Why Paylocity software and Marlee make the perfect tech stack
For companies feeling the pressure to do more with less, Paylocity software delivers essential HR and payroll features. But pair it with Marlee's collaboration and performance features, and you'll unlock the modern tech stack your workforce needs.
- Author
- Amy Rigby
What is Paylocity software?
Paylocity software offers digital payroll solutions to help companies automate the employee payment process. The company was founded in 1997 by Steven Sarowitz, who drew upon his 20 years of experience in payroll companies to create a solution that filled a gap in the industry.
Today, Paylocity has expanded beyond payroll services to include an extensive set of proactive features in the HR space, such as:
- Workflows and documents: Craft custom workflows to automate your company's unique processes, saving time.
- Benefits administration: Educate your workforce on the employee benefits you offer – and make sure they use them.
- Employee self-service: Give your team back the power by granting access to an online employee portal where they can clock in and out, request time off, and even chat with teammates.
Paylocity serves small, mid-sized, and large businesses across various industries, such as restaurants and hospitality, education, and financial services. It positions itself as a software platform focused on connecting people, hence its slogan, "Forward Together." A major point of difference between Paylocity and other payroll and HR software seems to be its customer support team – online reviews rave about the high-touch, responsive customer service received.
What is Marlee?
Marlee is an AI-powered collaboration and performance technology that enhances your Paylocity software investment by focusing on the human side of HR. While Paylocity handles your core HR operations, Marlee helps unlock your workforce's full potential through personalized insights and development.
Founded by Michelle Duval, a pioneering coach and published author, Marlee is built on 25 years of global human data and evidence-based psychology. The technology emerged from a groundbreaking decade-long study of successful teams across startups, scale-ups, and enterprises, making it the world's largest database of human motivations.
With Marlee alongside your Paylocity software, you can:
- Elevate team performance: While Paylocity manages your HR processes, Marlee analyzes individual work styles and motivations to optimize team dynamics.
- Enhance collaboration: Complement Paylocity's operational tools with Marlee's science-backed insights into communication styles, enabling seamless team collaboration.
- Improve hiring success: Extend Paylocity's hiring capabilities by using Marlee to identify high-potential candidates and predict team dynamics based on proven success models.
- Drive employee development: Build on Paylocity's HR foundation with Marlee's personalized online coaching and development programs that help everyone reach their peak performance.
- Boost employee experience: While Paylocity handles the administrative side, Marlee ensures team members feel seen and understood, creating a more engaging work environment. Best of all, Marlee's core features are free to use, making it a scalable complement to your existing Paylocity investment.
Teams from 90% of Fortune 100 companies and more than 90,000 organizations worldwide trust Marlee, including industry leaders like Canva, SAP, and the University of Technology Sydney.
Paylocity software features
- Payroll products: Simplify expense management, receive tax support from experts, pay employees faster with on-demand payment, and take advantage of aggregated payroll data in 100+ countries.
- Time and labor: Automate time tracking and attendance tracking, simplify scheduling, and decrease compliance risks.
- Human resources: Grant employees access to a 24/7 online dashboard, receive dedicated HR support, and pull reports from the analytics dashboards.
- Talent management: Automate recruiting, streamline onboarding, track performance, and provide online learning.
- Benefits administration: Help employees understand the benefits available to them and make open enrollment easier.
- Employee experience: Cultivate community by keeping your teams connected online, know how your employees feel through surveys, and recognize your team's hard work through peer recognition.
Marlee features: Enhance your Paylocity HR stack
While Paylocity software handles your core HR and payroll needs, Marlee adds these powerful features to optimize your workforce:
Evidence-based assessment
Uncover what truly drives your team with Marlee's science-backed assessment (the Marlee Motivational Analysis), built on 20+ years of research. Get actionable insights to motivate employees and complement your Paylocity HR processes. Marlee shares insights on your team's strengths and any blind spots they need to develop to achieve success.
The Marlee "My Results" board
AI-powered performance coaching
Add to Paylocity's payroll automation with Marlee's 24/7 AI coaching. Develop the crucial skills that lead to business success, set meaningful goals, and boost leadership performance - it's free for your first online coaching program. Cultivate loyal team members who see you’re willing to invest in their development.
Interactive team boards to improve collaboration
While managing operations in Paylocity, Marlee's intuitive team boards transform how you understand and lead your workforce. Visualize team dynamics in real time to spot collaboration opportunities and predict potential friction points before they impact performance. Learn each team member's unique information processing style and discover the specific language that motivates them best—taking employee engagement beyond Paylocity's HR fundamentals.
Marlee's team board shows similarities and differences in team work styles
These dynamic boards reveal how different work styles can complement each other, helping you:
- Orchestrate team composition for maximum productivity
- Adapt communication approaches for each team member
- Foster harmony by strategically combining diverse working styles
- Prevent conflicts by understanding work style dynamics
- Choose motivational language that resonates with each employee
Perfect for leaders who want to build upon their Paylocity foundation with deeper insights into team dynamics and personal motivations.
Success benchmarking
Compare your teams against Marlee's success factor benchmarking models while managing core HR through Paylocity. Marlee's data-driven insights reveal exactly what your teams need to focus on for venture success, from collaboration styles to performance drivers. Understand how individual work styles impact team dynamics and get actionable recommendations for adapting behaviors to boost business success. Perfect for organizations looking to elevate team performance beyond traditional HR metrics.
Global culture mapping
Map your workplace culture from team to department to global scale. While Paylocity handles your HR operations, Marlee reveals the deeper cultural dynamics driving employee behavior across your organization. Understand motivation patterns between offices, predict potential friction points before they escalate, and build strategies to strengthen your culture. Perfect for companies managing remote or international teams who want to turn cultural differences into strengths.
Form team connections faster with instant insights
While Paylocity manages your core HR processes, Marlee's AI chatbot is your 24/7 on-demand team coach. Ask Marlee questions like "What motivates Sarah?" or "How can I avoid conflict with Imran?" to receive instant, research-backed insights that enhance workplace relationships and performance.
This intelligent assistant helps you:
- Get real-time coaching on handling specific team situations
- Receive personalized strategies for motivating individual team members
- Navigate potential conflicts with tailored communication approaches
- Build stronger connections by understanding each person's work style
- Make more informed decisions about team collaboration and development
Perfect for leaders who want to complement Paylocity's HR platform with on-demand, personalized coaching that turns people insights into action. Marlee's AI assistant helps you apply the science of human motivation to your daily workforce challenges.
All these features work in harmony with your existing Paylocity software, creating a complete HR technology solution that addresses both operational and human performance needs.
How Marlee complements your HR tech, collaboration, and productivity tools
Paylocity was originally built as a way to process online payroll, so that's clearly where its strength lies. Additionally, it's powerful at streamlining workflows, providing employee self-service, and enhancing performance reviews.
But if you truly want to unlock the full potential of individuals and teams, pairing Paylocity software with Marlee is the ideal solution. Marlee is evidence-based and leverages AI to deeply assess the motivations of your workforce and provide insights and personalized online coaching to harness the unique strengths of your team to help them collaborate and perform better.
Compare Paylocity with Marlee's features (formerly Fingerprint For Success)
Paylocity software cost
Paylocity does not publish its pricing plans online. But its website states that pricing is based on the features you choose to use, and is per employee per month (PEPM). Online reviews say that the pricing can end up being anywhere from US$2 to US$25 PEPM.
Marlee cost
Anyone can use Marlee for free (forever!) with our Starter plan. To get unlimited personal insights and unlimited AI coaching, upgrade to our Individual plan for US$15.99/month. To use Marlee with your team (for teams with four or more team members), upgrade to our Team plan for US$15.99/month/user. Find more details on Marlee pricing.
Paylocity software reviews
Here are just a few Paylocity software reviews on G2.com that highlight its use cases:
"The platform offers modules that suit our retail/small business needs. We run weekly payroll and haven't experienced any problems. Customer service is excellent and easy to reach. Their 'community' module is a great feature for company communications, and it is fun! The ‘performance’ module allows us to track and perform evaluations online, keeping that information readily accessible to our managers."
"Paylocity is solving the overall employee experience and engagement. Building company culture and hiring top talent. Their entire suite allows the employee experience and the backend to collaborate and engage all in one suite."
"We initially turned to Paylocity as a way of building a hub to manage all of our training for the organization. It has allowed us to seamlessly create, manage, and analyze the various mediums of training that we currently use… classroom facilitations, eLearning, etc."
Marlee reviews
For each of the Marlee online coaching programs, you’ll find user reviews, such as the following:
Team Building program
“Mind blowing! The Team Building program helped us resolve long-standing friction and misunderstandings in the team. Great experience for everyone involved!“
“The Team Building coaching program has helped me gain a deeper understanding of my team and how to best lead, communicate, and work with them. As a result, collaboration has become so much easier and we can better utilize our creative differences in our decision-making – improving our happiness and performance!“
“The Team Building program was a great tool to get to know my team and to explore how we can improve our way of working.”
Goal Catcher program
“I learned how to set, move to take action, and progress towards happiness.”
“I learned to be organized and to have clarity of my target.”
"Wow this program has totally changed my relationship to goals! Thanks so much Marlee, I miss you already."
Multiply Your Impact program
“Blew my mind, had no idea how arrogant I have been. Total blind spot. I really like the multiplier stuff.”
As an engineer, I never thought about doing a retro with my family. This has been cool.”
“Marlee helped me discover skills in myself and others on how to work together as a team!”
How does Paylocity software compare with other HR tech software?
ADP Workforce
Founded in 1949, ADP is an established name in the payroll services world. ADP Workforce is another all-in-one HR suite that features payroll, workforce management, HR management, talent management, and benefits administration. ADP has been around longer than Paylocity, and has a stronger reputation and more features.
Greenhouse
Greenhouse is an applicant-tracking software and hiring platform. Unlike Paylocity and ADP, the company prides itself on not being one size fits all, but rather, being specialists in hiring. Their software, which can help with your recruiting process, is used by Wayfair, HubSpot, and Squarespace on a regular basis.
By the way, Marlee integrates with Greenhouse, so you can easily and seamlessly use them together to improve employee performance. If you want to learn more about Marlee integrations for HR software, contact us.
Ultipro (now UKG Pro)
UKG Pro, formerly known as Ultipro, is an HR and workforce management platform offering solutions in human resources, talent, time and attendance, compliance, payroll, and more. It's used by big names, such as Crocs, The Salvation Army, and MGM Grand.
Workday HCM
Workday is human capital management software that provides solutions for payroll processes, employee management, HR management, and custom reports to help business owners make informed decisions. Its customer list includes CarMax, Netflix, and AstraZeneca.
Bottom line: Paylocity software vs Marlee
Based on our research, Paylocity software is undoubtedly a powerhouse HR tool. Its robust set of key features almost makes it an all-in-one solution. However, it cannot provide coaching to help optimize individual and team performance.
Paylocity almost gets us there, with its employee engagement surveys, individual goal and corporate goal setting, and 360 feedback to help with performance reviews. However, nothing can replace the proven effectiveness of personalized coaching.
Marlee is the perfect complement to Paylocity. Based on more than 20 years of research, it is a science-based collaboration and performance technology that provides convenient access to coaching insights and helps teams connect, collaborate, and develop together to reach business objectives, whether individual or team goals.
Together, Paylocity software and Marlee empower people leaders to optimize team dynamics, build a culture of meaningful connection, and help every employee reach their full potential - creating a workplace where both operational excellence and human performance thrive.
References
- https://investors.paylocity.com/board-directors/steve-sarowitz
- https://investors.paylocity.com/news-releases/news-release-details/ameripay-corporation-changes-company-name-paylocity