REWARD
Ana Laiu MSc FCIPPdip, head of payroll, PPHE Hotel Group, discusses the issue of attracting new people to the payroll profession and considers whether a complete rebrand is required, in order to ensure future growth of the industry
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” This is a common question, often asked during performance reviews or job interviews. We’ve all been asked this at some point or we’ve been the ones asking our team members. It’s a short question, but with a huge raft of answers, depending on who we’re talking to. For many payroll professionals, the reality of this answer is that they’ll probably be in the same position as they are now, without much transformational change to their roles, skill set or qualifications. In the UK, the average age of the payroll professional is steadily rising every year and currently sits at above 40 years old. Of course, this is a reassuring sign that, once they find payroll, people tend to stay
in the industry for many years and make a positive contribution to their employers. However, this statistic also indicates we’re not attracting the next generation of young payrollers, those who grow up immersed in technology and represent the future of the workforce. I perceive this as a threat to our amazing industry and I want to engage you in a little reflection. Payroll technology has evolved quite rapidly over the past few years and a huge amount of manual and repetitive work is now, or soon will be, fully automated. Integration between systems has gradually improved, to enable the flow of the necessary data to the payroll engine, to facilitate gross to net calculations. All of this live, within minutes or seconds, and
with little to no human intervention. I find this rapid progress in technology truly fascinating, but what does this mean for the traditional payroll professional? They’ll have spent much of their time chasing spreadsheets, running manual tax and National Insurance calculations, reminding human resources to terminate employees on time, printing payslips, dealing with employee queries and multiple other tasks we’ll all be familiar with. Many of these tasks are now handled for the payroll professional. What does the payroll role for the next generation look like? If technology enables the automation of the transactional side of payroll and places
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | June 2023 | Issue 91 44
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