Fidelma McGuirk: The most important thing payroll clients miss is that they do not feel like they have a blank page on which they can design. They too often are following what the vendor told them to do, even deferring to other receivers of data, like HR and finance, to determine what is needed. So, they kind of have guardrails about what they can design. Payroll people should feel like they have a full license to change a lot of things. If we forget everything that’s in place at the moment, what should the best scenario look like? Give yourself a chance to really become a big system thinker and see things differently. Then be able to explain why and how this will impact HR and finance, and what the benefits for both of them should be. Second, many underestimate or miscalculate the time and resources needed for the steps and actions that must be taken and followed for the existing payroll and any project being added to the mix. In an ideal world, if clients can plan for a resource for a dedicated period of time to help
them, a kind of independent project owner or independent senior analyst across the process, and bring that together, the payroll people don’t have to own every part of it. GPA: What do you see as the future state of payroll in general? Fidelma McGuirk: We’re living in such a time of accelerating change all around us, I think the payroll function itself is going to fundamentally change. With the response to the COVID epidemic, it was this big kick to get payroll into the cloud. When AI came along, the big kick that has happened is payroll people are under pressure now to do interesting things with AI--but their data is all over the place and it’s trapped in these spreadsheets. So now we are having to embark on a universal mass cleanup of global data, payroll data. And I see it in every conversation. That data cleanup is happening everywhere. Organizations are now trying to work out where does it all live, what format is it in, where should we put it,
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ISSUE 23 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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