There’s some R and D expensing that’s probably more for your finance and accounting organization to really work through. But Be on the lookout for this tax and tax credits and what that may mean in 25 that’s first.

Trish 7:24
Could you talk a little bit about the tax credit piece? I know that’s one that a lot of small businesses and even mid sized businesses take advantage of some of those tax credits. And we’ve talked, I think, last year that you warned us this is coming. Any any idea now, if that is truly being sunsetted, are we still waiting on that one as well?

Tom Hammond 7:41
Still waiting, I would say the R and D portion of tax credit is one for organizations that do a lot of software development. That’s a great example. Be paying attention to that, that will be legislated, in our opinion, so just be watching and see this could be, actually could could become a moot point. It could come straight through as let’s extend if that’s the case, probably not a lot is going to change, and we can move to the next set of activities. So just be listening for what exactly will change.

Steve 8:13
Wonderful Tom, there’s some changes expected around things like retirement enrollment and retirement plans. What are some things we need to look out in that area?

Tom Hammond 8:24
Two things here, Steve, we fully expect that you will see more state mandated retirement plan requirements that will activate in 2025 so we expect Minnesota, Missouri and Nevada will likely be three states that introduce a minimum requirement for a state mandated retirement plan. And for those that aren’t familiar with these traditionally, they look like an IRA, where they’re essentially telling businesses of a particular size that if you’re not offering a retirement plan or a pooled employer plan, in essence, if you’re not offering a retirement savings vehicle, you need to and here’s the minimum requirement. There are dozens of states that now have these things on the books as either passed or coming legislatively. So be watching that, and that will be a real important one, especially in those three states where we expect it to come to start understanding how you’re going to communicate, how you’re going to budget, how you’re going to plan for some of these second starting in January on the first a new piece of legislation that passed with the secure two Dotto a few years ago will introduce a requirement that employers must Auto Enroll employees in any new 401 K or 403 B retirement plan that was established after December 29 of 2022 and that as an example, is a manner that is really trying to drive participation in retirement. And let’s face it, the states and the federal. Federal Government are really attempting to drive more of a mandatory plan for retirement, ensuring that there are dollars that are saved early and often to try to avoid the strain will come at the federal and state level, if folks are not do not have enough when that retirement date comes. Now, I can tell you with confidence that that auto enroll it sounds overwhelming, but I can tell you, we’re, we’re one of the largest retirement record keepers in the US. We have 120,000 businesses that we help save, help their employees save for a dignified retirement. We already have 70% of our base that has an auto enroll provision on it, and it’s it’s actually worked. So the the way that it’s worked in best practices, communicating it, ensuring that the employee knows this is going to happen, and that they know when it’s going to happen. They have the ability to opt out. But it’s really about educating the employee on the fact that this is coming, and here’s the benefits of it, and you’ve got an opportunity to opt out, if you wish, but it’s gonna get turned on, and in doing so again, 70% of our base has already got this plan. So be really proactive on this one as you head into the new year.

Trish 11:14
It sounds like this is another one of those areas too. Tom, it’s not just about if you’re in human resources or payroll, communicating this to your employees, you have to make sure you’re educated, right? Because yes, we’re going to be getting lots of questions. If we’re sitting in the HR function, people are going to be coming to us as they hear about it, right on the news, or wherever they might hear just bits and pieces. So I love the idea that you’re telling us be be proactive in looking into this, and then certainly for for Paychex customers, it’s made that much easier, right? Because you’re partnered with them on making sure they’re covered.

Tom Hammond 11:44
No doubt. And I think also our data would tell us that they’re in a five generational workforce. There are generations inside of that workforce that are looking for the employer to actually help them and educate them on how to save efficiently and effectively. They expect that that’s an employer’s responsibility, and we need to take that because you’re not going to change that perception. So really getting behind this and leveraging it, we offer a number of things inside of our base to just give the ability for individuals to participate in a discussion and ask questions. So real powerful opportunity for HR to make a difference in what is one of the most powerful benefits that an employee has access to?

Trish 12:29
Yeah, great point. Another one Tom that I know we’re already hearing from HR professionals that we speak with, as you said, new administration, things like E verify, could really be significantly impacted. Any thoughts there on what you all are seeing as you research that, yeah,

Tom Hammond 12:46
our our calls have increased around I nine verification, so it’s very clear you can you can see in the the new administration’s approach to border security and to ensuring that there is clarity on who’s actually here in the United States with the appropriate opportunities to work. I nine verification is going to get escalated, so make sure your house is in order. Is the real feedback that we’re providing to our employers that we’re working with? I think this is coming. I probably read a dozen articles in the last week about the fact that you really need to be paying attention to this, and you don’t want to have someone come in for an i nine verification audit and then find out that what you thought was happening wasn’t happening. And I just want to bring a couple of items to be thinking through. Remember that during COVID, we had a loosening of regulations here, where you could do things differently from an i nine perspective. So going back and spending time to ensure what do you have in house, where do you have it, and how was this data verified and validated is really critical, and our advice is, get ahead of this before someone walks in and says, I’m looking to look at your at your data. That’s a really important one, Trish.

Trish 14:10
I agree with that. I can remember just working in HR, at least as I was working we were doing, I nine audits every year on ourselves. So that’s just also a really good practice, even if you’re not thinking you’re going to, you know, get that call to definitely be ready for it and and if it found that you’re doing things in an inappropriate way and not documentating properly, then you are going to face fines and penalties and all sorts of things, right?

Tom Hammond 14:39
Yeah, and they’re not, they’re they’re not inconsequential. Let’s put it that way, very expensive.

Trish 14:45
It’s interesting. I remember having a discussion with with a CFO at one point saying, you know, I’m not going to go down with the ship, right? Like, we’ve got to do this properly. Because I think sometimes too you think like, oh, it’s, it’s these extra steps are not necessary. Or maybe another business leader is telling you they’re not necessary. They are and you can be held personally accountable in many cases. So yeah, it’s like, make sure you’re doing it properly. Make sure your company is doing it properly, and then you don’t have to do anything to worry about if you get audited. Couldn’t have said it better.

Steve 15:15
Tom you, you mentioned in the pre show something which I hadn’t heard of, and I should have, based on our position here at H3 HR Advisors is one of America’s small businesses, of which you serve hundreds of 1000s of them. You and the team at Paychex, but something legislatively that’s going on, or litigation around something called the beneficial owner regulation. And I hadn’t heard about this, Tom and you so you educated me pre show, but I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that on this show, so folks who may not be following as closely, which I wasn’t, can be made aware of what’s going on here and why it matters.

Tom Hammond 15:54
Yeah, it’s a FinCEN regulation boi or beneficial owner information was a piece of legislation that passed that was targeted to take effect by the end of the last week of December, early part of January, for every private organization with 20 or fewer employees. And essentially, the legislation was designed to ensure that the FinCEN transactions had an understanding of who the owners of each individual business are, and it was done in a manner to try to gage the legitimacy of financial transactions moving, not frankly, across the US, but also internationally. So it’s a handful of pieces of data, maybe 10 to 12 data elements. It’s not complicated. But it was a essentially a registry that said, for example, Tom Hammond is the beneficial owner of Tom Hammond Incorporated, and here’s the actual information on Tom. And it was meant to try to provide an opportunity to ensure that nothing inappropriate was being sent money laundering, things of that nature that would have had an impact on 32 million employers by the end of this month. And quite frankly, there was a lot, there was a lot of misinformation and lack of awareness in the under 20 space. Yeah, what happened earlier in the week is a had as a temporary non enforcement that has been assigned by a judge in Texas, so it’s basically on hold, but I would expect that we will begin to hear more from the government on what they’re going to do next. I would urge people to be watching this and pay attention to this and ensure if you, if you’re in a business with 19 or fewer, in a private organization, that you you come to paychex.com We’ve got some information on our site, and we’ll post that as part of the the show links that we’ll send to you after we finished.

Steve 17:56
Absolutely. Thank you.

Trish 17:58
Thank you for doing that. I know that. You know, again, it’s something that impacted us that we weren’t even aware of. So it just shows you, you know, ignorance is not an excuse, right? For non compliance. You have to, you have to constantly stay on top of these things and and it’s difficult to do when you’re especially under 20 employees, right? Because you’re probably doing a little bit of everything at that point.

Tom Hammond 18:18
So there’s no doubt, the amount of pressure to run a business in today’s regulatory environment, federal, state and local, is so complicated. You’re wearing so many different hats, and it’s really, really a challenge, which is why we try to make all of our research available, whether you use us or not. Certainly we would like you to be using us. But our mission is to help businesses succeed, and we’re going to share what we know to do just that.

Trish 18:43
Thank you so much. I know that you know AI, let’s shift gears a little bit. You know, artificial intelligence is something we’ve all been talking about ad nauseam sometimes, but there are some areas within artificial intelligence that we need to be watching for from a regulatory perspective. Could you maybe touch a little bit on that?

Tom Hammond 19:02
Yeah, I would say everyone has an opinion on what AI can do and what it can’t do. I think there are many that think that this could be a great opportunity to drive efficiency and effectiveness for businesses of all sizes. But one thing that’s really impactful, in order to have great AI, you have to have a large language model. And there’s really two things that we’re watching from a regulatory perspective. There is talk, both federal and state level, talk about large language models. There’s legislation that’s kind of being posed about whose large language model can you use? How big is it? And then that really kind of crescendos down to the impact to individuals whose data is in there, do I have the ability to get my data out of there? Pay real attention to this, especially on two different angles. The first is, if you got your own large language model, make sure you’re staying current with what these rules and regulations are actually driving, and if you’re leveraging a. National or regional provider, and they’re touting, AI, make sure you understand what they’re touting and why they feel they can make the claims that they’re making, because in the end, it’ll be very interesting to see what and how this is going to be litigated in the future. And some folks traditionally have said, Look, I just used what my provider actually gave to me, and I’m not sure that that’s going to fit or hold in the future. That is my opinion, and I would say be paying attention to that. It is only my opinion, but pay attention to that, because AI is being talked about in every nook and cranny of the industry coming out of HR tech. You guys know that was the story for the last 24 plus months, and there’s a lot of talk and a lot of hype. What is real? What is happening? Get close to that as an HR practitioner to ensure that you’re covered, and you know what’s happening.

Steve 20:53
And I know we’ve seen some I don’t know if it’s hit the state level yet, but certainly some localities have regulations around, particularly around job applications and the evaluation of an application and as assessment of candidates, and some duty to inform candidates that their application is going to be reviewed by AI and or even like an interview, right if you were going to be doing an interview, or Something like that. So there’s a lot of things swimming out there regulatory nature in this area.

Tom Hammond 21:26
Yes. Steve, great point. There’s eight new state laws that we’re tracking right now that we think will come somewhere between January and October. That is a perfect example of one of them. Yeah. Again, you can go to paychex.com, backslash, state dash resource. And again, I’ll put that in the link for your show notes. Paychex.com, forward slash state dash resources that’s available. Go to it. Look at it. We’ll be tracking this and communicating it, and then look for press releases in the future, when we see things come out. We’re very comfortable sharing that with the industry at large, but that’s a great example of AI regulation at the state level.

Trish 22:06
Yeah. Another thing that was highlighted in the report is around paid leave, and I know that many HR departments, of course, have to be managing this, in addition to paid sick time and so forth, anything that they should be looking at or paying attention to for next year on that?

Tom Hammond 22:26
Yeah, quite honestly, Trish, this is what I’m having a hard time even keeping up on, because it is changing so rapidly. At the state level, there’s 40 jurisdictions right now that currently have some type of paid leave legislation in place, whether it’s paid sick and safe leave or paid family leave. These things are literally changing week to week. Our compliance organization sends out an internal document to us every Saturday morning. Every Saturday morning, you can basically place a bet on the fact that there’s a new one that comes in. These are really complicated to get your arms around and pay attention to these, especially given the COVID environment that we’re still operating in with businesses that have individuals that are working all across the United States, and it’s now it’s HR responsibility to make sure that we’re remaining compliant in each one of these, whether I have an office sitting there or not, in essence, you do, because you’ve got somebody in that location that’s actually getting paid in that state or local.

Trish 23:31
Yeah. Do you know, what do you think, or in your opinion, is causing kind of that uptick in the number of states that are legislating this right now? It doesn’t seem like it was that way a year or two ago.

Tom Hammond 23:42
Yes, I would say it probably started really ramping up in the last 15 months. And I do think that it is based on family leave. There are so many things that impact an individual family, an ability to have a child, to adopt a child with individual families who now have multi generations living under the same roof, with your parents living with you, with your children living with you. There’s a lot of time and energy that is being spent to ensure that individual employee rights are being given equal access and to have something that’s more regulated, to ensure that when an individual comes and says, I need to do this with my parent versus I need to do this with my child, that they’re treated in many ways equally. Again, my opinion on that, but I think there’s a lot more coming here. And again, like I said, this one is complicated, just because of, once you go to that state level, and the Federal the federal level is is, candidly, quite straightforward. Once you get to the state level, it becomes much more complicated, especially if you’re in multi jurisdictional I’m laughing.

Steve 24:57
I’m laughing a little talk, because I think at the federal level there’s like, no rules, right? Essentially, yes. MLA, but beyond that, there’s hardly any right guarantees, right leave in the United States, which is sorry for another day and a different exactly, entirely. But yes, that’s a good go now, so the States, but in many, minimum wage is another great example. We’ll talk about minimum wage as well. Minimum wage is a great example where there’s been no movement on federal minimum wage in what 20 years, 25 years, something like that long time, but yet, almost every state has action minimum wage, and many localities have as well. And in fact, there’s probably another several dozen changes around minimum wages as we head into 25 as well.

Tom Hammond 25:39
Actually 70. So there’s seventy. Can you even believe that 70 minimum wage increases at the state and local level will take effect January 1? And when we really break this one down for us, it’s pay attention to wage compression. So what is your practice for wage? Are you differentiating your pay today by tenure, by performance or something else. Think of the practical implications of 70 minimum wage increases across an organization that’s nationwide. The bottom of that range for pay is moving up, and unless you do something the top is staying the same. That is really important for you to understand what that means to your employee base, from a morale, from an engagement, from an overall cost perspective. Be careful here, in action here could create unnecessary flight risk, and that a someone that’s been here for a significant period of time that’s made and earned their way through to a particular place in a wage range overnight, has somebody who just started, who has significantly less experienced that’s now much closer to their wage. That’s a real challenging issue for any business, because now you’re talking about increasing costs that are that are legislated to you, and then making it even more increases if you need to do something with your top individuals, the very least, you need to ensure you’ve got your HR talk track and that you understand how you’re communicating, especially to your key employees, so that you don’t lose them.

Trish 27:20
Thank you for saving that. Because I think that’s one of the things in HR, we kind of it ebbs and flows as to how often you have people kind of coming in and they they don’t just want a simple answer. They want a very detailed answer of where they are in a pay grade, for example. And you have to be able to say how you got to that point and why now people are kind of pushing up against them. So yeah, I think this is one of those good opportunities too. We talk a lot about HR working with, you know, your finance team. Sometimes there are disconnects. There perfect opportunity to be proactive and go to that finance team and sit down ahead of time and come up with the talk track together too. I think if you do that in in tandem, you’re going to have a better outcome as well. So yeah, great advice.

Steve 28:05
There’s been, you know, quite a few things we’ve talked about that are a little bit unique or specific to the environment we’re in going into 2025, with a change in administration, a likely change in many regulations, maybe lesser regulations in some areas, perhaps more in other areas, but there’s still, like some perpetual things, right? That organizations really need to make sure they’ve got in line in order, right? Checklist is a great way to do this, and Paychex has published their 2025, 2024, into 2025, year end payroll checklist, which we’ll link to in the show notes as well. But maybe just as we don’t have to go through every item on the checklist, it’s quite expensive, because I’m looking at it right now, but maybe just for folks, a couple of the key reminders you’d love to share at year end to help folks get really prepared for year end and then year begin.

Tom Hammond 28:55
Yeah, to me, as I think about getting ready for the holiday season, I’m trying to get my own house in order. Do I have all the gifts I need? Have I done all the things that I need to when somebody shows up? Do I have a gift that I’m expecting to give them? And when I think of year end at an employee and employer perspective, it’s exactly the same logic. So when you look at this, you to me. I’ve always looked at this at at two dimensions. One is the business itself. So do you have your state, your federal employer ID numbers, your addresses, your names. Have you done anything in your business throughout the course of 2024 that changes anything that your payroll application, your payroll provider is going to use to report your information to the appropriate regulatory agencies? If so, just just spend a few minutes and make sure that that part of your house is in order, and then really use this opportunity to talk to your employees and have a really meaningful discussion, ensure that they are leveraging the mobile capabilities or the ability to change information. There are a lot of us at this point in time that receive our W twos electronically. Right, and there are still many that are going to receive a paper copy of a w2 that’s sent from an employer or is sent from a payroll and HCM provider, you need to confirm that the employee’s information, including their full name, like who’s gotten married or had a HR event, social security numbers, their address, ensure all that’s accurate and give the opportunity for the employee to confirm his or her information is accurate.

Tom Hammond 30:27
Second look at the HR policies. Did you change anything in 2024 that has, in any way, shape or form a profound impact on end of year? Make sure if you do that your handbook is up to date and last, and probably really important, from my perspective, is that employee conversation, and I want to reference I read a great article recently from Forbes about the great stay. Was a fascinating article about how employees aren’t necessarily happy or engaged, and if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quit rates that just came out, they dropped below 2% and that’s the first time they’ve been that low since 2020 and we’re seeing a similar trend inside of our data that we report in what we call our small business employment watch data. So people are staying put for the most part. 65% of the workers today are reporting that they feel stuck, and that’s according to a survey we recently reviewed with Glassdoor in October. So year end? What’s the point of that? Well, year end is the great time to communicate the value of the benefits that you’re offering. As many employees don’t have a clue about the breadth of benefits that they have available to them. From you as that HR organization, that’s a really challenging scenario. And every time I talk to an HR practition, they always tell me the same thing, it’s almost impossible to create a benefits package that meets the needs of everyone. And I wish I had a way to ensure that every employee knew what they had available to them in an efficient and effective way.

Tom Hammond 32:06
Last I would say that there is an opportunity to remind the employees of the investment that the business has made in them, and that can be done in lots of different ways, but many employees forget the fact that you may have sent them to training, you may have brought them into training. You have you may have helped them get to another level in their career through a promotion during the course of the year, you’re producing the employer match for a retirement plan, the employer match for benefits plans. Those dollars are impactful, and finding a way through either a total reward statement or something as simple as that, to really provide that information back and then, do not forget that we have multiple generations in the workforce today that want to be working for an employer that is making a difference. So how do you actually just that’s not that’s not about cash or total rewards. It’s about what you are doing as a business in your community. Are how many jobs are you filling in a community or across the United States? As an example, are you providing an opportunity for a day for an employee to actually volunteer? And where did they get that’s their choice. What kind of product or service are you producing, and how does that fuel the engine of the economy or meet the needs of special needs individuals like I have in my family. Those are really powerful stories. They don’t cost you anything to actually think about how you promote your business and what you have done in the course of the year. And I personally would say, like many HR practitioners, we don’t take credit for a lot of the hard work that is done over a multi year or 12 month period. Think like a marketer in this respect and position, what you have done from January to today and how that’s made a difference on your business, and find a way to take the what has changed, and give to the employees the impact that’s had.

Steve 34:04
Yeah, well, said Tom, I think it’s a great time to celebrate, acknowledge, recognize, right, take that stock in what you’ve done, what at both as individuals, right and as part of the team and part of the greater organization, and how you’ve made an impact in your local area and maybe even the broader area, right? It’s well said. I always think it’d be cool if, like, companies did, maybe some do, I don’t know, but like, you know how the end of the year, some of the services like Spotify, for example, will send you that, yeah, here’s your Spotify wrapped, and here’s your whole year of listening to things like, we could do that for employees and for our companies, right? You know, ABC Company wrapped, and we did, worked on these projects, and we made this impact, and we, you know, provided services in our community. And you personally, you learned XYZ things, and you got it, you got a bonus, because you were so awesome, right? Or all the things that might happen during the course of the year, and tied that up with a nice bell. Be really cool. Yeah, be a good thing.

Tom Hammond 35:00
I mean, let’s face it, we’re we are always looking to retain the best talent that we have. No matter what size your business is, how long you’ve been in business. You know who your critical few are, and how do you communicate with them, but also, how do you see those next critical few evolving through your organization, and how are you building that flywheel effect to keep them engaged and educated and learning and growing, you’re we’re doing a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. Get your house in order with that as well, and be able to turn that into the great talk, Steve, that you just did. I couldn’t have said that better.

Steve 35:34
I’m gonna work on that over the break. Trish, that could be like our next little product.

Trish 35:38
Good.

Steve 35:39
I think the guys at Paychex will beat me to it. Nathan and the guys will be wrapped. They’ll beat me to it.

Trish 35:48
I mean, we just, we just had our strategy meeting this past week. And you know, for a company of three people, we are very good at being hard on ourselves, but we’re not very good at telling ourselves how, how how well we’re doing right when we like, we could have a huge thing happen, and we don’t really celebrate it or even acknowledge it sometimes. So yeah, I mean, it’s easy to fall into the day to day kind of work that you’re doing. I love your point. I wrote down think, like a marketer Tom, because I think then when you do that at a year end, you could actually have a marketing campaign for HR, where maybe in the in the next coming year, address each like one a month, right? That could be your message coming out. And whether that’s I remember working at jobs where, like, no one knew, we had sabbaticals, for example, well, once we started saying, Now again, you don’t want everyone to leave at the same time, but it was such a really nice benefit for people to think they could go off and learn something and have time and do something they’ve always wanted to do, or maybe it’s tuition reimbursement. Some people don’t realize their companies offer these things. So Exactly, yeah, being being like a marketer, and really it’s almost like re recruiting your team continuously. Right? Exactly, right.

Steve 36:58
And real quick. Tom I want to let you talk a little bit before we wrap about an element here that Paychex stepped into really importantly this year, won a top Product of the Year Award for this product this year, which is your Paychex Flex Perks product. And it’s not it’s not really about making a commercial for the product, but it’s about why you guys did it and important things it makes available to literally millions of employees and small businesses around the country. So let’s talk about that for a minute.

Tom Hammond 37:28
I appreciate you framing that, because I don’t want to make this an infomercial about Paychex. This is a this is a discussion with HR practitioners, but the why behind Perks to us was really simple when we took feedback directly from the employees that work for the clients that we serve, one of the key elements that they said they wanted was access to benefits. And we work with an awful lot of small and medium sized businesses under 50 employees that don’t offer a benefits package, and when you then go speak to the employer, what you find is concerns about cost. I don’t have the individual firepower to go and do all the research that I would need to actually introduce benefits. And when you talk to folks over 50, I hear the story that I’ve already alluded to, which is I’ll never get enough benefits to meet the needs of my entire base. I do the best I can with the resources I have. So we attempted to create a product that could fit perfectly in both of those camps, and we created Paychex Flex Perks. It’s basically a curated digital marketplace of lifestyle and voluntary benefits that run the gamut from everything from critical illness and short term disability to long term care to pet insurance to earned wage, access to a bank card, to financial wellness and access to get loans through all through third parties. And what we have seen is that we have brought millions of eyeballs to our flex perks dashboard, and we’ve had a significant volume of employees at businesses across all spectrums, under five, employees, under 20, under 50, well over 1000 that have bought something inside of that market pace, and they’re funding it themselves through payroll deduction. So the key point here is you can expand if you already have a benefits package, you can expand on what you have, because I can guarantee you that I have a full team of people that are looking to introduce the next set of benefits that we read about, research about and ask employees what they want. But you don’t have to pay for them as an employer. You can offer that to them, and there is clearly a demonstrated track record here that the employees just want. I want to know that it’s a good partner. I want to know what it means in simple English, and give me the ability to budget how much I pay each pay period to cover the cost. It’s been a good winner for us with really strong early adopt. Option, but that’s the net net here, and you can capture more information at paychex.com and what’s sitting there for that?

Steve 40:06
It’s a great way to sort of kind of think about some of the things we’re talking about. You know that that total value proposition that employers can provide to their employees, and this allows many, many, many more employers to offer even more, which is a great thing to think about as we as we wind down the year?

Trish 40:22
Yeah, well, that’s also one of the things that helps an employee feel like they’re being cared for. I mean, even if they’re, even if they’re spending their own money on something, but the fact that you’re making that easier, you’re taking that pressure off of them, that all that research, that you’re saving them time doing. I mean, again, it just, it’s, it shows to me, you’re in a more caring relationship versus, you know, just sort of they don’t understand their value and why they’re there. It’s something they struggle with.

Tom Hammond 40:49
I’m really excited about the feedback we’ve received, both from employers and from their employees. And when we take calls from employers that ask us questions, it’s really, really powerful when we’re able to say, look what we expected to see. We saw what we didn’t think we would see, we’re also seeing and it’s both of them are positive. When you look at businesses with more than 50 employees that are required to offer a set of benefits, what we found is there’s a large subset that just introduced the benefits that have to be there. And this is now an incredible supplement to that that didn’t require any work on HR behalf, and they can actually offer them to the employees and overnight, you now have that year end dialog to say, hey, during the course of this year, I’ve now added 17 different product offerings that you have access to, right? No issue at all with the fact that I’m going to fund it myself. None it’s these are things that many employees didn’t even know existed, and we brought a very simple way to actually shop and buy to their table.

Steve 41:51
Yeah, it’s great stuff, and great, a great way to show, like we said, you, you’re, you’re stepping up for employees in a time when employees are looking for these things, financial wellness, I think so. Head insurance for gosh, they exist. Is so remarkably popular and and requested. It’s, it’s something that many, many employees are seeking. So, all right, Tom, this has been great stuff. And what’s even better is so many of the resources we’ve talked about, the state resources, the year end checklist, right? Everything you need to get your organization ready for end of year. Enroll forward all out there on paychex.com We’ll put some links exactly some of these detailed resources in the show notes as well. And I just want to say Tom, thank you once again for being here with us, helping us understand some of the big, important issues and help us just get excited and enthused for for a year end, and, more importantly, for a year begin, right in a positive way. So thank you so much. Tom, it’s been great to see you again.

Tom Hammond 42:50
You’re very welcome, Steve and Trish, great to see you as always, and appreciate the opportunity. I wish you and all the listeners a very Happy Holidays.

Trish 42:58
Thank you.

Steve 42:59
Same to you. Tom, awesome. Great stuff. Trish, great stuff. Tom’s my favorite, right? You know, don’t tell those other people I say that.

Trish 43:06
I know, right? No, we start and end the year with Tom. So it’s, it’s a good place to be.

Steve 43:11
I love it. So thank you to Tom again. Thanks to all our friends at Paychex. We’ll put all the links in the show notes, as we said, thanks everybody for listening, and maybe, if this is the last show you listened to on the network this year. Happy holidays from us. And thank you once again. Go to hrhappyhour.net for all the show archives. Like and subscribe. My name is Steve Boese, for Tom Hammond, for Trish Steed, thank you so much. We’ll see you next time, and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai