Traditionally, payroll and HR are seen as merely operational functions, but there’s so much more to them. Everything from cost management to talent acquisition to environmental responsibility – payroll and HR are key strategic players in your organisation.
Together, HR and payroll are the beating heart of your organisation. After all, your people are your business. Not only is it about looking after your greatest assets, but payroll and HR departments are absolutely crucial to the strategic management of any organisation. They’re treasure troves of insight waiting to be broken open and all that rich information shared to up your game, and your productivity!
Efficient payroll for powerful insights
When your manual processes are automated, you minimise the possibility of human error as well as endless reams of paperwork. Automated payroll saves precious time, prevents mistakes and helps you make sure everything is as accurate as possible.
That’s not to mention the compliance part too. An efficient payroll is compliant payroll. When you keep up to date with all of your legal obligations you can avoid the risk of getting yourself into hot water and facing costly fines.
And that’s all great. But automating your payroll can pay huge dividends when you’re looking at things from a strategic standpoint. Your payroll data can show you where things aren’t so efficient in terms of your labour costs, you can discover trends, and pinpoint where you’re overspending.
Efficient payroll is where data is collected and time tracking, absence management, and scheduling are all done seamlessly. When things are automated, you can report in real-time and access to your analytics and forecasting—so you can see the true impact of payroll on your organisation at any given moment.
Strategic HR for talent acquisition and development
Talent acquisition is arguably one of the most important aspects of your organisation and this is where your HR team can really add some strategic value. Yes, they’ll find, hire and retain the most suitable, high-quality candidates who’ll add massive value to your organisation.
But before doing all of that good stuff, your HR team will carefully consider your organisational goals, looking to the future and determining your needs. Then, in alignment with your goals, they’ll engineer it backwards and find hires that are the perfect fit from a strategic standpoint.
And that’s where those analytics come in handy. It’ll tell the team what kind of talent aligns with and will contribute to your organisation’s long-term goals and success.
Training and development for better business outcomes
If done well, training and development initiatives can be a huge contributor to organisational success. Obviously, you want to make sure that your people are able to perform their role to the best of their ability, fulfil their potential and stay happy at work. Investing in your people makes them feel as though they matter. And a valued team member is one who’ll be much more likely to be motivated to do a good job, enjoy buoyant morale and high productivity. And of course, your profit margin will be smiling!
Another key aspect of training and development initiatives is that you’ll likely enjoy an excellent retention rate. Being able to keep your top talent means the money you’ve invested in them throughout their entire employee lifecycle, along with their skills, stays firmly in the business.
Another bonus of this focus on development is that it sparks creativity and innovation within your company. When your people have the chance to learn something new, it gets their creative juices flowing and brings fresh insights. The results? Applying what they’ve learnt for the betterment of your organisation. Well-trained, wall-valued employees lead to a sense of purpose, productivity and profits.
Sustainability strategy for responsible practice
Thanks to their positions and roles, payroll and HR departments have a unique opportunity to establish a robust sustainability strategy within the fabric of your organisation. More environmentally-friendly procedures can be written into your company policy. One such example could be HR reviewing your company travel policy to cut down on the number of flights or other travel in order to reduce your carbon footprint.
Another prime example of environmental goals is paperless payroll. Digitising your payroll (and HR) processes and systems will save hundreds of trees every year from getting the chop. There’s also the added bonus of not having to rifle through filing cabinets chock full of paper to find that document you needed yesterday!
Strategic HR for building resilience
Resilience makes all the difference when it comes to your organisation adapting to challenges and thriving through adversity. HR plays a pivotal role in cultivating a company culture that is both adaptive and resilient, at both an individual and an organisational level. How? Let’s take a look.
Recognition
Recognising your peoples’ achievements and work is linked to improved business outcomes. Such recognition is a crucial driver for productivity, employee engagement and resilience. Recognising and acknowledging your people, individually, in a way that is meaningful to them, can help to build a resilient culture and a great employee experience in your workplace. And the more you do this the better – make it a weekly thing and you’ll see results in no time!
Gathering feedback
HR teams are perfectly positioned to garner employee feedback in order to see what can be improved and how to go about doing that. Amazingly, acting on feedback from your people can double productivity and resilience.
Support and connection
The need for connection and relationships is hardwired into our human nature and the workplace is no different. Your organisation should invest in team building to create strong relationships between team members, which will help to create a culture of resilience and productivity. Another way to foster this kind of culture is to introduce employee resource groups, which also helps to build rapport between your team members. Where there’s community, there’s resilience.
Managers who care
The right manager to look up to is instrumental in motivating employees (as well as supporting and contributing to their development) to fulfil their potential. A good manager keeps in regular communication with his or her team, recognises their achievements, invests in their development and offers coaching where needed. And what helps managers to do better? An HR team with its finger on the pulse who can help to embed great leadership skills across the board (and non-board team members!).
Using the data for driving decisions
Your HR and payroll systems contain huge amounts of data about your team members. Information like employee profiles and salary details is a given. But then there’s data on compliance, EDI, training and development and even workplace wellbeing. But why does this matter? Because all this information can help to drive smart business decisions.
Using your analytics, you’ll learn so much about your organisation and the way everything interconnects. And with that kind of insight, decision-making becomes a whole lot easier.
When carefully analysed, payroll data can offer insights into labour costs, overtime and other metrics crucial for business planning and employee wellbeing. For example, making use of predictive analytics can help you to forecast costs and optimise your budgeting. Predictive analytics also show you where you’re spending and can help you to compare, contrast and save.
Strategy matters
It’s pretty clear that payroll and HR are so much more than operational functions of a business. In fact, they’re the foundation for considerable strategic impact on your organisation.
Cintra offers a suite of payroll and HR solutions, bringing together your HRIS, payroll, performance management and employee engagement together in one place. We’ve invested countless hours into our analytics to make sure they offer you all the insights you need to really drive your organisation forward.
Our single system for your people management processes will take the burden off you, so you can focus on making maximum strategic impact. Give us a call today.
Introducing Lean Payroll
Walk through the entire concept with PSSG CTO, Seb Aspland—the mind behind Lean Payroll—covering everything from its roots up to a step-by-step guide for implementation
