Decision Fatigue Is Quietly Costing You — and It’s Hiding in Your Payroll Process

Do you ever feel like you have too many choices to make and not enough time? It’s more common than you think, given the average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions a day. The result? Decision fatigue, or the state of mind where the more decisions we make over the course of a day, the more physically, mentally and emotionally depleted we become.

The phenomenon doesn’t just disrupt our personal lives, either. Left unchecked and lacking the right technology with decision logic to overcome it, decision fatigue takes a constant toll on our organizations. Here’s how.

The hidden cost of too many decisions

Nearly every decision we make at work could make us pause and evaluate our options. All of us experience this, but what you may not realize is how quickly endless decision-making takes away from work in areas that add value, like:

• strategic planning
• vision casting
• talent development
• recruitment
• engagement
• and more

To better understand how decision fatigue drains and harms business, let’s step into the shoes of an everyday leader.

The executive struggle with constant decision-making

Think about the start of a normal workday as a manager of a fast-moving HR team. Maybe you’d like to invest time in an exciting new recruiting initiative. Or you want to reevaluate your department’s long- and short-term goals. It could just be that you need some uninterrupted time to research and consider upcoming compliance requirements. Regardless of the specific task, you want your time free to focus on strategy.

Within a few hours, however, you’ve made little to no progress on any of these projects. Your team has hundreds of time sheets to approve, and you need to oversee the entire process. At the same time, employees are flooding you and your staff with questions about payroll and time-off requests. Meanwhile, you still need to compile a report on recently submitted expenses and ensure they adhere to your company policy.

Whatever task distracts you, all of them require a decision. The more they pile up, the more time and resources they ultimately divert from your organization. This is the result of unchecked decision fatigue, which doesn’t just impact your workforce on a personal level — it’s systemic. And its real cost could be quietly adding up in your payroll process.

What is decision fatigue in the workplace?

Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion caused by too many choices, but that doesn’t entirely capture how it impacts an organization. After all, choices are inevitable, and some are even vital to steering a workforce in the right direction in pursuit of long-term success.

Defining decision fatigue in business terms

In business, decision fatigue already makes the complex process of managing payroll and other pieces of workforce management even harder. Decision fatigue weakens our executive function and can lead to:

• lower productivity
• poor and inconsistent choices
• putting important decisions on the back burner

It can overwhelm us to the point that our ability to make a choice at all declines, according to The Decision Lab. The more decisions we’re bogged down with, the slower our organizations operate — almost like trudging through mud.

The HR and payroll connection

So where does payroll come into play? Virtually every factor related to employee compensation — from base pay and benefits to taxes and bonuses — feeds into this fundamental process. By extension, HR and payroll professionals need to make hundreds of small decisions every week as they relate to:

• approvals
• adjustments
• verification
• and more

If that wasn’t complex enough, those working in payroll must also reconcile the data that feeds into it. But where that data comes from isn’t always obvious. A study conducted by Forrester Consulting found employers use an average of 6.17 HCM providers,* each with at least one of their own databases.

In turn, a payroll administrator must sink time into deciding which of the multiple systems has the right data, as well as which entry into payroll is actually correct.

How decision fatigue takes root in payroll and HR

Sure, someone working in payroll could eventually establish a flow — if every payroll were truly the same. Let’s dig deeper into how decision fatigue preys on the specific choices that contribute to payroll.

Quantifying the decision load

Payroll could require HR teams to consider hundreds (or more in enterprise organizations) of microdecisions. Some common examples that compound an HR workload include:

• approving time sheets and time-off requests
• checking deductions and benefits updates
• managing pay rates, overtime calculations and shift differentials
• reviewing and vetting compliance alerts
• withholding taxes and garnishments
• verifying pay for new and terminated employees
• fielding questions about taxes and pay

Without tech to automate them, these decisions require just as many manual payroll processes each pay cycle.

The ripple effect across an organization

Yes, microdecisions around payroll directly impact the employees who have to act on them, but the resulting decision fatigue isn’t just limited to them, either. Looking at all the roles in an average company, we can see how organizational efficiency takes a hit across the board:

• Chief executive officers may be expected to make operational decisions around payroll, compliance and other processes that dilute their strategic focus.
• Chief financial officers might need to identify and make decisions around labor costs, which can affect an organization’s financial visibility.
• Chief information officers must evaluate every new or manual process, which can bring complexity and possible risk.
• HR directors are responsible for payroll accuracy and also have to manage their teams and the resulting burnout and inconsistency that a manual payroll process could bring.
• Employees may not need to make a specific decision around payroll, but errors involving pay and delayed responses to address them can create financial strain that hurts their trust, engagement and long-term commitment to their employer.

The financial and compliance risks of decision fatigue

While decision fatigue has the potential to harm anyone at work — from executive leadership to new hires — we need to dig even deeper to determine how much businesses could lose to it.

From mental strain to measurable loss

Let’s return to the HR and payroll professionals. For example, if one of them is in the thick of manually processing payroll, decision fatigue’s hidden labor costs begin to reveal themselves.

As an admin gets further into the process, they grow tired. Their responses become slower. Their work becomes sloppy. They miss things outright, like approved PTO or shift differentials. Those errors make their way to paychecks and later get called out when an employee catches the mistake. HR then has to go back and retroactively fix the issue, leading to costly post-payroll corrections. So a process that once required a relatively consistent amount of time from HR demands more hours due to retroactive work, likely exceeding an organization’s estimated labor costs for payroll processing.

That’s also assuming the issue is a relatively easy fix. Given HR Daily Advisor found HR teams that juggle more than 10 tools only report 47% efficiency and productivity, multiple HCM systems could lead to more decision-making that ultimately harms payroll accuracy.

Again, that’s assuming every error is quickly resolved with minimal impact. Because even a minor, easily overlooked mistake could create a compliance risk that could cost an organization thousands in fines and penalties.

Compliance exposure under fatigue

Payroll is bigger than just paying employees. Every cycle brings a risk of noncompliance if HR and finance fail to consider:

• wage laws
• benefit eligibility
• tax reporting
• and more

Failing to meet any of these requirements could result in operations as a whole suffering delays and disruptions due to audits and other compliance consequences. This happens more often than you might think. In an October 2025 survey commissioned by Paycom, HR professionals said compliance issues led to delays or disruptions in the last year. As more rules and guidance emerge on the local, state and federal levels, a manual review process for regulatory issues can’t scale with them.

Decision fatigue complicates compliance, sure, but navigating it successfully doesn’t mean we have to accept the cost of a slow and inconsistent manual process. When implemented correctly, payroll automation benefits everyone involved in and affected by the process, including the HR team responsible for ensuring its organization’s compliance.

How automation reduces decision fatigue

The best way to avoid decision fatigue? No, it’s not to avoid making decisions outright. (At least, not quite.) Instead, we should rely on automated tech configured with decision logic to help make consistent choices for us. Here’s how.

Redefining decision-making through technology

Under no circumstances does HR automation replace human judgment — it just removes the repetitive friction that holds us back. It’s like a smart thermostat that automatically adjusts your home’s temperature based on the conditions outside. Or a healthy eating app that recommends diet-friendly foods for you. Neither of those technologies really deprives you of a choice.

It works similarly when your organization uses payroll automation to streamline HR processes. When your HR tools work within a single, automated software, it centralizes payroll and automates its foundation, allowing it to self-build and even catch compliance-breaking issues before they negatively impact employees. In turn, it allows HR personnel and leaders to make fewer, higher-quality decisions.

Focusing on what matters most

With their more menial decisions taken care of, your leaders experience true strategic clarity through automation. This gives them an opportunity to invest their energy in strategic planning, employee engagement or another pressing need of your organization. Let’s look at just a few examples:

Now that we understand how decision fatigue harms payroll and how automation helps overcome it, you’re one step closer to addressing the phenomenon’s impact in your organization. Of course, it’s impossible to meaningfully conquer it without executive buy-in.

How executives can help their organizations overcome decision fatigue

Remember, decision fatigue is a process problem, not a people problem. Business executives should approach it as such, examining how operations limit talent — not the other way around. Successful decision fatigue management demands finding the right, single HR software to automate payroll and enhance an organization’s overall:

• accuracy
• consistency
• efficiency
• focus

By automating payroll’s most complicated tasks and eliminating needless decisions, organizational and HR process improvements, positive business outcomes and an enhanced employee experience follow.

Ready to end the impact of decision fatigue on your payroll process? See how Paycom’s truly single software automates the process’s microdecisions, so you can focus on the big picture.

Decision fatigue in payroll: FAQ

How does decision fatigue impact payroll?

When HR and payroll professionals must manually complete the process, the resulting decision fatigue slows their progress and increases the likelihood of errors. As a result, payroll errors can create costly post-payroll corrections and, even worse, fines and other penalties from noncompliance.

How can automation reduce decision fatigue for HR?

Payroll automation relieves HR of the hundreds or more microdecisions that complicate the process and dilute its focus. Rather than meticulously managing the process, payroll automation allows HR to simply monitor it.

What are the business risks of manual payroll processes?

Manual payroll processes and the resulting decision fatigue can create issues around:

• accuracy and efficiency
• employee satisfaction and engagement
• compliance and regulatory risks
• HR burnout

*Single-Database HCM Solutions Drive Cross-Business Success, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Paycom, May 2025.