Workday’s recent Evolve and Thrive: Rethinking Global Payroll whitepaper makes for eye-opening reading. And it underlines some of the industry’s most pressing challenges, which I’ve seen up close.
This stat from the report really stood out;
64% of payroll practitioners believe their current payroll operations lack the necessary agility, flexibility, and innovation to support their business.
It’s a damning statistic, but not a surprising one.
It’s also no surprise then that 50% of respondents plan to change their system by 2025.
The need to modernize before it’s too late
What the report makes clear is that the payroll sector has been too slow to modernize in line with the digital transformations seen across other disciplines.
It’s still commonplace for payroll officers to be reliant on manual data processing and “a patchwork of paper”. That approach has a high-risk factor.
Not wanting to scaremonger, but in the context of shifting regulatory requirements and ever-increasing cross-border complexity, payroll is a ticking time bomb for so many organizations.
To quote the report, “standing still isn’t an option”.
Changing the perception of payroll services
How have we ended up in this situation?
Historically, payroll has been viewed solely as a cost-center. It’s been seen as an operational necessity, nothing more. And crucially, perhaps not seen as worthy of investment (from an ROI perspective).
But that way of thinking is outdated. In my opinion, it undermines the people in charge of payroll and the impact that it has across an entire organization.
This wave of new technology is changing payroll (and the wider HR ecosystem) from a purely transactional function to one with real strategic merit, under 3 pillars:
- Reducing complexity and future-proofing
- Deeper operational insights
- Better employee experiences
The report covers these in greater detail, but here’s some thoughts from my own perspective, working with Payslip’s clients as they transition to the next generation of payroll technology.
When the payroll team has access to the right data, they naturally have a bigger seat at the table. And they can add real value to the conversation around a company’s future decisions.
The burnout rate in the payroll industry is real. The stereotype of the over-worked and underappreciated payroll admin sadly holds true. And the incumbent tech isn’t helping.
79% of those surveyed in the report say they feel underserved by technology.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
When you empower them with automation tools that take the sting out of repetitive tasks, your staff retention is notably better.
And when you safeguard against mistakes and compliance breaches…well, it’s better for all parties.
Workday and Payslip
At Payslip, we’re delighted to be one of just seven trusted partners integrated with Workday’s Global Payroll Connect Platform.
Global Payroll Connect is a unified global payroll solution that can seamlessly connect with payroll providers to deliver an end-to-end global payroll experience.
Payslip is the only partner that offers vendor-agnostic payroll integrations, bringing data from any payroll vendor around the world into Workday. This gives you total freedom over which payroll vendors you work with, as well as worldwide coverage, without compromise.
This means that all the data across each of your vendors is centrally managed and controlled from a single platform. And importantly, it’s available at your fingertips whenever you need it, accessible via your Workday dashboard.
Workday and Payslip; it’s global payroll that just works.
You can read the full report from Workday here. I highly recommend it.
This article originally appeared on linkedin.com
