While television meteorologists across the state are telling everyone to stay home and thousands of businesses and schools across the state are closed, some companies, like Paycom, do not have a choice but to keep their doors open.
The employees at Paycom, a payroll service company headquartered in Oklahoma, knew over 150,000 individuals across the country were depending on them to process their paychecks. So, last week, Paycom implemented their Disaster Recovery Plan to ensure their employees could do their job. The plan included reserving hotel rooms close to their offices on Northwest Expressway, providing safe transportation to and from work and having plenty of food on hand. Generators were in place in case there was a loss of power.
By Monday, January 31, the Paycom leadership decided to implement their plan. Around 70 employees stayed in a hotel close to the office on Monday night, 80 on Tuesday night and 40 on Wednesday night. The Paycom Disaster Recovery plan also included plotting the location of employee’s homes on an electronic map and coordinating rides for employees that were not able to stay in the hotel.
Justin Boeckman, Paycom’s Internet Marketing Specialist, celebrated his birthday at the hotel. “I thought the weather was going to cancel my birthday celebration but my Paycom friends helped me celebrate at the hotel — we had a blast.”
The Paycom employees were also taken great care of while at work. “For lunch and dinner they brought in things like pizza, sandwiches, burgers and buffalo wings,” said Ashley Jennings, New Client Setup Team Leader. “We were definitely taken care of!”
Some employees were surprised to see who showed up to provide safe transport. Paycom’s Founder and CEO Chad Richison, CFO Craig Boelte , COO Shannon Rowe and VP of Operations, Brad Richardson were each behind the wheel of their 4×4 vehicles providing employees transportation between hotels, office and some individual employee homes.
“During this storm we had two priorities,” said Brad Richardson, VP of Operations for Paycom. “Our first priority is the safety our employees. The second is that all of our clients receive their paychecks on time. We understand that dealing with disasters is difficult enough, but finding out your paycheck didn’t get processed makes a difficult situation unbearable.”
Paycom’s plan worked. Employees were able to process all the paychecks on time. Luckily, the UPS and Fed Ex planes were cleared for take-off out of Oklahoma City by Wednesday and 150,000 people never knew the hurdles some very dedicated employees were willing to jump to make sure they got their paycheck on time.