How to achieve agility through payroll digitilisation

How to achieve agility through payroll digitalisation

Ian McAlister, GM at CRS Technologies,

By Charndré Emma Kippie

Digital solutions create massive opportunities Digitalising payroll solutions can signify the watershed moment for a company to embrace a cloud-based approach across its systems and processes. Ian McAlister, General Manager at CRS Technologies, believes that this provides an organisation with a massive opportunity for growth while enabling it to become more agile and responsive to market requirements.

Ensuring the protection of customer information With the deadline for Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) compliance has come and gone on 1 July, companies are under pressure to ensure they have taken all reasonable steps to protect the personally identifiable information of customers. Digital systems can help mitigate some of this risk. Of course, it is not a case of blindly implementing security and data controls that make systems unusable, it is about finding the right balance between dealing with compliance while remaining operational and delivering services to employees and end-users.

“The normalisation of remote working has highlighted how flexible companies can become in their workforce. This has also expanded the talent pool for a business as geographic limitations to finding the right candidates are no longer a constraint. Whether a person lives in the US, Nigeria or China, if a cloud environment is in place, that person can contribute to the growth of the organisation,” says McAlister.

Adaptability to laws & regulations

However, he cautions that with this comes a responsibility by the organisation to ensure the payroll can adapt to the specific regulations and laws of the country from which a person is working.

“Digital payroll solutions can accommodate for this while providing the customisability and scalability for the organisation to adapt to any geographic territory. And yet, despite this, human resources and payroll are often overlooked when it comes to digitalisation. An international study has found that 76% of human resource leaders say their department’s value was overlooked in digital transformation projects,” says McAlister.

Investing in effective payroll solutions

When combined with the fact that another survey found that financial matters are the biggest cause of stress for employees (at least in pre- COVID-19 days), investing in an effective payroll solution must be an obvious strategic priority. A digitally led payroll environment introduces such features as employee self-service and online payslips. Even on-demand payments (thanks to the gig economy workforce) have become an accepted way of doing business with a growing digital-friendly employee base.

“Through integrating this digital payroll with human resource systems, the data can provide a range of critical workforce insights that can be used to improve internal processes and support the human resource function with its role in digital transformation. Fundamental to this is adopting a mindset that digitalising the payroll environment is an ongoing process with both upfront costs and ongoing expenses to consider,” concludes McAlister.