In 2007, Steve Jobs jumped up on stage to unveil something that people in the 1980s thought was utterly impossible. He was dressed in his iconic turtle neck, with dad-style sneakers and baggy jeans. His pale pallor was a stark contrast to the black curtain at the back of the stage. Soon he was dwarfed by the images on the screen behind him as well as the immensity of what these images would come to represent.
Over the next 2 hours, he proceeded to revolutionize the most fundamental part of human interaction – how we communicate. The iPhone was born and the world; from shopping to driving, and music to the internet, would never be the same again. But what does this have to do with the future of payroll?
Since this moment, technology providers from every corner of the industry have sought to have their own iPhone moment. Their collateral and sales pitches talk endlessly about being at the cutting edge, all vying for their own revolution in their particular sector.
One sector however has seemed resistant to this type of change.
Paying people for their work is an idea nearly as old as humanity. It’s true that the form, etiquette and currency have changed dramatically- from livestock to shells to precious metals to modern fiat and cryptocurrencies.
However, the fundamentals – the ground rules – have been doggedly consistent – people want to be paid on time and correctly or else they get pretty peeved. This means that payroll professionals are naturally sceptical when it comes to people talking about a “revolution” of the way payroll is done. If it goes wrong, at best people will be deeply unhappy. At worst, it can end a company.
So what does this mean for technology providers who want to bring the weight of 2022 technology to bear to help payroll professionals? One suggestion is to look at Payroll through the lens of evolution not revolution.
Looking at the fundamentals
Quite often, when talking about the future of a payroll solution in a business, software vendors will talk about giving more time back to staff. Staff can spend this time on strategic vision, they say, and operational objectives. They can add value to the company in other ways.
While this is good for a lot of departments, it often overlooks two things about payroll professionals:
- The job is all about attention to detail which doesn’t have shortcuts.
- A lot of payroll professionals enjoy number crunching and the problem-solving that comes as part of payroll.
So with that in mind, how can technology providers help payroll professionals in a way that would actually be valuable to them? Below are some suggestions from Max van der Klis-Busink, the Global Head of Payroll at Zoom.
- Put yourself in payroll’s shoes
How can technology be developed to make the life of payroll professionals easier? Around 60% of the job is data crunching, much of which is simple but manual and labour intensive.
For example, if I want to see the average pay for a particular pay bracket over the last 5 years then this should be an easy task. Except it’s not. Because most of the time it involves pulling previous separate years into a big spreadsheet. It means picking out lots of different data points that could skew the information – leavers, anomalies, bonuses etc.
Future payroll solutions should allow payroll professionals to pull out and manipulate data far more easily such that there is more time for the actual analysis and detail of the data, rather than simply building the data into a structure that makes any kind of sense. If technology could do this for payroll professionals, it would be seen as a massive win by a large number of companies.
- Move away from the idea of connectors and interfaces and toward common data
In the human capital management world, the idea of revolution is everywhere – and rightly so. A company’s biggest expenditure is always its staff. And in a world where people’s relationship with work is changing dramatically, it makes sense that their technology should revolutionize along with the relationship with staff.
However, something that happens all too often is that during the flurry of revolutionary ideas and concepts washing over the HR technology, Payroll is forgotten. This usually leads to a world where the data models for HR can be drastically different to the data that is essential to payroll.
The result – more work for payroll professionals. They now have to try and adapt the new data from cutting-edge HR systems to fit into a payroll structure that has remained largely unchanged for the last 50 years.
So, how can technology vendors help? By building better collaboration between human capital management systems and payroll systems. Simply this means that the systems should share commonalities – things like better validation and flow.
This will improve the quality of life for payroll professionals by a significant margin so they can spend more time on the actual numbers. One way to help is to ensure that Payroll is kept in the loop when big HCM changes are afoot. Including Payroll in the conversation will be invaluable in ensuring that payroll evolves and enjoys the same benefits from technology as other departments.
- Educating employees
Payroll is time sensitive by its nature. Deadlines are strict and unmoving. Missing them is not an option. And alongside all of this time pressure, payroll must be completely compliant and correct to the decimal place. So what is the worst thing that can happen in a payroll run? Having to call up your provider to ask a question or get some historical pay slips.
This will not change as payroll professionals enter the future, so developing software that is simple and intuitive enough that payroll professionals, or even employees themselves, can self-serve should be a fundamental focus for payroll software. The ability for an employee to download their payslips themselves, or view them on a mobile app. The ability for payroll professionals to pull up valuable data quickly and in any form they want, without having to export raw data and hand crank everything. This sort of enablement should be the focus for payroll software, beyond developing a shiny new toy that may need years of testing before the sector has the confidence to test it, let alone fully adopt it.
The reason is simple – the more time that payroll professionals spent logging requests with payroll software vendors or answering requests for employees, the less time they have to get into the detail, ensure everything is correct and people are being paid on time and correctly for the valuable work they do every day.
So, payroll is one of the most important things that a company needs to get right. Because of its traditional nature, it is also one of the hardest places to leverage technology in a way that will make a real difference for payroll professionals (as opposed to offering stress and a desperate desire for early retirement).
Suppliers should talk to payroll professionals to ensure that software focuses on smooth processes. They should make software that is intuitive so it’s easy to be self-sufficient when the pressure is on. Crucially, they should focus on what will ensure real-life, practical improvements to the life of a payroll professional, rather than pushing a shiny new toy that is likely to miss the point.
For more information about how software professionals can ask better questions, look at Smarticles Sales Tips #1: https://smarticlesdotcom.wordpress.com/2021/08/09/smarticles-sales-tips/
Payzarr offers a great series of payroll podcasts which talk about the future of one of the most important ignored and often most important departments in a business. You can watch the first episode, featuring Max van der Klis Bisink here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpvI_tHgFYk
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