Payroll, and the way that companies are approaching how they deliver to the employee as well the technology that surrounds it, is transforming before our eyes.
As the age of clocking in and out of the office gives way to the gig economy and remote employment opportunities around the world, so changes the expectations the current workforce has around the way they will be paid. In response to this, and to stay competitive in attracting and retaining top talent, companies must make a conscious effort to modernize their payroll platforms and the way they serve to accommodate demand.
Before the exponential rise of cloud-based technology, payroll platforms were primarily on-premise with the expectation of working with and monitoring local payroll data. With the cloud, company payroll data should be seen holistically across multiple countries and analyzed in conjunction with other HR and financial data to inform better business decisions, especially during times when payroll operations must respond rapidly to disruption and change to take care of their people.
Allowing a payroll team’s operations outcomes to occur on the same platform, even if they are operating halfway across the world from each other, also provides better business continuity. This, in turn, makes it easier for a company payroll team to stay agile and coordinated around the globe. These advantages in payroll operations allow companies more flexibility when deciding what options their workforce will have with pay.
This flexibility is important because as the traditional salary and benefit packages companies offer their candidates to become commonplace, employers must find other ways to distinguish themselves against their competitors.
The rise of the gig economy has been especially perilous to employers looking to attract top talent as workers who would normally be content embarking in an office job now have the option to use their skills in a job they see as more flexible to their lifestyle. With the average job tenure of 25-34-year-olds at 2.8 years] , companies must also go a step further and work not only to attract top talent but to keep them from leaving. Companies that have a payroll platform capable of offering these flexible pay options as a benefit to their incoming and existing workforce can use this technology as means to attract and retain payment options that fit the needs of their employees.
A modernized payroll platform also allows for better, faster, and more accurate data scrutiny through AI and robotic process automation. AI’s ability to make inferences from historical payroll data provides employees with better guidance for their compensation actions, such as benefit elections. Its analytical capabilities allow for the quality reviews that normally happen during a payroll run to occur in the pre-payroll stages.
This means mistakes that might have been previously caught too late and affected an employee’s pay, such as incorrect time entry, can now be detected by comparing the time entry to historical employee time data and corrected in real-time before the inaccurate data is carried over into the payroll cycle.
The way we pay people now is different from how we paid them a decade ago and will be different than the way we pay them a decade from now, so it’s important your payroll platform can keep up. As the workforce and technology continue to evolve rapidly, organizations must keep pace too or run the risk of becoming laggards in their industry.