04:05 INTERVIEW
GPA: What got you into payroll? Tell us how your career path progressed. Vijaya Nair: Like most people in this profession, I never planned it. Payroll happened to me. I trained in HR/Personnel, held general HR roles and moved into training and development, mostly in India. Then I moved to Dubai in early 2000 and joined a company looking to set up its employee services organization. I raised my hand because I wanted to understand what HR operations were about and help build it. We were setting up HR shared services covering immigration and other employee-facing activities, which put a lot of legal responsibility on me. It was called Employee Services. Within a year or so, payroll was declared an employee-facing function and came under my oversight.
It was new to me, but I quickly saw what payroll does to people: how an employee’s emotions are shaped when they are paid right and on time. So, I went all out to put a structured delivery standard in place so payroll could have a positive impact on the employee experience. Not long after, the company made a global decision to move payroll under the leaders in the finance function. They welcomed me into finance with an offer to run payroll from there and valued the HR knowledge I would bring. This offered a great chance to learn finance from the inside. I asked my new finance colleagues for one hour every Tuesday and called it “Learning Tuesdays.” I learned how each role connected to the big picture of finance and, if at all, to payroll. It taught me the power of collaboration and how much it can benefit the organization, and payroll. Eventually, my role and payroll found their way back to HR. By then I was so well positioned that when a country hit a stubborn problem, like an unreconciled payroll account nobody could crack, the leaders called me. I jokingly became the company’s payroll “agony aunt.” The advice was free; the
It was new to me, but I quickly saw what payroll does to people: how an employee’s emotions are shaped when they are paid right and on time.
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GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE ISSUE 28
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