Doing What Comes Naturally – Payroll

by Caroline Garstang Howlett

The timing couldn’t have been better. On International Women’s Day, a copy of Paytech, the magazine of the Global Payroll Management Institute, thudded into our inboxes.

The March issue features an Executive Spotlight on Clare Kidd, Global Reward Director at NGA Human Resources.

In any other organization it is very possible, as a payroll professional, that Clare would be a customer of ours, but at NGA Human Resources, Clare is just as vital.

Clare is one of a growing number of women at NGA Human Resources, heading up global teams

Her role is broad, covering the core reward aspects of, compensation, executive compensation, benefits and governance & regulatory matters. She is instrumental to the development of the global reward strategy, as well as providing group-wide reward advice to the executive leadership team.

Clare’s role also allows her to be involved in both the training and development of junior team members, an opportunity that she really enjoys.

In her interview, Clare shares her professional experience and thoughts on emerging trends, as well as touching on the subject of compliance, which in an ever more complex environment, is increasingly challenging.

The full interview can be read here, but in summary, Clare explains that the role of a global payroll professional is fast evolving with the digitization of the workplace.

Article synopsis

Payroll and HR processes really are intertwined, and more so than ever, we’re tightly aligned to the finance department, centrally, and with the teams in each of the countries where we have employees to pay and reward.

To be successful, highly accurate workforce data analysis and reporting must sit at the core of business decision making. The smart management of workforce costs and performance can clearly be seen in results.

Headcount, resource allocation and organizational changes each impact employee costs. It is, therefore, vitally important to record time and attendance and to then match hours worked against efficiencies in processes.

For example, simple, but smart analytics will show that of 400 man hours worked in a shop each week, more customer transactions would be processes and customer satisfaction and, therefore, loyalty built, if 80% of these hours were worked between 8 and 9am and 5 and 8pm.

Staff costs would remain the same (or be reduced if lower salaried employees can replace higher paid managers), but revenues earned per employee hour would significantly increase.

Only by analyzing the data from HR, payroll and finance can answer these questions:

• Are we getting return on salaries paid?
• Is the workforce working efficiently?
• Could we benefit from centralizing local roles?
• Could we localize global roles?
• Would part-time or contingent workers be more cost-effective?
• Are customers getting the service they are paying for from charged out employees?

Customer satisfaction loops back to CSAT. The income generated as the result of customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention impacts the revenues and profits we have to cover staff costs – fixed and incidentals including spot bonuses.

10 core trends to be focused on

1. Joined up data processes across all business areas – one true source of data to feed into and out of HRIS system
2. Return on employee investment – payroll is no longer an operation. It’s a critical business function presenting total direct and indirect cost of employees
3. Standardized global payroll system – fully compliant with HR and payroll regulations in all operational countries
4. Talent mobility – agile systems making it easy to migrate employees across locations for payment purposes
5. Payroll-as-a-Service – risk-free migration to payroll in the Cloud
6. Flexible, single vendor management –  best technologies delivered, managed and invoiced by single point of contract
7. Rewards and compensation – of increasing importance, ahead of basic salary, for employees
8. Cloud technology – allows organizations to transform and release systems very quickly on a flexible pricing model
9. Automation – replacing routine processes data and admin processes to cut time and costs and redistribute skills
10. Analytics –cloud makes it easy to deploy, consume and analyze data and to use this I dialogue between HR and finance

The rest of Clare’s insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by payroll team, single and multi-country, can be enjoyed in the Paytech article.