Recent Research:
3Sixty Insights spoke in depth with three SMB customers of Engagedly — Essex Bank (a local financial institution), Convergent Media Group (a digital marketing agency), and BSR (a nonprofit consultancy focused on corporate responsibility). Each was facing significant challenges in managing processes associated with tracking and measuring their employees’ performance. This was the common paint point leading them to make the decision to implement or expand their deployments of Engagedly’s solution, which, in turn, brought order, efficiency, and flexibility to their workflow. All reported making major progress in achieving their ultimate goal: to modernize the employee experience. Users reported improvements in the retention of their people and in HR’s ability to help inform rational, effective employee incentive programs.
Learning plays an enormous role in organizational stability. Whether it is for training, upskilling, reskilling and, ultimately, career pathing, an employer’s learning platform is often the best vehicle for an organization to set goals for its people or have an effective impact on overall internal culture—together among the fundamental factors impacting the employee experience. It’s certainly the sole efficient way to track compliance with the complex regulatory environment governing the employment of people. Over the past 19 months, meanwhile, the worldwide pandemic has exacerbated the always-pressing concerns around these same factors—training, compliance, upskilling, reskilling, and employer culture. During this time, naturally, organizations have leaned as heavily as ever on their learning management systems (LMS) and the content feeding these. This reliance has become acute, and related use LMSs methodical, as employers have navigated complicated scenarios to reestablish a semblance of normalcy as the world exits the onset of the pandemic. This pressure to innovate with regards to what being at work will look like long-term has produced or breathed new life into concepts such as re-onboarding, work-from-home (WFH), hybrid work, and more.
Research Note: Outsourcing Global Payroll: The Impact on Data Security & Compliance
Consider the pent-up employee sentiment waiting to be validated or triggered against the backdrop of the massive complexity global organizations face in processing payroll in a timely manner, accurately, compliantly, and securely every pay period. Payroll teams, HR and finance face a daunting task managing highly sensitive employee data as efficiently as possible to deliver timely and accurate payroll. Because technological infrastructure is critical to paying employees, the organization’s CIO is also an important stakeholder who shares responsibility for ensuring that global payroll processes successfully every time.
How an Organization Evolves into Needing a Global Payroll Solution
The road to global payroll is long and winding and often unpredictable. Put differently, a solution for global payroll is not something employers typically implement before it’s needed. This type of action is not even something they really can do. Unlike a software vendor’s modules for human capital management, for example, global payroll isn’t a pure-play off-the-shelf functionality any given employer is apt to pay for up front, but leave shut off until the time is right. Never mind that an outsourced solution for global payroll constitutes far more than software. Whereas the need for a level of capability around performance management or any other conventional silo of HCM proper or its subsets always exists, this is not so with global payroll. It is one of those needs that does not exist right up to the point when it undeniably does.
It is at this point that the vast majority of organizations will contend with their need to process payroll on a global scale however they can. Every pay period—weekly, every two weeks, or, for some, monthly—many continue on, for far too long, rolling the rock of a heavy manual payroll management process up the same hill again and again. With heavily manual workflow for global payroll, employers waste unnecessary labor expenditure on exceptionally tedious tasks. Compounding matters, these organizations also run a high risk of missing the deadline for payroll and paying staff inaccurately, all leading to yet more labor expenditure to rectify the situation and remain compliant with myriad regulatory environments.
For well over a decade, employers have been ripping out legacy deployments of software for human capital management in favor of superior, cloud-based solutions delivered via software-as-a-service (SaaS). Providing the impetus for their decision to leave these often on-premises solutions behind is, typically, some combination of factors: the desire to emancipate HCM from pernicious inefficiencies, the business rationale to lower IT-related labor expenditure and eliminate expensive yearly maintenance fees, and more. Modern technology for HCM tends to deliver automation that greatly alleviates the administrative burden associated with the last generation of software for HCM. It is unacceptable today to accept highly manual processes in payroll or anything immediately surrounding it—e.g., the human resource information system (HRIS, a.k.a. core HR), time and attendance, scheduling, benefits administration.
With the change comes more, however. Modern technology for HCM delivers innovation, flexibility, and data transparency. Aspirational HCM focused on improving and buoying employee sentiment becomes something organizations can consider doing (3Sixty Insights BWSRN2142 – Concrete vs. Abstract HCM: The Power of “And,” April 2021). The technology they have gets the low-level, unnecessarily time-consuming work out of the way. This helps them save considerably on labor expenditure. Call this tactical. 3Sixty Insights calls it concrete HCM. Going far beyond the automation of tedious, repeatable workflow, meanwhile, modern HCM technology supports mobile internal applications and responsive self-service functionality. It provides real-time visibility into people data. It makes people analytics sophisticated—predictive and prescriptive. This is all the stuff of strategic HR, what 3Sixty Insights calls abstract HCM, an attention to employee sentiment and its inextricable, eventual link to everything the C-suite appreciates: increased revenue, reduced cost, and mitigated risk.
Where these employers that make the leap into the cloud exist in their journey runs the gamut. However, the decision to leave old HCM software in the rearview mirror positions them from a technological standpoint to lift their HR operations out of cost-center old-think to take on a future-of-work mindset. The organizations that initiate and matriculate successful cultural transformation get to that other side.
Getting global payroll right is mission-critical, and a significant share of the responsibility for it falls on CIOs, naturally. Absent order for the enterprise software ecosystem touching global payroll, so much can go wrong. This profoundly affects an organization’s people. The infographic here delves into the specifics around outsourcing global payroll—the seven warning signs that you should do, the three major upsides for your organization, and more.
Recent Articles:
Immedis Guest Blog Article | How the CIO Plays a Critical Role in Bringing Order to Global Payroll
It is not a surprise that getting global payroll right is a mission-critical activity. What might surprise you is that a significant share of the responsibility for ensuring that an organization successfully accomplishes this falls on the CIO. Why? Because much of an organization’s enterprise software ecosystem is tightly entwined with the intricacies of processing global payroll, it causes significant stress across enterprise software infrastructure every pay period. Plus, there are considerable data security and compliance risks for organizations to consider- most of which will come under the CIO’s remit.
However, there are other often-overlooked considerations. The impact on an organization and its people can be stressful too. According to The Workforce Institute at UKG, 49 % of employees will tolerate no more than one mistake or problem with their paycheck before looking for a new job—making the decision to upend their own lives and placing the unwanted pressure of creeping attrition on the employer. Their decision likely stems from the fact that, according to a 2020 survey by the American Payroll Association, more than two-thirds of employees would experience financial difficulty if their paychecks were delayed by just one week. In other words – the pressure to ensure and maintain a secure, timely, and accurate payroll system is immense.
Paying and Getting Paid — The Future Is Already Out of the Barn
“I want it all, and I want it now!” belted the late, great Freddie Mercury on a criminally underrated song by the rock band Queen. Was he channeling typical first world consumers and employees from some four decades into the future? He might as well have been. People these days, not all of them want it all, truly, but most seem to want whatever it is they do want, now. They expect every accommodation. Leeway and speed are what they want. They want what they buy to arrive as soon as possible. They want to pay in the easiest way available, in a way most accommodating to their needs and wants. And they want the pay they’ve earned so far, right now — not in two weeks, at the end of a pay period.
The gall, the nerve of these people, to expect convenience, immediacy and flexibility — it’s almost as if they see the caliber of technology out there and ask rhetorically, and logically, “Why should I have to wait?”
I’m with them. So is the future of getting paid and paying.
How Compt became this year’s SHRMLabs Better Workplaces Challenge Cup Winner
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a fireside chat during the HR Tech Alliances Weekly Town Hall Meetup. Featured was Compt, this year’s SHRMLabs Better Workplaces Challenge Cup Winner. Following is a recap of the event and high-level analysis of Compt.
We find ourselves smack-dab in the middle of a Great Resignation. What is it, exactly? Scores of the employed across myriad sectors of industry are reevaluating their work lives and opting to trade in their existing, possibly unsatisfying jobs for new work, elsewhere. It’s a not entirely unexpected outcome of pandemic-related lockdowns that have lasted longer than just about anyone would have wanted. Facing these market forces, how does an employer persuade a workforce to stay or potential staff to join? This is where innovation in the thinking behind total compensation comes into play. It’s not a panacea, but employers can simultaneously attract new hires and entice their current employees to stay by making tweaks to the parts of total compensation that are flexible—namely, employee perks. And those tweaks may include a shift in mindset and software….
On Friday, Oct. 22, Amy Spurling, chief executive officer and founder of Compt, joined Ward Christman, chief advisor for HR Tech Advisor and co-founder of the affiliated HR Tech Alliances, for a fireside chat during HR Tech Alliances’ weekly Town Hall, a one-hour forum where users, vendors and influencers gather to discuss current events in the HR industry. Spurling explained how Compt became this year’s SHRMLabs Better Workplaces Challenge Cup Winner. For their conversation, Spurling and Christman also focused on Compt’s solution. Spurling then fielded questions from attendees.
Lever Blog Article: 5 Talent Acquisition Trends That Will Define 2022
As each year comes to a close, talent acquisition and recruitment teams worldwide plan their respective strategies for the next 12 months. The top TA teams tackle several critical tasks and address key areas like:
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- Resolving issues with their hiring processes
- Revisiting language in their job descriptions
- Reevaluating their talent management
- Reconsidering what a ‘qualified’ candidate looks like
- Reassessing where and how they source top talent
Recent #HRTechChats
For this episode of #HRTechChat, our guest was Caitlin MacGregor, chief executive officer and co-founder of Plum.io. As readers of the 3Sixty Insights blog know, we are convinced that there is a critical link in human capital management between artificial intelligence and psychometrics, and this critical link needs a cacophony of advocacy. The idea is that fast-developing AI for the world of work runs a risk — a huge one, actually — of failing to account for the most important, necessary aspects of humanness. That is, unless we intercede immediately and in a big way. If we don’t, the prospects for humans in the future of work might not be too good.
To be clear, I am hopeful. Caitlin and I went into some depth on the rationale behind this urgency and why this kind of key information may nonetheless be less than a priority among forces currently steering the evolution of workplace AI. Plum’s expertise and value proposition are in the psychometrics side of this equation. Drawing on the latest science, the vendor deals in modern psychometrics. In other words, and to pilfer an old marketing slogan for Oldsmobile, a now-defunct automobile brand, this is not your father’s MBTI. Advancements in the science behind industrial psychology have produced instruments capable of much depth and accuracy in testing for the potential of people.
And the question has now become, what’s stopping us from doing all we can to take all this new high-caliber insight into humans’ potential and inform the development of AI for the world of work? We’re talking about soft skills, by the way. These are the gold standard in predicting humans ability to survive and thrive in a given role. It isn’t hard skills or past experience or past performance. Too many factors are at play.
A bright future of work is possible. Its likelihood hinges on a number of things, and one of those is how good of a job we do right now in feeding still-young AI nutritious data on people potential. It’s the dimension and perspective that conventional data on people’s job eligibility (e.g., credentials) and past performance, while necessary, can’t provide. Among the upsides, meanwhile, will be increases in retention from improvements to the employee experience and employer culture and brand.