Overcome Busyness to Make Work More Meaningful and ...

Overcome Busyness to Make Work More Meaningful and Improve the

Customer Experience

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Welcome to Hustle Culture, where everyone is always trying to do more. Where the inspiration and light from the sun inspires 18-hour days, cucumber flavored water, and a lifting session at the gym keep you pumped.

Not sounding like your idea of heaven? You’re not alone. Turns out 60% of people are unhappy at work and their daily grind. So, who is actually hustling?

“ The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers, and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, a software company.

“It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.”

“Never once at the start of my workweek — not in my morning coffee shop line; not in my crowded subway commute; not as I begin my bottomless inbox slog — have I paused, looked to the heavens and whispered: #ThankGodIt’sMonday.”

E R I N G R I F F I T H

Turns out the Founder and former CEO of WeWork should have hustled a little less…

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Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.

According to research in 2020 by the staffing firm Robert Half, almost 70% of professionals working remotely started working on weekends, while 45% said they were working more hours during the week.

70% 45%of professionals working remotely started working

on weekends

of professionals said they were working more hours

during the week

H U S T L E C U LT U R E

M E A N I N G : It’s a lifestyle where career has become such a priority in your life or the environment where you work that those other aspects of being human — such as hobbies, family-time and self-care — often take a back seat.

Where did that lead?

To the Great Resignation.While it’s true that people will always be looking for what’s next, the Great Resignation stands out both because of its numbers—an estimated 38 million U.S. workers quit their jobs in 2021—and because so much of that activity could be linked to a similar cause: burnout.

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According to a 2021 survey of 1,000 U.S. workers by the software company Limeade, 40% left their old job because they were burned out, while 20% said it was because they felt undervalued or because they lacked flexibility.

Even the charitable view of side hustling as an opportunity for personal growth leaves out the fact that it’s a second job.

As the journalist Oliver Burkeman writes in his 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Manage-ment for Mortals, “busyness has been rebranded as ‘hustle’—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme; the pressure to fit ever-increasing quan-tities of activity into a stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time.”

Companies are working to address this by em- phasizing the importance of mental health and enhancing their mental health benefits. In many cases, they’re also offering more time off, including company-wide wellness days, where operations across the company shut down for a day to give employees a break.

But while these are welcome steps, they don’t fully address the problem so many are facing—they just have too much to do.

In 2022 and beyond, companies will have to figure out how they can balance the needs of their busi-ness with the needs of their employees, specifically the need for less hustling.

Often, this process starts by requiring you to reexamine the technology you’re using. From there, you can update your processes to make life easier for both your employees and your customers.

40% of 1,000 U.S. workers left their old job because of burn out.

20% of 1,000 U.S. workers left their old job because they felt undervalued or because they

lacked flexibility.

A typical Hustle Instagram post. Influencers are finally being called out for their fake lifestyles, props and paying agencies to take photos of them in a fake first class.

When businesses don’t invest in the latest technol-ogy, processes can become more convoluted as employees end up relying on patchwork solutions or workarounds. This can lead to an overwhelming amount of manual administrative work spread out across multiple platforms, multiple integrations, and multiple streams of data.

Integrated technology can make day-to-day tasks much simpler and easier. And while keeping up-to-date with the latest software and versions may be challenging, the downsides are far greater.

Let’s consider all of this from the perspective of payroll.

Without a comprehensive payroll management solution, like Workday, it’s almost as though you are running administrative tasks blindfolded and unable to see beyond the growing burden of tasks.

You don’t have a single source for truth

You lack visibility into your global spend

You have less access, less confi-dence about compliance, and less time for deep work

If you’re serious about addressing the amount of busyness for your payroll team—and the rest of your employees—reevaluating your technology will unlock your potential for streamlining your processes. But it’s just the first step.

Reevaluating Your Technology—The First Step to Making Work More Meaningful

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It can’t be overstated that streamlining compli-cated processes is hugely important. But making certain tasks more efficient won’t by itself make life easier for your payroll employees—not if those tasks are still part of their to-do list. While new technology might make a task more efficient, it still takes time.

If you’re expecting your employees to do more just because they have better tools, you might actually be adding to the hustle they’re already feeling. And that’s only going to make your prob-lems worse.

If you want your payroll team—and any team, really—to feel less stressed, you have to be willing to take work off their plate.

And that means finding an experienced partner that can help.

The right payroll partner will scale with your needs and have the capacity and resources to help you with everything from simple processing and payment to fully managed payroll support.

What this means for your business is that every important payroll task gets done, but your in-house team isn’t stuck doing it all themselves. Finally, they can reclaim their time for work that is more strategic, human, and meaningful.

Give Your Team More Time— Find a Service Partner

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Exceed Your Customers’ Expectations

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When you improve your technology and free your employees to focus on what matters, eventually your customers feel the benefits – improving their overall experience as well.

For your payroll team, their customers are the rest of your employees.

When payroll teams are burdened with dated technology and overwhelmed by the demands of routine manual tasks, there’s a significantly higher risk of errors. And that’s the last thing you want when you’re talking about peoples’ pay-checks. When you make a mistake in payroll, your employees are going to feel it.

Alleviating busyness for your payroll team puts them in a better position to serve the rest of your employees.

But creating a good customer experience is about more than just meeting expectations. Think about your own experiences as a customer. The moments that stand out are likely those where someone went beyond what you expected.

When your payroll team isn’t suffocating under their regular administrative work, there’s more time for making payroll better through payroll cards and earned wage access.

With the right partner, these solutions are easy to implement. But if your employees are maxed out, even a simple implementation can feel like too much. Actively combating busyness within your organization will create opportunities for your payroll employees to work on delivering a superior customer experience.

Change Takes Courage

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No matter who you are, time is one of the single most valuable commodities. Every minute matters and for many of us it feels like we have more to do than we could ever actually accomplish.

Since 2021, companies have been all too aware of the consequences of burnout, but how many of them are actively taking steps to make hustling a thing of the past?

In 2022 and beyond, leaders should be looking at what they can do to give employees more time for work that is meaningful and human, especially in those areas like payroll, where replacing knowl-edgeable experts who’ve left the company can be a challenge. Making these kinds of changes doesn’t just help your employees, it enables them to concentrate more on what matters to help your customers by creating the potential to deliver a superior customer experience, regardless of who that customer is.

Adapting isn’t always easy, especially when the culture around you has embraced busyness as a badge of honor.

Resolving to do things differently begins with an act of courage, even before reassessing your technology. This might require some sacrifices in the short term, but are worth it if each day your helping your employees and customers make the day more doable in the long term.