The payroll team
Where does it sit? The policy team takes great interest in how companies view and situate the payroll department within their wider structure. Last year, 20% of respondents indicated their payroll department was stand-alone. This year, however, this has fallen back to 9%. As with previous years, there was a comparable split between the finance (44%) and human resources (47%) teams. It remains to be seen if the representation payroll departments saw last year was a deviation from the norm, or if we may still see increased independence of the payroll function. It may have been the effect that the ‘key-worker’ status of payroll professionals played over the course of the pandemic which led to the larger response seen last year. In-house / outsourced? This year, the questionnaire asked if responses were being received from an in-house payroll point of view or from a payroll service provider. 87% of respondents were from an in-house background and 13% from a service provider background. 78% of in-house payrolls are processed completely internally and 22% are partially outsourced. Where payrolls are completed by a payroll services provider, the majority (67%) are completely outsourced to them. 8% of those outsourced are only partially outsourced and 25% are a mixture of both. Due to this year’s questions splitting between those who predominantly work in-house vs outsourced, a comparison to previous years is hard. However, we can see that most companies prefer to retain the full payroll function internally. Where outsourcing is chosen, there’s a tendency to outsource the entire process., with few choosing to only partially outsource. Team members On average, payroll teams have between three and four members. However, the distribution trends towards one, two or three members, with 33% of respondents indicating there’s only one full time equivalent employee in their payroll team. 22% have two members and 12% have three. Except for some outliers, there was no discernible difference between public or private sector employers. There was an increase in team size when looking at outsourced payroll providers. This seems logical as payroll is a product the company provides rather than an internal function. As with previous years, the payroll profession is predominantly occupied by female employees (79%). This is a change from last year (76%) of 3%. Again, there was no relevant difference between the private and public sector, nor the in-house and outsourced employers. The turbulent job market of the past year, the so-called ‘great resignation’, may cause some differences from previous year’s data. However, the CIPP will continue to investigate why the profession is so heavily female dominated. The CIPP does extensive work promoting the profession, engaging young professionals on the many career paths available in the payroll sector. The CIPP strongly encourages employers and recruiters to consider equality and diversity in their strategies.
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