3 keys to maintaining compliance
with a global workforce
Apr 12, 2016 | By Aaron Hurst
Ph
oto: AP
In today’s global economy, the borderless nature of employees and transactions
present human resource and payroll professionals with significant challenges.
Staying compliant has never been an easy task. Compliance can change, sometimes
substantially, from place to place with very little notice.
Recent examples include e-Social legislation in Brazil, onerous changes to payroll and
workforce reporting requirements in Spain, and Russia’s sudden data privacy decree. In
a world where single companies spread quickly across continents it is important for HR
and payroll leaders to take steps to make sure they are up to the compliance
challenge.
Three keys can help human capital management professionals more easily provide the
means for managing compliance on a global scale: Effective data management
practices, employee self-service, and the right partner strategy.
1. More effective data management
The foundation for helping to maintaining compliant global operations is accurate data.
If workforce and payroll information is inaccurate, compliance risk increases
significantly. To understand how effective your organization is with managing workforce
data, it helps to break out this type of data into the following categories:
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

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Employee data: General employee information such as age, base salary,
address, but also information on training and performance
Documents: Signed paperwork such as work contracts
Workforce management data: Information such as schedules, attendance, and
absences
Elective elements: Additional employee pay elements such as bonuses,
benefits and allowances
This information should be both secure and up to date. Manually storing sensitive
workforce data in multiple locations is very common but can be unsafe. In addition,
manual processes or disparate systems often make the “timely and accurate” part of the
equation unattainable.
Modern cloud technology can help with data security, timeliness, and accuracy
challenges. By storing information in a single system that is monitored 24x7 with the
latest security measures, and with highly configurable software features, companies can
quickly move from paper and aging systems to a single source of truth.
This greatly increases a firm’s ability to facilitate global workforce compliance, including
at the payroll level.
In addition, cloud HCM systems provide visibility into broken or inefficient processes by
providing a clear audit trail of data changes. Executives often assume effective data
management processes are in place worldwide, but the reality is often very different.
Good systems and partners can help clean up the data management skeletons that are
likely in the closet.
2. Simplification through self-service
Accurate and timely data also requires employees to play their part in the process. If
employees fail to submit their bank account changes on time, their pay is now at risk.
By empowering employees to manage their own information in an efficient, user-friendly
way, leading HR and payroll professionals can reduce workloads while improving
accuracy and timeliness of data. Today’s workforce is actually used to on-demand, selfservice type features in their everyday lives, often through their mobile devices (think
iTunes downloads wherever, whenever).
HR and Payroll processes should be no different – especially in the employee’s mind.
Employees expect to be able to check earnings, view schedules, trade shifts and
request time off, among other many tasks – anywhere, anytime.
In addition to improved efficiency and employee empowerment, self-service enhances
transparency and allows HCM professionals to reallocate time to more strategic work
such as analytical reporting and risk management. The right HCM technology and
global payroll providers can help employers increase self-service adoption through selfservice portals and mobile technology.
3. Picking the right partners
Whether your company already operates globally or is just beginning to expand beyond
its current borders, the first step to manage compliance is to determine what capabilities
you want to retain and what areas require an external partner. The right partnership(s)
can provide tools to help relieve the heavy compliance burden on HR and payroll
professionals.
Hiring local expertise, either directly or through an external partner, is an excellent way
to help manage global workforce compliance. Since payroll processing is usually the
source of truth used by governments and companies to file and report, it is essential to
have a payroll partner strategy at the country level.
Payroll partners can usually be categorized into three buckets: technology providers,
service providers, or hybrids. Depending on the size and complexity of each of your
company’s operations, certain types of partners may be more appropriate.
If you have small operations in certain locations, it may make sense to outsource a
higher degree of the work – so a heavier focus on service partners may be needed. If
you have large scale operations, you’ll likely need to build more internal service
capabilities to handle compliance no matter which partner you select – so technology
partnership may be of greater importance. If you work backwards from payroll into HR
and talent, you can better manage compliance worldwide.
No matter what size your operations are in each market, technology partners should be
assessed since they offer such a significant benefit to helping achieve compliance. This
is driven by the wide availability of cloud technology, where a single source of truth isn’t
a fairy tale anymore.
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