As their shift reaches its 3:30 p.m. finish, a line forms at the electronic punch clock on the wall of the operations office. Workers grab their timecard and stamp it to the usual "chunk-chunk" noise — as Assistant Human Resources Director Peter Ritchey describes it — to officially end their day.
But as Fairfield looks for ways to modernize the way it operates, the "chunk-chunk" of a day's work will soon be a thing of the past.
"They literally line up for like 20 minutes because it takes them all that long, and so now you got people being unproductive and or working with very antiquated technology that, candidly, doesn't always print well," Ritchey said.
Fairfield will retire the DPW timecard system next month as it replaces the town payroll and time and attendance software to a more advanced digital platform as part of a contract First Selectman Bill Gerber signed with service provider Paycom last month. Town officials hope the move will free up hours of work for its Human Resources Department and prevent what's been a near-weekly stream of paycheck inaccuracies and accounting errors due to manual operation of the current system.
"Anyone who sits in that seat ... really hates their job because they're responsible all day long for doing manual, and you're going to make mistakes," Fairfield Human Resources Direction Cathleen Simpson said of town HR work during a Board of Selectmen meeting last month.
A review of Fairfield's payroll process by a public accounting firm earlier this year outlined a series of errors, including pay rate calculations, deductions, withholdings, longevity payments and deferred compensation contributions. Fairfield paid the Internal Revenue Service a more than $10,000 penalty in 2022 for writing the wrong amount on a payroll tax return, according to the review.
The report also exposed excessive access that some town workers had to pay rate changes and employee records. Gerber called those staffers "super users," and while he's confident they never abused their power, he said doing so would have been easy and shouldn't be possible through modern systems.
Ritchey described the current system — Munis by Tyler Technologies — as "low tech, high touch," meaning town officials like him have to enter more figures between more forms instead of automatic calculations by the software, which would otherwise reduce the frequency of human error. He said he recently had to modify the differential pay for 96 individual police officers because figures from a "master screen" wouldn't automatically populate their records.
Gerber, who ran for office partly on his financial experience in the private sector, has stressed how the town's system has lagged behind modern technology and said he isn't aware of any other Connecticut municipality that still uses a system like Fairfield's.
"I haven't met a single person who hasn't laughed," he said.
Town officials said Paycom would streamline many of those tasks, minimizing the amount of manual accounting and calculations that takes place in between records, like change requests for benefits packages and tax forms.
Ritchey said the updated system will save about half of the department's head count from keying in time, attendance, payroll and other forms. The department plans to repurpose that time into longer-term policy initiatives, like management training that develops soft leadership skills and updates to Fairfield's ethics code, credit card policy and employee handbook.
"We've been trying to rewrite our ethics policies to be clear, and HR is a big part of that," Gerber said. "But they keep getting interrupted for fire drills related to things like payroll, so they get drawn off."
The switch to Paycom will also save on time logging regular time and attendance, from the halls of the DPW operations office to the rest of the town departments where a designated employee takes the attendance of their coworkers before plugging the data into Munis. Ritchey said employees will be able to enter their time through an app, on their computer or on one of a few digital time clocks around town facilities like the Parks and Recreation Department, Department of Public Works Operations Office or the Water Pollution Control Facility.
Town officials said Fairfield has spent years trying to shift its payroll system to a more modern platform, setting aside $75,000 for a contract but never inking a deal. The push to get one done was a top priority for HR when Ritchey started working for the town about two years ago. He said he declined a recommendation to implement a system proposed before his arrival so he could spend time vetting all the options with a panel of town employees he formed. The group had representation from the Libraries, Finance, HR, Purchasing and Information Technology departments, he said.
Fairfield landed on Paycom — which has over 36,800 clients, including Glastonbury, Waterford and Southbury, Ritchey said — because it could integrate both the payroll and time and attendance systems. Gerber said he decided to outsource payroll and time and attendance services to a provider like Paycom to overcome potential recruitment and retention-related struggles.
Ritchey said employee training for the new system will start next week, and he hopes to send workers their first paycheck through the new system by Oct. 3.
"It's extremely aggressive, but everybody's really been strong and hopeful and working diligently to try and pull that off," he said.
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