04:05 INTERVIEW
Angela: You have to make a lot of best friends! That is something that I tell my team, especially those that might be new
giving them a fax. It’s all kinds of weird different channels to move information, to dissect issues and then make some decision about where does this fit within the process. That 20% gap is a blue sky opportunity. If you had your magic wand, what would it take get the process to the final stages when the vendor technology or the service supplier can’t do it for us? Interestingly, payroll is not alone in having a gap to fill. Every department has it. I think sometimes we get really caught in our own head and we think we have to solve all the problems by ourselves. I have had great success in going out to these other functions and just soliciting support to fill our gaps. So that’s a big project for us. GPA: Outside of payroll, who are the most important people you work with?
information into payroll applications or how we extract those applications out. GPA: Is there something that makes your job challenging that people do not think about or consider? Angela: Our counterparts sometimes don’t recognize that they’re creating more work for me and my team. But, to be honest, while I strive to be a good cross-functional partner, I also recognize my team may be doing the same for them. I think if you’re working with a counterpart, a cross-functional peer that’s really close to the payroll space, I think that we owe it to each other to be very honest about pain points. We each have assumptions on how we operate, so we need to help them help us, whether they just need that awareness, for troubleshooting, or to find a solution together.
to the payroll space. I make friends with
people in legal so I can understand what are they hearing. I want to know who is in internal audit, and I want to see the findings. I also look for relationships with people in financial planning and analysis. We help each other so I can understand the business burdens and they can learn, say, what drives employment taxes at the company. Then, I think knowing the members of the communications team is important because they usually are the ones helping to set the tone for messaging. And I’ve I tapped into my counterpart in IT and he showed a handful of use cases in terms of how might we fill that 20% gap, how we move
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GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE ISSUE 9
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