Payroll Digital Transformation - Applying The Principles Of ‘Truly Digital’ In Payroll World

InI recently read again one of our whitepapers, which was by Steve Goldberg, an eminent Global HR Tech Adviser, on Becoming a Truly Digital HR Organisation. The “truly digital” part was indeed thought-provoking. The whitepaper crisply defines Digital Transformation and Intelligent Automation and offers a practical framework for the HR to adopt, to become Truly Digital.

It acknowledges that job satisfiers vary widely between individuals and underlines the importance of personalization. The key to unlocking management effectiveness is rich and accessible data. It makes you think about going beyond ESS/MSS and supporting self-managing career plans and continuous/quick feedbacks to employees.

What Should be the Modus Operandi of HR Managers and Executives?

Be it recruitment, training or understanding employee sentiments, to achieve the ideal organisation culture and employer brand – the paper discusses what should be the approach of HR. Steve underlines that simplification of work helps in increasing productivity and deploying a nimble HR technology is non-negotiable. The best part is, he gives 5 specific actions that you must follow to achieve the goal (don’t miss reading them yourselves).

If you read this insightful paper, and if you happen to be a payroll-blooded person (like me and many other Ramcoites), you will naturally wonder, “How do I extend these principles to business Payroll process and make it TRULY Digital?” And the answer lies in making your HR/payroll managers the superheroes. Yes. Don’t forget, payroll manager is also an employee (like Steve reminds us about Line Manager) and your payroll process’s output is truly proportionate to the degree to which he/she is digitally armed. Three key things that would largely help your business’s payroll team in digitizing your payroll process are:

• Cutting no-value activities
• Empowering with high-power tools
• Assisting with automated assistants

Cutting no-value activities

Yes. Why should a payroll manager spend time in clicking buttons and watching progress bars for processing payroll or generating reports? These are surely time-consuming activities that add zero intellectual value. With a digital payroll process in place and automation at its best, combined with intelligence to understand a payroll calendar, you should be able to finish off such tasks overnight on payroll cut-off date. Look for payroll systems which can provide you such clean automated solutions with perfected RPA. Never let your folks do anything manually that could be automated.

Regular Payroll Audit & Controls is strongly recommended.

• Empower with high power tools

The primary channel through which HR/payroll managers check business payroll computations is by analysing the Variance Analysis reports. The usual norm is to find the variance, and use other reports like new joiner report, salary change report, promotion report, absence report, etc. to reconcile the variances and sign off the payroll. But, with payroll digital transformation and propulsion of artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can look for powerful tools which can do all the trend analysis, find out the possible reasons for variances, and explain the payroll administrator proactively. Yes, your payroll manager can be empowered to use such tools, managing their time efficiently..

Assist with automated assistants

As Steve underlined in his whitepaper, it is now time for ESS and MSS to positively impact Employee engagement, Productivity and Retention. There are ample opportunities in digital payroll. Think of how many times your payroll manager was made to explain normal payslip queries for employees and for how many months and years is he/she doing the same routine! Automated assistants like Chatbots are the best way to break this monotony. Well-designed chatbots can be great assistants, helping employees and in turn helping the payroll managers too.

Also Read: Digital Transformation in HR & Payroll

Now that you know how you can digitize your payroll process, let’s take a closer look to the benefits of digital transformation of payroll:

1. Improves Regulatory Compliance

When we talk about highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, advertising, food, technology, etc., and activities like payroll processing and accounting, even minor mistakes can push your organization into legal complications and have unexpected consequences.

While human intelligence is still superior when it comes to decision making, digital payroll solutions and automated tools are way more efficient and effective when it comes to performing repetitive and mundane tasks and generating accurate data. With advanced payroll process solutions in place, employees can stay assured that right data is being generated and right salary is being processed at the right time besides other processes taking place.

2. Mitigates Employee Burnout

Remote work as well as hybrid work models are here to stay and might potentially become an integral part of the corporate world. However, with this, employees are facing disengagement problems and burnout due to distractions and increased workload. Even global surveys have shown that employee burnout is increasing consistently. However, you can alleviate employee burnout and disengagement problems with advanced payroll solutions.

With the AI-enabled cloud payroll processing solutions in place, you can easily track the working hours of your employees. Such real-time insights can help you minimize employee burnout significantly as you would be able to find out that exactly how much are your employees overworked. Based on this data, you can help your employees by mentoring them on better time management, re-distributing tasks and responsibilities or by hiring new people.

3. Overcoming the Global Shortage of Talent

Lately, resource crunch for organizations and unemployment for people have become common problems. One of the main reasons behind this is - employers have access to a limited talent pool and candidates have access to limited opportunities due to innumerable reasons. And, geographical boundaries are one of the main reasons.

However, this problem is solved to some extent with the shift in work structure and the growing popularity of remote as well as hybrid work models. While this has opened up a myriad of opportunities for employers to hire talent from across the globe, it gets challenging for them to efficiently manage such a diverse workforce due to varying regional laws, lack of engagement with other employees, and many other reasons.

Also Read: How Digitally Mature Is Your Payroll Function?

However, with the innovative solutions and digital payroll processes, it has become seamless to manage a diversified workforce effectively while tracking their working hours accuratelt, paying them on time, complying with their local laws and regulations, and maintaining your employee records related to their skills, dependents, training, etc.

4. Improves Team Collaboration and Trust

As the agile and all-inclusive tools allow you to monitor your employees’ workflow progress, the managers can simply go to the dashboard to understand the same instead of emailing or calling their team members at frequent intervals. Ramco’s payroll process solutions also allow you to track employee movements and enable human resource functions such as promotions, transfers and deputations. This is of great help when it comes to changing the assignment of an employee or moving them across grades, locations and positions.

So, one can safely say, True Digital Transformation is something that is definitely possible, if a structured approach, the right choice of tools and HR software and payroll software are put in place.