Corporate Office Employee of the Year 2020 – Kayla Lord!
Hear what people shared about Kayla:
Over the course of 2020, Kayla took on a new position with hardly any training that included a great deal more responsibility in the Payroll Department. She had a positive and professional attitude through the whole transition, keeping her composure and never seeming overwhelmed.
Kayla is always wanting to learn new tasks and immediately upon learning the task, begins to work on how the process could be done more efficiently. When Payroll converted to PDI in 2018, Kayla was a driving force in the project, as she caught on very quickly to the new system. She learned Talentreef and SNAG very quickly and is the go to person for folks needing help with SNAG.
She completed the 401K testing for 2020 with no training, just getting instructions from Empower and was off and running!
She is a very fast learner and is great at documenting processes and procedures.
She is super helpful to all employees when they have questions. If she does not know the answer, she finds it and communicates the information in a timely manner.
Her learning the benefits desk and deduction setup has been a benefit to CN Brown Company. She is friendly, efficient, professional, and willing to tackle anything thrown her way.
While she was learning her new position, she was also helping Misty learn and understand, as she had taken over the Payroll accounts reconciliations in accounting and had many questions.
Kayla handles pressure with a cool head. A great example of this is the pay batch issues that happened the week of Christmas; really bad timing since Christmas was on Friday, and many banks were closing early on Thursday, Christmas Eve. On a typical week Payroll has everything done mid-day Monday and the file is sent to the bank Monday afternoon So, the holiday gave very little wiggle room for extra processing time. As it happened, there was a tax update that caused multiple errors on most Maine employees that week. Until the errors were resolved, the batch could not be processed. This meant folks might potentially not be paid before the holiday. Kayla kept calm during a stressful two days, which included a three hour long phone call with PDI support, and we got it fixed and folks were paid.
Another example of her cool calm demeanor is when she had spent several hours reconciling deductions and benefit payments in a new system and all the data was lost. She showed so much class in how she handled that situation, staying patient, positive and polite.
She is such an enjoyable person to work with. No matter how busy or stressed she is, she is always helpful, professional and positive with all who interact with her.
Kayla is a true asset to the Payroll department and to CN Brown. For all these reasons, she is the Employee of the Year for 2020.