How You Can Change the Company with Payroll in the Cloud

The digital transformation isn’t endangering employees; it’s emboldening them.

Where does HR come in? The same study found that 84 percent of companies plan to upskill their workforce by 2020. With greater technological and digital capability across the board, the importance of separating yourself through your unique workforce has become more essential than ever. You must create a culture of innovation.

This is where HR will play an essential role — in educating, training and enabling employees to do more (and more of different things). They won’t just run the company. They’ll change the company. Payroll in the cloud, with full compliance, lower cost and a coherent employee experience, will create peace of mind allowing HR to refocus on what really matters: the future of work.

Many companies are still stuck in the status quo: HR professionals are bogged down by administrative tasks, regulatory reporting and burdensome compliance responsibilities. As the rush of digital transformation approaches, compliance needs increase amidst a system landscape that is outdated, fragmented and costly. The race to the cloud is on, and it starts with payroll.  Start with the core and aim agile!

Enable HR to Run HR Better

With 50 percent of HCM licensing now in the cloud, we expect a renewed focus on payroll BPO in the cloud. It’s the natural next step in HR’s transformation, doable within 12 months of go-live with global HCM such as Workday, Oracle and SAP SuccessFactors

Payroll in the cloud is key to enabling change in the organization. By utilizing BPO across many countries, companies can unlock many key benefits that will push employees to make a real difference. This journey takes place on four levels, or tiers, depending on the degree of investment and HR’s appetite to truly change the company to face disruption, stay in business, maintain a healthy cashflow as an attractive employer.

Figure (above): A conceptual approach to clarifying our four-tier value promise and managing mutual expectations (Credit: Zalaris)

Any lasting strategic relationship — like any lasting marriage — is built on a solid foundation of trust. From a trust level, we must engage more and more in mutual dependency and co-success to empower our clients to meet business needs — or envision the next digital release of themselves, including their own disruptions and innovations. Think:

• 40 to 50 percent of large payroll outsourcing clients want to engage with their vendor to benefit from automation (HorsesForSources)
• 25 percent of the same want to use the extended capability for their trusted partners’ strategic advisory services (Everest Group)
• 85 percent of large companies still lack a proper HR dashboard (Deloitte)

So much to do, so little time. The world is headed toward the cloud, and there’s no turning back. Again, HR is leading the way. Payroll in the cloud is lower cost, higher quality, more secure and fully compliant, leading to digitalized processes and one ultimate truth. CFOs and CIOs stuck with fragmented and complex on-premise systems need to catch up. Keep in mind: It’s not all about technology. It’s about people and their overall experience of being employed.

As you embark on your cloud journey, HR professionals will increasingly be able to focus on strategic value and shift the employee vision from process to experience. HR’s value will become unmistakable and irreplaceable as the mission to close the productivity gap takes flight.

Enable Enterprise-Wide Evolution

Technology can take on more than ever, from recruiting to hiring to personnel data management to employee benefits processing, and a cultural change is necessary to carve out a space in this new reality.

HR must understand that its sustained competitiveness is not about payroll systems or compliance reporting; it’s about focusing on company-changing efforts, such as driving innovation, improving workforce experience and capability, and fulfilling business need.

Above all, again, effective and strategic HR comes down to valuing people. All our customers have demonstrated a commitment to this aspiration, and we embrace and support the sentiment across everything we do at Zalaris. We take pride in tackling challenges of designing, developing and implementing new integrated solutions that will enable you to thrive and capitalize as well.

As an HR professional in a large, established company, ask yourself:

1. What are you doing right now to close the productivity gap from disruption?
2. What is your appetite for change: run the company better or change the company?
3. If payroll is not part of your company’s core business model differentiator, why hesitate to start the journey to the cloud?
4. Do you agree that the myths around payroll in the clouds are busted? After all, Zalaris today provide multi-country BPO services from the cloud across all highly regulated industries, including public, across Europe, including Germany as well as UK.

The business disruption is here. Margins are squeezed. Thirty to forty percent of major revenue streams are in jeopardy. We’ve been providing payroll services for nearly 20 years and have repeatedly been named one of the top BPO providers in Europe. We would be thrilled to gain your trust; engage with you; empower you; envision the necessary change via HR to drive overall business productivity.