In today’s global economy, the borderless nature of employees and transactions present human resource and payroll professionals with significant challenges.

Staying compliant has never been an easy task. Compliance can change, sometimes substantially, from place to place with very little notice.

Recent examples include e-Social legislation in Brazil, onerous changes to payroll and workforce reporting requirements in Spain, and Russia’s sudden data privacy decree. In a world where single companies spread quickly across continents it is important for HR and payroll leaders to take steps to make sure they are up to the compliance challenge.

Three keys can help human capital management professionals more easily provide the means for managing compliance on a global scale: Effective data management practices, employee self-service, and the right partner strategy.

1. More effective data management

The foundation for helping to maintaining compliant global operations is accurate data. If workforce and payroll information is inaccurate, compliance risk increases significantly. To understand how effective your organization is with managing workforce data, it helps to break out this type of data into the following categories:

Employee data: General employee information such as age, base salary, address, but also information on training and performance
Documents: Signed paperwork such as work contracts
Workforce management data: Information such as schedules, attendance, and absences
Elective elements: Additional employee pay elements such as bonuses, benefits and allowances

This information should be both secure and up to date. Manually storing sensitive workforce data in multiple locations is very common but can be unsafe. In addition, manual processes or disparate systems often make the “timely and accurate” part of the equation unattainable.

Modern cloud technology can help with data security, timeliness, and accuracy challenges. By storing information in a single system that is monitored 24x7 with the latest security measures, and with highly configurable software features, companies can quickly move from paper and aging systems to a single source of truth.

This greatly increases a firm’s ability to facilitate global workforce compliance, including at the payroll level.

In addition, cloud HCM systems provide visibility into broken or inefficient processes by providing a clear audit trail of data changes. Executives often assume effective data management processes are in place worldwide, but the reality is often very different. Good systems and partners can help clean up the data management skeletons that are likely in the closet.

2. Simplification through self-service

Accurate and timely data also requires employees to play their part in the process. If employees fail to submit their bank account changes on time, their pay is now at risk.

By empowering employees to manage their own information in an efficient, user-friendly way, leading HR and payroll professionals can reduce workloads while improving accuracy and timeliness of data. Today’s workforce is actually used to on-demand, self-service type features in their everyday lives, often through their mobile devices (think iTunes downloads wherever, whenever).

HR and Payroll processes should be no different – especially in the employee’s mind. Employees expect to be able to check earnings, view schedules, trade shifts and request time off, among other many tasks – anywhere, anytime.

In addition to improved efficiency and employee empowerment, self-service enhances transparency and allows HCM professionals to reallocate time to more strategic work such as analytical reporting and risk management. The right HCM technology and global payroll providers can help employers increase self-service adoption through self-service portals and mobile technology.

3. Picking the right partners

Whether your company already operates globally or is just beginning to expand beyond its current borders, the first step to manage compliance is to determine what capabilities you want to retain and what areas require an external partner. The right partnership(s) can provide tools to help relieve the heavy compliance burden on HR and payroll professionals.

Hiring local expertise, either directly or through an external partner, is an excellent way to help manage global workforce compliance. Since payroll processing is usually the source of truth used by governments and companies to file and report, it is essential to have a payroll partner strategy at the country level.

Payroll partners can usually be categorized into three buckets: technology providers, service providers, or hybrids. Depending on the size and complexity of each of your company’s operations, certain types of partners may be more appropriate.

If you have small operations in certain locations, it may make sense to outsource a higher degree of the work – so a heavier focus on service partners may be needed. If you have large scale operations, you’ll likely need to build more internal service capabilities to handle compliance no matter which partner you select – so technology partnership may be of greater importance. If you work backwards from payroll into HR and talent, you can better manage compliance worldwide.

No matter what size your operations are in each market, technology partners should be assessed since they offer such a significant benefit to helping achieve compliance. This is driven by the wide availability of cloud technology, where a single source of truth isn’t a fairy tale anymore.

Instant Insights /

3 keys to maintaining compliance with a global workforce

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