Employers are continually expected to take a keen interest in providing workplace perks. This helps businesses prosper by attracting, retaining and motivating talent. Remote working schemes and free food and drink are popular workplace benefits, but are these sufficient to please the younger generations? Employers must fulfil their duty of care, but with millennials and now centennials known to desire workplace initiatives that are flexible, transparent, fast and mobile, employers could find their responsibilities extend to protecting staff employee wellbeing outside work.
The implementation of carefully-formulated wellbeing strategies in UK workplaces was recently reported to have grown by 20 percent within the past year, according to REBA’s 2017 Employee Wellbeing Research, and that trend looks likely to grow.
But why should employers care, and how far should the duty of care extend? Some might argue that providing paid employment with fair workplace policies and a comfortable working environment should be enough to keep workforces satisfied.
By extending their duty of care to cover the financial wellbeing of the workforce, employers can increase their appeal to new talent, retain existing personnel and ensure the best possible engagement from their workforce. Research from debt charity Step Change shows that financial troubles have a significant impact on mental health with 5,000 users of the charity’s online debt counselling service over one year showing signs of anxiety or depression.
With experts at Manpower Group predicting that by 2020 millennials (now aged 21-35) and Gen Z (aged 20 and younger) will make up more than half of the entire workforce, the financial wellbeing of employees has never been a more important factor.
These studies show that yes, now is the time to disrupt the way people are paid. While monthly payroll works for the employer, it doesn’t always serve the worker. Beyond the demanding expectations and requirement for instant gratification within younger generations, employers must acknowledge the financial burdens that can so quickly intensify, even for the steady earners.
Removing the struggle of individuals waiting long periods for pay that they have already earned no longer has to rely on businesses changing their payroll cycles and risking cashflow dilemmas. With Hastee Pay’s solution, businesses can embrace giving workers instant access to the wages that they have already earned with zero impact on companies’ cashflow.
Emerging Technologies and Disruption
In the last decade, we’ve seen numerous businesses appear from nowhere to challenge traditional conventions and as consumers, we’ve welcomed them.
How much are the emerging technologies influencing our lives? Uber has revolutionised travel in cities by simplifying booking or hailing a cab. Deliveroo took away the hassle of ordering a takeaway. Challenger banks are modernising the traditional banking system, and this probably wouldn’t be happening had PayPal not overhauled the way we pay and transfer funds.
Emerging technologies are set to reshape the way businesses operate too. Take payroll, for example. The traditional pay cycle simply doesn’t fit comfortably with the way we live. It’s an area that is ripe for disruption.
The wellbeing, attendance and retention of the worker is becoming increasingly important to businesses today. If used in the right manner the new emerging technologies can help businesses to take steps to alleviate pressures in their workers’ personal lives, they can leverage these workplace perks to reduce the spend on recruiting and staff turnover.
More than 50 percent of all organisations globally have difficulty retaining some of their most valued employee groups, according to a recent Willis Towers Watson study. Research by Kronos and Future Workplace finds that 87 percent of HR leaders consider improved retention a critical or high priority for the next five years.
So, what should businesses look for in emerging technologies that are on offer? With so many new emerging technologies for businesses, it’s difficult to know what’s worth investing in. Factors such as integration, scalability and compliance must be taken into consideration.
Open APIs & microservices are essential attributes in any disruptive and emerging technology. Avoiding monolithic blocks of code will reduce the time and cost spent getting the integration right, avoiding the technical debt traditionally accrued through work that must be redone repeatedly.
The ability to scale up easily is paramount, therefore a worthwhile technology must incorporate autoscaling – available through any technology built with microservices from AWS, Google or MS Azure.
While there are plenty of emerging technologies that are designed to help businesses be better at integration, security and scalability, it is essential that those ones also deliver a return on investment, adding true value for both the organisation and the worker.
With Hastee Pay’s solution, businesses can embrace giving workers instant access to the wages that they have already earned with zero impact on companies’ cash flow.
Hastee Pay’s innovative technology is buzz-worthy by disrupting how workers are paid forever.
