salaried people. We managed to do it on time. It wasn’t without errors, of course; my first experience with payroll was not smooth by any means, but I loved it so much that I just stayed in it. GPA: What came next in your payroll journey? Ramona Greenhalgh: In Germany, there was a market for payroll people. Through a headhunter, I got a job as a regional head of payroll for a big startup called Groupon. Before, I had always done the payroll in-house, but then I had to learn how to work with payroll providers. It worked out well. In startups, you just need to adapt and make sure you just get everything done on time. As we grew as a company, we also changed our processes. I helped put a lot of processes in place to make sure the company was compliant, especially with SOX rules under U.S. law. Eventually, I managed nine countries. But because of automation and having standardized the processes, it was no problem scaling. After Groupon, I moved to Adidas, and there I led the HR services
There were processing issues because the main HR and payroll employee information was still paper-based. Changes, including sick leave requests, were on paper. That was crazy!
center, which included payroll and the pre-payroll data management team. I also led the service center, implementing a ticketing system. Next, I worked for a restaurant delivery firm that was expanding rapidly. When I started, we had about 2,500 delivery people on our payroll and about 800 other staff. There were processing issues because the main HR and payroll employee information was still paper-based. Changes, including sick leave requests, were on paper. That was crazy! Once I got there, we quickly developed an Excel file just to get all the information in an electronic file system for payroll. They merged with another firm, and suddenly we jumped to 9,000 delivery people on our payroll, which later peaked at more than 11,000. This is where I really learned not to work in a silo, especially with our HR colleagues.
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ISSUE 26 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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