Insights from Ralph Lauren: Elevating the Payroll Team's Brand

In a fast-changing world of work, businesses are increasingly realizing that the role of payroll has to change, too. As employees are demanding more flexibility and independence from their payroll experiences, employers need to manage these demands to retain their top talent, and organizations as a whole need to keep pace with technology, particularly if they want to strive for long-term growth.

It’s one of the reasons that we at CloudPay believe so wholeheartedly in the modern pay experience. Now more than ever, payroll must encompass the entire payroll process, with speed, flexibility, sustainability, and certainty at the core of everything - from data collection initiatives to treasury and payments, and everything in between. This need for an end-to-end process is why more than 90% of new CloudPay customers also take on our payments services. It’s also why payroll teams are now becoming a major strategic function internally, including for one of the most famous lifestyle brands on the planet.

At our recent Paymakers event in Barcelona, we were delighted to be joined by Paul Simpson, Senior Director EMEA Payroll and Benefits at Ralph Lauren. At one of our customer insight sessions, Paul spoke to our Chief Marketing Officer, Nick Webb, about how the modern pay experience has not only helped Ralph Lauren step up their payroll performance, but also helped build the payroll brand internally. In this blog, we’ll summarize Paul’s insights from that fascinating session.

Elevating your payroll team's brand in a new era of payroll

For Ralph Lauren, the modern pay experience means greater efficiency, streamlined payroll processes, and adding real value to the business. At a practical level, it runs payroll for more than 5000 employees across 17 countries, with instant salary payments available globally, plus payroll funding and pay on-demand options.

Paul has found that his payroll team has become more than just an admin function. They now play a major role in contributing to the employee wellbeing strategy across the business, also helping to drive talent acquisition.

To make this a reality, Paul suggests five key strategies:

• Relate to company objectives: Ralph Lauren sends out five overarching corporate goals for the year, from which the payroll team assesses which areas they can fit in to and add strategic value. This has led to real contributions being made in cost savings and faster payments for employees, which have not gone unnoticed across the business.
  
  
• Use quiet times to your advantage: Every payroll cycle has a period of relative quiet, which is the key time to work on ‘tooting the horn’ for payroll, and promoting the good work that the team has been doing.
  
  
• Talk to the business: Connected to the point above, it’s vital to show people throughout the business how payroll is making a difference through those cost savings, time efficiencies, and to the day-to-day lives of employees.
  
  
• Embrace payment tools: Benefits like Earned Wage Access (such as the one delivered via the CloudPay NOW app) give employees control and flexibility around their wages, allowing them to autonomously check accrued wages and withdraw that money in real-time.
  
  
• Don’t be held back by volume and complexity: Working with technology and an expert partner enables you to manage all your payroll, regardless of the number of countries, currencies, and compliance requirements involved. That way, you can ensure no payroll delays, efficient payment processes, and time saved on manual interventions.

Building the business case for the modern pay experience

To make all this possible, Paul and his team had to build a compelling business case and achieve buy-in with key stakeholders across Ralph Lauren, including treasury, HR, accounts, compliance, and legal teams, plus the wider workforce. They did so by demonstrating value in two essential areas:

• Proven time and cost savings: Showing how a new approach can reduce workload and improve efficiency for payroll and finance teams can really help stakeholders visualize the benefits. Furthermore, the time savings gained from combining payroll and payments, or using instant salary payments, can speed up payroll cycles.
  
  
• Demonstrable employee impact: All departments will have a vested interest in employee wellbeing. Having seamless and consistent pay processes reduces the payroll team’s workload and Earned Wage Access and related solutions like budgeting advice can only help to improve wellbeing.

For Paul and Ralph Lauren’s payroll team, successfully implementing an end-to-end pay solution has allowed them to simplify processes, improve payroll performance, enhance employee experience, and elevate their internal brand. Take inspiration from these insights and see what you can do with the modern pay experience in your organization.

Learn more about CloudPay’s approach to the modern pay experience.