To those viewing Payroll and HR departments from the outside, one might be forgiven for assuming them to be fairly constant. Traditionally, they are seen as fundamental and mostly administrative functions that work to keep the wheels of a business turning, rather than agile centres of innovation, insight, and business strategy.
But modern Payroll and HR teams - those who are set to outmanoeuvre the competition as the digital age shifts the business landscape for good - know better. They are becoming proactive rather than reactive, using new technologies and software to provide insights that allow their employers to do better business, enhance workplace culture, cut costs, and reduce employee turnover. What if this most fundamental function were to be recognised as the competitive advantage it is, rising to take its rightful place at the C-suite’s boardroom table?
According to the recent Gartner 2019-2021 Strategic Roadmap for HCM Technology Investments, by 2025, a full 50% of medium and large enterprises worldwide will have invested in a cloud-deployed Human Capital Management suite for administrative HR and talent management. Payroll and HR as departments are becoming more effectively integrated than ever before, transforming from reactive to future-forward, and providing valuable business insights to organisations that can radically enhance their competitiveness in the long run. Employees, it goes without saying, are at the heart of every department in a business, so managing them better, holding onto them for longer, and ensuring they are happier, can result in advantages that go far beyond the Payroll and HR departments themselves. Lower payroll running costs mean a leaner operation with better cash-flow. Elimination of manual data entry errors means efficiency through accuracy. Accurate record-keeping and data availability mean more effective employee engagement and management. And that’s just the beginning.
Insightful Payroll looks for opportunities to save money, not just spend it
As in practically all careers, Payroll and HR functions are increasingly being automated, resulting in plenty of anxiety on the part of practitioners; but the move toward automation isn’t necessarily a threat for professionals in the field. With monotonous tasks automated, their time is freed-up to focus on employee engagement, career-planning, and other more human-centric functions that have proven to reduce costs and deliver measurable ROI. Less time doing admin means practitioners can spend more time on fostering a great company culture (translating to less spend on hiring), redesigning processes to run more smoothly and efficiently, and spotting patterns that can spark innovative change to the way work is done.
Insightful Payroll keeps up with modern employees
The old saying that a business’s employees are its most vital asset has been universally accepted through the ages – and it’s even more relevant now. In today’s competitive environment, it’s a job-seeker’s market. With staff turnover, recruitment and training absorbing valuable resources, it’s in every business’s best interest to actively engage and retain good employees in the long run. Modern, digitised Payroll and HR software offers employers every tool they need to ensure long-term satisfaction for their hires, including:
- The flexibility to access their own employee information securely from remote locations and on the devices they prefer
- Speed and accuracy when processing requests, reimbursements, leave, bonuses, increases, and more, rather than the days-long delays most have become used to over the years
- The feeling that the organisation is invested in each employee’s career path and actively involved in training and upskilling workers, as well as recognising and rewarding outstanding performance
Allow employees to work in the ways that make the most sense to them, and your business will never struggle to attract and retain the cream-of-the-crop that will move your organisation into a bright future.
Insightful Payroll uses the past and present to predict your company’s future
Businesses have been gathering data of current and potential employees for decades, capturing every detail from performance measurements to academic history – but are they using this massive amount of data to its fullest advantage? There’s no crystal ball to predict the future of an organisation in uncertain markets, but with technology on their side, Payroll and HR professionals are turning to internal data analytics to view patterns and trends, gain insights, and make predictions for the future of the organisation. These insights can help future-proof an organisation in terms of:
- Succession planning and career road-mapping for promising hires
- Establishing a strategy for a fast-changing employee landscape
- Implementing a culture of learning and skills-improvement
- Predicting the changing resourcing needs of the business and how they will affect the bottom line
Payroll and HR are not simply grudge-necessities for businesses anymore. A business area once perhaps overlooked by digitisation is being thrust into the spotlight every bit as much as Communications, Marketing and Operations Management, as the pure potential of digitisation begins to come into focus. Technology isn’t about to take our jobs away, but those who neglect to take account of just how much it is changing the scale and scope of our work will find themselves left behind anyway.
