In the face of heightened employee expectations and rapidly evolving work environments, Paylocity clients are quickly adopting employee experience features that drive measurable improvement in engagement and retention

To help companies meet the challenges of ensuring team engagement, retention, and productivity in remote, office, or hybrid work environments, Paylocity is launching Community Plus, which adds incremental communication and collaboration features to Community, its online social collaboration hub. These new features augment the existing employee experiences embedded across the Paylocity platform, which is built with both HR professionals and end-user employees in mind. Paylocity clients have seen their employees rapidly embrace Community to connect with their peers and teams – and this adoption is having a measurable impact on both company culture and business outcomes.

Community is an integrated part of the Paylocity platform that streamlines communication, strengthens collaboration, and fosters a culture of engagement not possible through traditional email, antiquated intranets, or other broad communication channels. All Paylocity clients have free access to a basic level of Community including a company feed, discussion groups, peer recognition, user profiles, and directory search capabilities—features that are already delivering benefits to HR professionals and employees.

The new premium capabilities announced today as Community Plus are available for an additional cost and include:

• One-to-one and one-to-many chat functionality to improve real-time communication;
• Ability to upload, create, edit, and share files;
• Automatic creation of team groups for supervisors and direct reports that immediately add or remove employees based on changes in employee status, and that help new teammates connect easily with icebreaker questions;
• Updated user profiles for employees to list interests, team members, education, skills, or hobbies; and
• Enhanced people directory and search capability to easily find, follow, and engage co-workers.

New Community Plus Features Build on Widespread Momentum

Since its initial launch two years ago, Paylocity clients have rapidly adopted and increased their use of Community:

• In the last year, overall employee engagement in the form of employer announcements, employee visits and posts, reactions, and comments has increased by more than 56% overall, with employee comments up by more than 150%.
• Within 180 days of implementing Paylocity, organizations typically see nearly 30% of their employees actively using Community to exchange messages, ideas, and comments.
• Among clients who use Paylocity the most, peer recognition shows “viral adoption” with the number of employees receiving public recognition from their peers increasing on average by more than 500% within 180 days of implementing Paylocity.

Making Work Feel Like a Community

As part of the most complete platform for the modern workforce, Community helps employers deal with critical workforce challenges, including The Great Resignation, changing workforce demographics, and the rapid shift to mobile and hybrid work. The employee experience has never been more imperative, as evidenced by recent research from the MIT Sloan Management Review, which found that corporate culture is 10 times more likely to contribute to employee departures than a company’s compensation.

“The modern workforce is expecting so much more of their employers,” said Steve Beauchamp, Co-CEO for Paylocity. “Employees expect payroll, benefits, and performance tools that are easy to use, but more than that, they want a personalized experience that is flexible enough to meet their needs. That is why we have built employee experience into every part of the Paylocity platform. From text recruiting to mobile time entry, from discussion groups to on-demand payment and built-in video capabilities, Paylocity delivers collaboration, communication, and connection. Traditional HR and payroll systems just aren’t designed to address these needs, which is ironic since an HR system really should be about the employees it claims to serve.”

Many clients use Community to replace communication channels that either don’t reach all employees or are ignored. It quickly becomes the single source for all company updates, connecting employees across locations, even those that are deskless or completely remote.

Mountainside Fitness, a chain of high-end health clubs, rolled out the Community Plus features to its 1,400 employees. “Community is already a big asset to our company. It lets our team connect with each other in ways they haven’t before, but it’s come so naturally for them. Now with team groups, chat functionality, and file collaboration, we can level up our communications,” said Robyn Klawitter, SVP of Human Resources at Mountainside Fitness. “Our employees are not at their desks all day so delivering communications on their mobile devices is critical. We hire a lot of young people, so making sure we have technology that fits their lifestyle is key to attracting and retaining talent. Our executives post messages about company updates or even location-specific updates, so Community has really become our go-to source for communicating with employees.”

Community has also been proven to positively impact employee engagement and business outcomes based on data from Paylocity’s Modern Workforce Index (MWI). Built with patent-pending artificial intelligence and based on best practices from 30,000+ clients, MWI provides an overall score of an organization’s health, performance benchmarks to peers, and tailored recommendations to improve efficiency and employee engagement. Companies using Community show higher employee sentiment and overall MWI scores. More important, companies with higher MWI scores also experience on average 15%+ lower attrition and faster headcount growth.

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