Working with technology is all about balance. When it comes to looking for a payroll provider, for example, there’s a balance between automation and human interaction that can feel difficult to find. On the one hand, it’s probable that you don’t want to work with a payroll company that’s running who knows how many other businesses’ payrolls by hand. After all, it’s also probable that one of the big reasons you’re looking for a payroll provider is to ditch your own manual processes. On the other hand, however, too much technology and automation can leave you feeling abandoned and ignored. We’ve all probably had our own experience attempting to talk with an AI chatbot about an issue that we’re having. We’ll save you the stress of having to relive that experience by simply stating it probably would’ve been easier to just talk to a person. Ultimately, finding this balance is equal parts crucial and hard to find.
At Payday HCM, we understand the importance of finding this balance. At the end of the day, we are a payroll provider, and we’re constantly fielding questions from clients about anything and everything. For us, our job—aside from providing fast and efficient payroll processing, HR services, and benefits administration—is to provide our clients with answers, not with chatbots, but with people. We also acknowledge, though, that if we’re reading everything we just wrote, we’d also probably go, “Yeah, sure, everybody says that, but no one actually does it. How can you prove that you’re any different?”
Well, in this article, we’ll be providing you with a review of Payday HCM courtesy of one of our clients: Colonial Family Dentistry. We sat down with Colonial’s Director of Accounting, Dian Eckstrom, to talk about her experience with Payday. Here, we’ll cover:
- About Colonial Family Dentistry and How They Discovered Payday HCM
- Colonial Implementing More of Payday HCM’s Services
- Colonial and the Payday Difference
Ultimately, we not only want to provide you with the ability to hear someone’s opinion on our services, but we also want to spotlight the true backbone of our business: our clients. Let’s get into it.
About Colonial Family Dentistry and How They Discovered Payday HCM
Before we go into how Payday has helped Eckstrom, and Colonial as a whole, streamline their processes, we’ll go into some background on Colonial and how they came to work with Payday.
About Colonial Family Dentistry and Cook Dental Group
Colonial Family Dentistry is a part of Cook Dental Group, a dental organization with six different locations within the Tidewater region of Virginia. Currently, Cook Dental Group is made up of about 68 employees, but Eckstrom said they’ll be looking to expand all the way up to 90 by the end of the year.
Eckstrom’s title of Director of Accounting doesn’t quite do justice to all of the services she performs as a member of Colonial and Cook Dental Group. Having been in the accounting business since 1990, Eckstrom also serves as Cook Dental Group’s Human Resources Officer, working alongside Cook’s Director of Operations.
A Top-Down Evaluation—How Colonial Came to Utilize Payday’s Services
Colonial was already utilizing some of Payday’s payroll services when Eckstrom joined the team as their Director of Accounting. However, a recent top-down reevaluation of Colonial’s operations meant they would begin taking full advantage of everything Payday has to offer, moving toward what Eckstrom described as “a much smoother process.”
“Before, I had six different accounts. Now, I have one parent account, and all of my entities are listed under that parent account, which [is a] far smoother situation,” Eckstrom said. “Our timekeeping is here now, which feeds directly into our payroll system, whereas our other one, we had to import information—many times, information was lost, especially PTO. So, this has made everything much smoother.”
Colonial Implementing More of Payday HCM’s Services
With their evaluation of their own operations and subsequent adoption of more of Payday’s services, Eckstrom noticed a difference in how they did business.
Working Through the Growing Pains
Implementing a new system, regardless of how big or small, is a tricky process—Eckstrom acknowledged that she was aware of this reality when Colonial opted to adopt a larger number of services through Payday. Eckstrom explained that, although she was in a “complete panic” at some points, Payday’s Vice President of Sales, Kristi Feist, and the entire Payday implementation team were able to reassure her and get things working.
“It was a very cumbersome process, and we had a lot of hiccups in our first couple of payrolls, as I'm sure there would have. I was anticipating it… [But] everybody just really helped get us through that difficult transition…. It's all working now, how we need it to, and we have a great team of people that, when there is a problem or when there is a hiccup, we can get it addressed and get answers,” Eckstrom said.
How Payday Helped to Fit Colonial’s Needs
As mentioned earlier, Colonial wasn’t just transitioning over to Payday’s services for payroll—their evaluation revealed needs that included things like human resources and benefits administration. Eckstrom was quick to note that previous HR companies they had worked with in the past had failed to adequately address Colonial’s needs, even with essential services like HR compliance.
“I left the human resources company we had in the past because, well, number one, they didn't keep up on what our needs were: if Kristi hadn't told me that we transitioned into being a large employer, I would have never known. So, we were out of compliance on several issues. I was relying on the human resources company that we had to let me know what that threshold was, and turns out we'd passed it months before and didn't know,” Eckstrom said.
Colonial and the Payday Difference
Colonial’s HR needs highlighted a key difference between Payday and other payroll or HR service providers, according to Eckstrom: treating everyone, herself and Colonial’s employees included, as people instead of numbers.
‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbors’
The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot—for Eckstrom, one of the biggest changes was the prevalence of automated systems. She shared a line from the Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” to express her discontent with the overwhelming presence of automation these days: “Good fences make good neighbors.” It meant that Payday’s uniquely human (and fence-less) approach was a welcome difference for her.
“To find a way to work with a company and feel like, ‘I may not be your biggest client, but I'm still a client,’ that's what I like—all the clients being equal no matter the size, you know. I don't mind if I'm not considered the same as an employee group with a thousand employees; that's fine. But I'm still treated like the things that we have—these people—are still important,” Eckstrom said.
While Eckstrom was quick to note how much she enjoys working with her main point of contact, Payday Customer Service Representative Paula Dean (“I cannot say enough good things about Paula,” Eckstrom said), she also remarked on working with the entire Topaz customer service team.
“I don't imagine they treat other clients any differently because they just seem to be that kind of team where they really care about who's on the other end of the phone. And that's the most important,” Eckstrom said.
Payroll’s About More Than Numbers
And while Eckstrom spoke about the differences between Colonial’s old HR operations in the wake of their adoption of a wider range of Payday’s services, she still came back to how Payday’s approach to payroll in particular was unique for its people-first approach. This is crucial for Eckstrom, as she noted that payroll isn’t simply just a process: it’s about taking care of people.
“Payroll, sure, it can be an automated process, but those are people. Those are our employees, and it's really part of my job to take care of those employees. And so I want to have a vendor who looks at them the same way I do, and that's really, really difficult to find,” Eckstrom said. “That's how Payday remembers it: these are people. At the very end of the [process] is that employee who's gonna pay their rent, and they need to make sure that their payroll is correct. That’s the difference I’ve had with Payday.”
Working With Payday: ‘Everybody Just Takes Care Of You.’
Technology is a great tool, but when it begins to be used as a substitute for human interaction, it can become alienating. Finding a business in any industry that relies more on person-to-person communication rather than person-to-robot interaction is seemingly becoming exceedingly rare. When asked what Eckstrom might say if a colleague approached her for a recommendation on a payroll provider, it was Payday’s people-first approach that helped her make us the first thing she’d say.
“The first thing I would tell someone looking for a new payroll vendor is that Payday's different in that they still have managed to automate things, but not forget the person at the other end of the phone, to treat you like a client,” Eckstrom said. “And when things are so automated these days, you're not gonna be put into a phone queue and [hear], ‘the next available representative will be right with you.’ You get a phone call back, if not that day, definitely the next day; someone responds to your email, and it's not an automated email. It's an actual person saying, ‘What do you need?’ Or, ‘How can I help you?’ Everybody just takes care of you, and, in today's environment, that's what's been missing for us.”
Ready to discover what a people-first approach to payroll, human resources, and benefits can look like for your business? Schedule a meeting with us today to take the first step in what we hope to be a long partnership.
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