Canadian Payroll Reporter

News Published 12 times a year by Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. Subscription rate: $179 per year Customer Service Tel: (416) 609-3800 (Toronto) (800) 387-5164 (outside Toronto) Fax: (416) 298-5106 E-mail: carswell.customerrelations @thomsonreuters.com Website: www.carswell.com One Corporate Plaza 2075 Kennedy Road Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1T 3V4 Director, Carswell Media Karen Lorimer Publisher John Hobel (on leave) Managing Editor/Acting Publisher Todd Humber Editor Sheila Brawn sbrawn@rogers.com Assistant Editor Mallory Hendry Marketing Manager Mohammad Ali mm.ali@thomsonreuters.com (416) 609-5866 Circulation Co-ordinator Keith Fulford keith.fulford@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9585 Payroll Reporter Can R Can R adian adian a www.payrollreporter.com ©2014 Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-7798-2810-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher (Carswell, a Thomson Reuters business). Return Mail Registration # 1522825 | Return Postage Guaranteed Paid News Revenue Toronto Canadian Payroll Reporter is part of the Canadian HR Reporter group of publications: • Canadian HR Reporter — www.hrreporter.com • Canadian Occupational Safety magazine — www.cos-mag.com • Canadian Payroll Reporter — www.payroll-reporter.com • Canadian Employment Law Today — www.employmentlawtoday.com • Canadian Labour Reporter — www.labour-reporter.com See carswell.com for information from semi-monthly to biweekly. "Our parent company, Great- West Life went biweekly," she says. "Some of our employees on the Reality Advisor side actu- ally exist on the Great-West Life payroll and so we didn't want pay stubs coming in on different days to the same branch all the time. Helping them (the employees) to understand which payroll they are actually on is enough of a challenge, so we needed to stay in sync with what the parent company was doing." She says the process took a lot of time and planning and re- quired her to work in the back- end of the company's payroll sys- tem to ensure the correct coding changes were made for the move. She says previous experi- ence working in data manage- ment helped her understand the inner workings of the company's Ceridian payroll system. "We started looking at that back-end stuff really early and getting all of that set up so that we wouldn't have that issue come year end." Explaining the change to em- ployees was another vital part of successfully making the switch, Pronchuk says. "Communica- tion was huge in this change. It was about 50 per cent of the project." The payroll department at- tached information to pay stubs, sent out e-mails and posted on the company's internal website where employees could review questions and answers. Payroll made sure documents explaining the change were translated into both French and Spanish for French-speaking employees in Quebec and Span- ish-speaking workers in Texas. In addition, Pronchuk says she directly communicated with staff through online information sessions. "Because of how our com- panies are situated — we own buildings all over the place with one or two staff here, one or two staff there — we couldn't have group meetings where we could explain the whole thing to em- ployees sitting in a room all at once. Instead, I built a webinar that people could sign up for. We had a half-hour session on several different days where they could log in and see the slides and I was live talking to them, so that they could ask any questions they had," she says. For workers on night shifts who could not attend the live we- binars, Pronchuk created a pre- recorded session. "If they had any questions after, they could follow up with their manager who could follow up with me." Pronchuk says she put so much effort into communica- tion because it was important to help employees understand the change. "We are changing their entire livelihood. They are now going to have to reschedule how they are paid, reschedule how (money is) coming out of their bank account, how that is going to impact their lifestyle." When it came time for the switchover this past January, Pronchuk says she was pleas- antly surprised by how smoothly it went. She says payroll staff had cleared their calendars and were waiting for calls from employees with questions or concerns. "By noon on D-Day, as I like to call it, we did not have one phone from pAYROLL on page 3 Biggest challenge keeping on top of changes call or e-mail. I called our Corpo- rate Resources department and asked them if they had any con- cerns or questions from anybody and they said, 'No. Why?' And I said, 'We went live today. Today was their first pay cheque.' 'Oh yeah,' they said. 'Good job.' We went and celebrated after that." At the same time Pronchuk and her team were implement- ing the new pay cycle, they had to deal with a new acquisition the company had made and carry out normal year-end functions. Pronchuk says proper planning and good teamwork helped them cope with the challenges. "I have a really good team. Keeping them involved and my- self involved in what was com- ing, what the next tasks were. A good task listing is where we started, brainstorming on every- thing, on everyone's thoughts, on what needed to be looked at, be changed, (then) assigning the duties appropriately based on skill, (and) making sure that the staff is appropriately assigned the tasks that are upcoming." Pronchuk says one of the big- gest challenges in payroll is stay- ing on top of everything happen- ing in the profession. She tries to read as much payroll news as she can, but says with her busy job there is not always time to digest all the information from differ- ent payroll sources. Pronchuk says one thing she does to keep abreast of the big changes is to attend the Cana- dian Payroll Association's year- end legislation updates. "It is so helpful because you are then removing yourself from all the other distractions (at work) and you can focus on just that emerg- ing change to make sure that you are at least on top of it annually if not right away." To be successful in payroll, Pronchuk says passion and dedi- cation are fundamental, as is be- ing comfortable with change. "If you are the kind of person who doesn't like change and that's not interesting to you, then it prob- ably isn't the profession for you because you have to always be able to make the change, under- stand the change, implement the change and be okay with it con- stantly changing." While Pronchuk did not start out her working life planning to be a payroll professional, she says she is happy she followed that path. "I just fell into it like most of the people I know in payroll. There are not very many people out there that I've actually come across who say, 'Oh yeah, I actually went and took courses because I wanted to be a payroll professional,'" she says. "I definitely hear more so that somebody quit or they needed somebody in that department, so they moved them along into there and closed their eyes and ran away and hoped everything would be OK." She says she is pleased employ- ers are now seeing it as a profession and people are setting out in their careers to be payroll professionals. "You used to look at ads and they would say they needed a payroll processor, a few duties they needed to do and whatnot, nothing ever about needing the education or the skills behind that role. Now if you look at ads from employers, you are seeing more the actual PCP (the association's Payroll Compliance Practitioner) or CPM (Certified Payroll Manager) noted in the ad. It is huge. It makes me feel proud to be in this profession." September 2014 | CPR

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