Agile, innovative, ambitious and forward-thinking businesses must be able to grow with confidence. How? By hiring the right people, managing them effectively, developing them in line with business objectives, paying them correctly and on-time and ensuring legal compliance.
Once your business has reached a certain size, you can no longer rely on basic disparate systems and manual processes to ensure that your HR and payroll operations remain accurate, effective, aligned and compliant. You may have already reached your tipping point, where HR management and payroll processing becomes too draining and technology and service solutions have made their way to the table for discussion. If so, the argument for a perfect partnership between HR and payroll is clear.
Hiring the right people
Job applicants nowadays have high expectations. The brand value of your business is important and can be influenced by issues such as slow application processing, repeat requirements for applicant information, lack of sufficient follow-up or feedback and an overall poor applicant experience.
Businesses of all sizes need an established recruitment process – automated where possible – to enable effective and smooth on-boarding. Key elements of this process include the capture and centralised management of all necessary applicant data; the ability to receive applications online from a branded portal; and the ability to process applicants throughout the entire process to ‘new starter’ status.
Provided your HR and payroll processes are aligned, new starters will automatically be pushed into your HR and payroll business without any hiccups.
Managing people and ensuring compliance
Having the right people with the right skills and at the right time is critical for business success. With such a close link between the effective management of people and positive business performance, tools that can help align human resources with business requirements can prove very valuable. Consider the following:
Employee satisfaction = employee retention = customer satisfaction = customer loyalty = high profitability
A simple HR and payroll system will allow for the storage of key information, including personal details, right to work data, and all documents and correspondence relating to employees, including policies and procedures. Easy access to this information can help you ensure legal compliance as well as providing the tools you need for effective people management. Add to this the ability to view and edit your organisation structure and you will have a transparent view of reporting lines, vacancies and more. When all of this information is held in one place alongside payroll data, it eliminates inaccuracies and duplication of data, while reducing exposure to risk and errors.
Paying people correctly and on-time
With all employee data updated correctly and made available in one place – regardless of which business area ‘owns’ that data – it is easy to run an accurate payroll. The processes and workflows required to achieve this will be simple – for example, a new employee can be added to your HR system, their personal details can be added and the data can be used to run the payroll without any costly cross-referencing, delays or mistakes.
Self-service: devolving responsibility for data availability and accuracy
The icing on the top of any HR and payroll tool will be the ability to deliver self-service to your employees and their managers. Giving employees the ability to log in and manage their own information, submit time and expenses information, book holidays and view payroll information is a real game changer for many businesses. Likewise, allowing managers to authorise holidays and time and expenses claims, as well as manage absence, promotes fast administration and joined up information.
With payroll information being pulled through automatically, you can ensure payroll accuracy too. Self-service gives you benefits like access to accurate, up to date information, reduced paperwork, improved employee engagement and reduced telephone enquiries to HR for basic information.
Compliance requirements are a concern for both HR and payroll and pressures in this area only increase as businesses get bigger. As you grow, having a ‘single view’ of HR and payroll information is vital, allowing you to keep tabs on the effective management of employee relations and employment practices, safety and risk, compensation and benefits and all other areas of HR and payroll compliance.
Developing your people
If you are looking towards future success, you will know that it is your people that will get you there and you may be looking for more formalised ways of managing their development. If your people development needs are straightforward, you may not need a full talent management solution. Tools are available that allow you to record qualifications and learning activity and review performance against objectives, to ensure that your people’s development needs are taken care of in support of business objectives.
Driving business efficiency
Many businesses have a large amount of duplicate data that is used for disparate payroll and HR processes. It is difficult to maintain consistency between two data sets that are very changeable. Integration means that data is entered and amended in one single database, which improves business efficiency and accuracy. It is also far easier to extract a ‘single version of the truth’ that can be used to drive profitable business decisions. By pushing for payroll and HR integration, the flow and management of information through the business becomes straightforward.
Aligning HR and payroll data improves the ability to collect and communicate meaningful data to the business to inform business decisions in key areas such as staff turnover, employee satisfaction and legislative compliance. Businesses of any size can realise the benefits of a perfect partnership between HR and pay. 
This article comes courtesy of MidlandHR, the provider of HR, talent management and payroll solutions.
