After a turbulent year and a half of payroll delivery, the global pandemic has re-emphasized the urgent need for a technology solution to apply structure, control and management to global payroll delivery which has been deemed a business-critical service.
Some global employers found that their chosen payroll process model was not sufficiently strong to deal with all the challenges brought about by COVID-19 I and may not be fit for purpose for future global payroll delivery.
Other employers found that in general, they managed to deliver global payroll under exceptional circumstances, but also had clear gaps exposed that now need addressing to ensure a stable global payroll processes in place for the long term.
All of this means the global payroll professionals or digital transformation officers are putting together a clear business case for a technology investment in a global payroll solution. This is happening at many multinational organizations across the world and in this article, we will take a look at some of the things that should form a part of any business case for global payroll investment
Avoid damaging and costly global payroll error
One clear area to mention in any business case for global payroll technology is how the implementation of security focused payroll technology platforms can boost payroll accuracy and avoid payroll error.
Understandably, payroll error can be extremely damaging to a company's reputation. As much as people are reasonable and acknowledge that mistakes happen from time to time, global payroll errors are considered more serious than most.
Just two payroll errors can cause 49% of employees to start job hunting
In fact, according to a survey from The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated - a massive 49% of American workers will start a new job search after experiencing only two problems with their paycheck.
Global employees have many personal and financial obligations that revolve around being paid accurately and on time on a specific date every month. Should this not happen, or the figure that they are paid not be an accurate one, then this can be very problematic for an individual. In terms of the employee experience, morale and staff retention, it is clearly in the best interests of multinational companies to ensure that their global payroll professionals are working with the best available new technology to ensure payroll data errors are eliminated or at the very least minimized.
Provide remote access to essential data
The global business world shifted almost overnight to a remote delivery service environment and huge numbers of office workers across the globe found themselves working from home or in offsite locations.
Global payroll has been delivered remotely for over a year now, and this will continue to be the case until the vaccine program has been rolled out in vast numbers across all continents. It has also become clear that a return to normal on-site global payroll processing may not be a certainty as many organizations are currently examining what the future of office life and essential service delivery will look like. Early indications are that it will be a hybrid of remote delivery and office-based work so this means that payroll operations will be delivered at least in part, from a non- office environment in the future.
This means that it is absolutely essential that remote based employees and payroll team members have full, secure access to global payroll data they need to do their jobs. An investment in a digital platform featuring digital tools that enables the easy sharing and transferring of global payroll, HCM or other system data, should now be a priority at all global payroll departments, especially those that struggled to provide global payroll data access in the last 12 months.
Moving from non-secure excel spreadsheets and email transfers over to a secure cloud-based environment should form part of any business investment case. A global payroll platform featuring digital tools, user access rights, fast and efficient data transfer facilities and built-in information security and data protection modules should become the new normal for global payroll delivery.
Automation and standardization
During the pandemic, many global payroll professionals around the world would be more than happy to confirm that standardized data and processes would have made their lives a lot easier.
These professionals would also likely have been grateful for the introduction of robotic process automation to their monthly payroll workflow cycles- this would ensure that any repeatable, recurring data entry and validation processes would happen automatically and thereby allowed them to focus their valuable time on higher priority tasks in the global payroll delivery.
Automation ensures speed and accuracy, while data standardization enables global payroll professionals, spread across different countries and continents to work with similar or identical payroll data formats. This allows for immediate streamlining of processes as well as better operational efficiency.
Meeting demand for essential payroll reporting
The business case for comprehensive and detailed multi-country global payroll reporting has become extremely clear in the last 12 months. Requests for detailed analysis and multi-country cost comparisons have skyrocketed due to the global pandemic as C- suite executives and decision-makers look to get a handle on payroll costs across their network of payroll countries.
Leaders need to compare countries to see where money is going and where money can be saved. They need comprehensive and detailed reporting that enables them to drill down and examine trends by different pay elements such as job title, entity and country.
Many businesses across the world are still in crisis mode - so data analysis and insight are more important than ever as leadership teams know that the decisions they make right now could impact the future of their business for the next decade - naturally, they are keen to get these decisions correct and want to make these decisions based on hard facts, statistical data and trending insight.
To provide these key business stakeholders with this essential information, it is necessary to have a global payroll technology platform that is designed to provide consolidated multi country reporting on a detail level. The preference is for this reporting to be on a self-service basis, for it to arrive in a digestible format and for it to serve a range of business needs and key personas across the leadership team- ranging from human resources managers right up to the CFO.
Employee Data Access
The employee experience is now being prioritized more and more at global organizations -the war for talent is fierce and companies are keen to avoid staff turnover and churn. In an effort to better prioritize employee welfare, many organizations are choosing to respond to their requests for anytime, anywhere access to their employee data and pay related information.
Self-service digital tools will be required to make this a reality and any global payroll investment case should feature some information around the importance of enabling this level of access to a geo dispersed workforce.
Data protection and access has become a key issue for global employees, and this is an opportunity to make a positive impact on employee welfare by ensuring that they can access their payroll information in any location, on any device at any time they wish to. It also has the added advantage of reducing the administrative burden on global payroll and human resources departments who tend to spend way too much time answering employee data requests. It is a far more efficient process to have this information digitized and made readily available to employees whenever they need it. A global payroll platform with an employee facing portal is a new solution with a strong in-house user experience, that would be viewed very favorably by an international workforce.
2021 is an important year for technology investment and people responsible for creating a compelling business case to justify these investments. The learnings from a pandemic year are now in and while nobody can be 100% certain of what the future holds, the benefits of a global payroll technology platform that helps multinational companies better manage their global payroll service delivery are too important to ignore. Of course, many departments are likely to be working on business cases for investment and confident in their reasons why they should receive technology support but given the truly essential and business critical nature of global payroll, you are likely to be on firm ground with any business case that covers off the above topics when it comes to presenting a case for investment in a digital platform that future proves global payroll.