Lifeways

Lifeways Group is one of the UK’s leading providers of support services. Their national network operates a range of services including supported living, residential care, short breaks and respite care. They have 11,500 employees spread

across the UK, of which many are remote workers in the community and therefore are not office-based. Lifeways were running a monthly payroll, delivering payslips via the self-service function of their HR software for 2,000 staff with self-service login details, and printing and posting the remaining 9,500 payslips – sometimes to home addresses.

Lifeways’ Direct of HR Operations, Alex James, could see that they were spending a lot of time and money delivering payslips each month.

Their payroll manager spent 3 days per month producing the printed payslips and had problems with employees not updating their home address details when moving to a new house, leading to payslips being delivered to the wrong address. Alex considered using their existing HR platform for all staff, but purchasing an additional 9,500 licenses for the HR software was cost-prohibitive. So Lifeways began a procurement process to find a third party solution.

It was essential that the portal selected was easy to use and, as Lifeways did not have email addresses for all their employees, they also needed an easy way for staff without an email address on file to register their account.

PayDashboard was selected as the payslip portal based on the ease of use for Lifeways’ employees.

Having been attracted by PayDashboard’s clean, intuitive interface, Lifeways were particularly impressed by the simple way that an employee with no email address in the payroll system could still activate their payslip account – a feature not offered by many of the other providers they considered. This, along with the level of implementation support offered, led to PayDashboard being awarded the contract.

In total, Lifeways have calculated the project savings as over £100,000 per year, including the costs of labour, stationery, printing and postage.

Following the implementation of PayDashboard, Lifeways also noticed a drop in the number of HR helpdesk queries regarding payslips.

They also encountered a surprise benefit when the Payroll Manager was on leave. The Director of HR Operations, with no previous experience of payroll systems or using PayDashboard, was able to upload the file and deliver all the payslips on time, telling PayDashboard “If I can do it, anyone can do it!”

This means the Payroll Manager no longer has to plan her annual leave around ‘payslip day’ and knows her colleagues can handle the task if she is out of the office.