When organizations have multiple locations, leadership teams are demanding visibility of their 
entire workforce.
At a simple level, a view across your entire workforce allows you to capture and report on total head counts and its costs. However, as our businesses continue to change with decentralized teams, remote employees and operations spread often across multiple states and time zones, leaders require a global view of talent to facilitate workforce planning. This includes understanding the competencies and skill shortfalls of the workforce that may impact future strategies and hiring. A global view of recruiting, learning and development, career and succession planning are also realities that must be embraced and addressed.
Traditionally, such information has been stored in disparate systems.
In fact, on average we see most businesses still ask their employees to access at least five separate software applications to get their payroll and HR data.
In this model, when leaders want a consolidated view of their total workforce, each system has to produce its own reports in different formats. After the exports, the report data then needs to be reconfigured or merged into a spreadsheet or other reporting tool in order to derive the global view.
This time-consuming and error prone process diminishes the value of the data due to its lack of currency. Such poor reporting provides data too late for it to even matter. At best, the results are partially effective as the data on which decisions need to be based is never timely.
What Type of Software Functions Should Be Expected of a HRIS and Payroll System?
A best principle and quickly becoming the defacto standard is for organizations to capture all HR-related data into a single database. It will offer multi-state, multi-jurisdiction, multi-language and mobile capabilities. It will have a powerful, yet easy to use report writer allowing information consisting of Payroll, Time and HR to be pulled into the same report with a few clicks of a mouse. It will also have sophisticated workflow functionality to configure to the specific businesses needs.
A true workforce management software is an accurate, single source of truth that allows HR to be part of the revenue side of the business – not transactional.
Stay tuned for more information in a future blog post about transactional HR.
