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

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

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

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

1. More effective data management

The foundation for helping to maintaining compliant globaloperations is accurate data. If workforce and payroll informationis inaccurate, compliance risk increases significantly. Tounderstand how effective your organization is with managingworkforce data, it helps to break out this type of data into thefollowing categories:

• Employee data: General employee informationsuch as age, base salary, address, but also information on trainingand performance

• Documents: Signed paperwork such as workcontracts

• Workforce management data: Information such asschedules, attendance, and absences

• Elective elements: Additional employee payelements such as bonuses, benefits and allowances

This information should be both secure and up to date. Manuallystoring sensitive workforce data in multiple locations is verycommon but can be unsafe. In addition, manual processes ordisparate systems often make the “timely and accurate” part of theequation unattainable.

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

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

In addition, cloud HCM systems provide visibility into broken orinefficient processes by providing a clear audit trail of datachanges. Executives often assume effective data managementprocesses are in place worldwide, but the reality is often verydifferent. Good systems and partners can help clean up the datamanagement skeletons that are likely in the closet.

2. Simplification through self-service

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

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

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

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

3. Picking the right partners

Whether your company already operates globally or is justbeginning to expand beyond its current borders, the first step tomanage compliance is to determine what capabilities you want toretain and what areas require an external partner. The rightpartnership(s) can provide tools to help relieve the heavycompliance burden on HR and payroll professionals.

Hiring local expertise, either directly or through an externalpartner, is an excellent way to help manage global workforcecompliance. Since payroll processing is usually the source of truthused by governments and companies to file and report, it isessential to have a payroll partner strategy at the countrylevel.

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

If you have small operations in certain locations, it may makesense to outsource a higher degree of the work – so a heavier focuson service partners may be needed. If you have large scaleoperations, you’ll likely need to build more internal servicecapabilities to handle compliance no matter which partner youselect – so technology partnership may be of greaterimportance. If you work backwards from payroll into HR andtalent, 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 asignificant benefit to helping achieve compliance. This isdriven by the wide availability of cloud technology, where a singlesource of truth isn’t a fairy tale anymore.