Workshop Tells How Payroll Leaders Are Overcoming Challenges

The world of payroll can be deceivingly tranquil above the surface. Still, beneath it, payroll professionals work tirelessly to navigate multiple deadlines and responsibilities to ensure compliance, accuracy, and timely employee payments. The workshop "How Payroll Leaders Are Overcoming the Challenges of Global Payroll," presented during PayrollOrg’s 2023 Payroll Congress by Lisa Weckman, VP of Product Management at Ceridian, highlighted the struggles faced by payroll professionals globally.

Despite the rapid technological advancements, the payroll industry needs to adapt faster. It still relies on batch-based processes dating back 80 years, resulting in 80% of a payroll professional's time still being manual. Add to this the challenges of managing compliance, multi-jurisdictional payrolls, forecasting accuracy, inefficient processes, enterprise risk, and administrative burden, the situation can be overwhelming for global payroll professionals. However, there is hope.

During the workshop, Weckman shared that businesses could support payroll professionals to scale and expand globally by embracing change and implementing software that can manage multi-currency wage calculations and local labour laws and process payroll data securely and timely. Four best practices were presented:

1. Centralizing global compliance and coordination
2. Using a single platform
3. Utilizing localized support
4. Implementing a compliant solution with intuitive self-service controls

The future of global payroll, according to Weckman, would be driven by trends such as automation, cybersecurity, remote working, localized employee experience, payroll analytics, and earned wage access.  By accepting that automation is coming and adopting new technologies, payroll professionals can break free from outdated batch-based processes and confirm payroll as a strategic function that adds value to the business.

The presentation provided valuable insights into the payroll industry's challenges concerning global payroll. Weckman reminded the audience that it is up to them to overcome these challenges. She said payroll professionals need to be open to change and embrace technology and innovation to ensure all processes can handle this new (and rapidly changing) world of work. However, it is up to payroll professionals to advocate for the changes they want to see.