Feature topic - automation
higher value, more strategic roles – those which still require that essential ‘human’ element instead of mundane tasks such as running routine payroll processes. For people working in payroll and reward, for example, this could mean moving into a broader HR or finance role. Sharon Looney: Organisations are automating many of the transactional aspects of HR – especially payroll but also elements of people management, workforce management, recruitment and onboarding. Not only is automation making HR more efficient, improving return on investment, but the fact that it also frees the function from routine means HR teams can undertake the more strategic responsibilities of their role. Smart automation also delivers insightful analytics around HR’s contribution to key goals like improving talent retention, increasing customer satisfaction, revenue and profit. This helps HR steer and align people strategy with business goals, and prove its contribution to the board. Done well, and via a single unified payroll and HR platform, rather than disjointed applications, automation is freeing HR to design positive workplaces that people want to work in. This optimises employee engagement and boosts the value people deliver to the business. Richard Rowell: If you aren’t already looking at automation then you should be. With ever-increasing drives to increase speed, improve accuracy and reduce costs, automation must already be on the agenda and being implemented for your payroll functions. In a practical sense, for a payroll team managing thousands of disparate customers, automation comes in the form of importing data provided by business I think most people will have already adopted many forms of automation by necessity without even realising it. The advent of real time information will have forced the last few manual payrolls onto software solutions. The introduction of automatic enrolment has also forced the pension providers to be as lean and automated as possible with their low charge pension schemes. Payment solutions may be an area ripe for automation. There are many businesses with very labour-intensive methods and there are many new and increasingly accessing data via application program interface (API).
approaches and new entrants into the payments management processes. Historically, paying bankers automated clearing services (BACS) files was an area that required high levels of review and control. That would lead to manual process, spreadsheets, logins to BACS portals, uploading files and so on. All of these are areas where automation can help and actually provide stronger controls repetitive tasks in payroll and HR. These tasks must be undertaken, but it does not make commercial sense for them to be undertaken by a highly skilled and qualified HR or payroll professional, whose time would be better spent elsewhere. Automation of small, repetitive tasks that do not require expertise to undertake frees up this personnel resource to be utilised elsewhere. Not only does this improve efficiency, but it means that a highly qualified individual is not spending their time on menial tasks and can utilise their skills on projects that are mentally challenging and rewarding for them. ...will revolutionise our profession by while minimising manual input. Laura Hughes: There are a lot of There is clearly huge scope for automation of payroll in outsourced payroll bureaux in particular. Small, static payrolls that rarely change month on month can now be automated, and there are some exciting software providers entering the market to offer payroll automation for accountants and payroll bureaux. where a computer can do something better ... What changes do you think automation will bring in the future? Jaspal Randhawa-Wayt: As automation becomes more and more commonplace, the natural next step for forward-thinking organisations is to explore where they might be able to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to make their core processes even eliminating all of those routine tasks or tasks
smarter. This makes sense within the payroll industry, especially as the number of legal requirements increases, the enforcement of compliance become more rigorous, and the nature of the workforce becomes more complex and unpredictable. There are various subsets within AI and one that is likely to have a profound impact on the payroll industry is machine learning. We are already seeing some organisations experiment with processes such as continuous compliance, where the software is trained to recognise compliance errors and automatically fix them, significantly reducing risk. Another example is the use of chatbots that are trained to respond to common HR and payroll-related queries from staff members. The immediate benefits of this are reduced costs, fewer errors, and greater access to analytics that fuel business decision-making. But the increased adoption of software may also help to alleviate succession planning problems in the long-term because, unlike human staff members who switch jobs on a regular basis, machines can be a permanent presence within an organisation. This helps ensure the continuity and consistency of core HR and payroll processes. Sharon Looney: For HR to contribute more to the corporate strategic agenda, it’s going to need to be able to quantify its value-add in reporting to senior executives. Given this demand, I think we’ll see automation vendors deliver ever-better analytics. This will support HR operational excellence, ever better decision making and objective management reporting around how HR initiatives are impacting multiple aspects of an organisation. With the increase in data available to HR professionals, I expect an increase in ‘enabling’ technology to help HR make sense of it all. Machine learning and AI will have an increasing role to play here, allowing us to drive more and more insight and prediction from a more diverse and broad set of ‘people data’. We will see these tools growing in their accuracy and business impact. That said, my experience so far is that AI will complement rather than replace the human component of HR. Richard Rowell: Our view is that automation will eventually eliminate the needs for any payroll team to be mass
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 57 | February 2020
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