GardaWorld: Delivering More Benefits to Employees With On-Demand Pay

In just over a year, GardaWorld has enabled more than $100M of early, earned wages access for their employees, improving employee benefits and supporting employees retention in a difficult labor market through an easy, no-risk integration between WinTeam and DailyPay.

About the client: GardaWorld

GardaWorld is a global champion in security services, integrated risk management and cash solutions, employing more than 120,000 highly skilled and dedicated professionals. Driven by a relentless entrepreneurial culture and core values of integrity, vigilance, trust and respect, GardaWorld offers sophisticated and tailored security and technology solutions through high-touch partnerships and consistently superior service delivery. In addition, the firm is proud to announce they have earned the Great Place To Work Certification™. This certification recognizes employers who create an outstanding employee experience and an amazing workplace culture. 

BEST Crowd Management, a GardaWorld company, offers decades of experience providing world-class security solutions and staffing for crowd management solutions. Its workforce of security professionals delivers services to sporting events throughout the NFL, MLB, MLS, PGA Tour and F1 circuits, high-profile international resorts and entertainment venues, among other clients and partners. 

GardaWorld prides itself on prioritizing employee wellbeing. It provides a work environment that encourages understanding, acceptance and integration. It strives to make the world a safer place for both their clients and their employees as well as the communities in which it operates. It works to provide viable career opportunities for staff across departmental disciplines.

That’s why, when senior leadership identified a need to improve employee financial wellbeing, an internal taskforce was created to reach a solution.

Matthew Wilson, Vice President of Strategy and Chief of Staff at GardaWorld, played a key role in strategizing a solution as a part of this taskforce, bringing together software already-in-place in GardaWorld’s ecosystem with an on-demand wage access integration.

The objective: pay employees faster

The labor market for the security industry is historically volatile. Even when labor trends demonstrate more unemployed persons per job opening, the physical security industry consistently records turnover rates anywhere between 100-400%.

In more recent times, where the number of unemployed persons per job vacancy has been at or less than one, companies like GardaWorld are experiencing heightened challenges in attracting and retaining talent from competitors in and outside of the security industry. 

“We began to see trends in competitors beyond the security industry who were paying their employees more frequently,” said Wilson. “With the labor pool continuing to tighten, we knew we needed to look at ways of giving our own employees faster access to their wages.” 

The goal was easier said than accomplished. The task force considered altering payroll to a weekly cadence, but the change would have been more time-consuming and disruptive to current payroll and scheduling processes while negatively impacting cash flow. 

Instead, the task force turned to their partners at TEAM Software by WorkWave and the possibilities of earned wage access. 

The solution: a no-risk, all-reward integration

Earned wage access, also known as on-demand pay, is the concept of giving employees access to their earned pay as they need it, rather than waiting for a regular paycycle to process payment. Historically, employees may have been able to gain early access to wages via third-party salary lenders or cash advance programs not affiliated with their place of employment, but high fees and interest rates detract from the benefit of having cash-in-hand sooner. 

GardaWorld wanted to offer a benefit to their employees that would minimize fees as much as possible. Already a client of TEAM Software and a user of WinTeam, an enterprise resource planning software that connects everything from time and attendance, payroll, scheduling, accounting and financials, and job profitability, the company needed a tool that would work alongside their existing processes.

As a member of TEAM Software’s client advisory board, Wilson knew TEAM Software had been working on enhancements and integrations to support earned wage access capabilities. After reaching out to their customer success manager, GardaWorld became one of the first companies to implement WinTeam’s integration with DailyPay, a leader of on-demand pay products. 

The integration works like this: 

DailyPay essentially acts as an early-access account for an employee’s earned wages.

It’s an integration that enables your employees to access their funds as early as the day after their shift without complicating the regularly scheduled work done by payroll and administrative teams.

“Adding the DailyPay integration into your payroll flow is a seamless process for your payroll teams since an enrolled employee is simply getting their direct deposit funds automatically rerouted through DailyPay,” explained Stephanie Petersen, Associate Product Manager, WorkWave. 

With daily access to an employee’s worked shift details, DailyPay handles the calculations and available funds for employees while your normal payroll cycle continues as-is.

“By providing a view into their earned wages with the ability to withdraw from the balance early, it benefits employees and employers by encouraging good electronic timekeeping habits and improving retention rates,” continued Petersen.

At GardaWorld, that means checking in (and out) of shifts through their mobile app or telephone system, which records their time and attendance tracking in WinTeam. WinTeam validates all work delivered against the schedule before it goes to payroll. When time worked is approved in WinTeam, the balance of earned funds for that shift becomes visible in DailyPay. From there, employees can access the balance of their earned wages. Meanwhile, WinTeam operates as usual, with payroll still processing the employee’s check as normal. Any paystub issued still reflects earned wages, taxes, deductions and other normal information. 

Although DailyPay does collect a small fee on every transfer of an employees’ earned income to their bank account or debit card, it is much lower than traditional salary lenders. Since the integration only offers access to earned wages, rather than unearned, there is no risk of compensating for services not yet performed or having to reclaim wages if an employee does churn prior to completed duties. Solidifying the decision for GardaWorld was the ease of implementation and seamlessness between WinTeam and its third-party earned wage access partner.

The results: Paying employees faster while keeping contracts covered 

A year after integrating Win Team with DailyPay, GardaWorld has seen a 58% adoption rate from their workforce, with expectations of even more use when the service is rolled out to their event service population. To date, over $104 million dollars worth of earned wages have been taken in advance.

“For GardaWorld, initiatives like this really center around improving the welfare of our employees,” said Wilson. “The integration between DailyPay and WinTeam gives us a way to provide a real benefit to our employees – employees whose needs may outpace a regular payroll cycle.” Wilson adds, “GardaWorld is proud to offer our employees additional benefits that set us apart.  We believe amazing benefits like DailyPay are what helped GardaWorld earn the Great Place To Work Certification™.”

The amount of earned wages taken before payroll processing averages $118 per employee. Assuming those expenses are covering basic needs like food and transit, GardaWorld was able to hypothesize the added employee benefit has had a positive correlation with employee retention and contract coverage. 

“Access to transit is a common challenge of our industry,” Wilson explained. “Think of this summer [2022], when gas prices were abnormally expensive. Early access to earned wages helps give us the means to support our employees when they have a need, and as a result, helps ensure they’re able to get to their shift. We’re then able to keep our contracts fully covered and our clients satisfied. From every angle, it’s a win.”