November 25, 2021
Businesses grow. Needs change. It’s the cycle we hope for, but it also addscomplexity to strategic planning in multinational companies. It’s why weinvest significant time and resources into regularly updating our businessstrategy.
Global payroll should play an important role in these strategic discussions.For multinational corporations, though, this presents a challenge. Globalpayroll can be an absolute beast to tackle from a strategic planning point ofview.
At best, you might know what markets are doing well and where you plan togrow. But it can be next to impossible to predict how laws and regulationsmight change, affecting pay and statutory withholdings from one year to thenext—or even one month to the next.
The best solution is to give payroll a considerable slice of your strategicplanning time. Did you know that 88% of surveyed businesses have a payroll strategy or plans to develop one? Here are six ideas about what you should be mulling over.
The first step in planning is getting real about your current payroll state.Look at what is working and what isn’t. If you can understand why somethingdoes or doesn’t work, you can use that to inform decisions about change.
Growth is always the goal in business—more output, increased cost savings,bigger profits. That means that your current payroll process is only workingif it can accommodate growth.
If the idea of expanding to another country makes you think of long hoursspent auditing your current system to ‘get it ready’ or you’re wondering whereyou’re going to find the help to do the extra work—your growth potential islimited and in serious need of a scalable strategy that can grow with yourcompany.
Key considerations for scalability:
Every business does things differently. You can look at industry benchmarksand best practices all day long, but at the end of the day, it comes down towhat works for your unique product/market/approach.
Do yourself a favor and put the blueprints away. Decide what your idealpayroll situation looks like in terms of being scaleable. You’ll probablyend up taking action somewhere between your analysis of your current state andyour definition of ‘ready’.
Even when things look pretty great, complacency is the root of businessfailure. The only way to stay on top is to take a strategic approach to yourbusiness decisions like payroll management.
If what you’re doing is working, make sure you understand why. You should bestrategically choosing to stay the course versus settling into what’scomfortable.
Are you missing any of these opportunities?
You’ll want to examine both opportunities AND threats to your success. Yourstrengths and your weaknesses. Your strategic planning sessions can be a greattime to hash out the logistics of your roadmap to success.
For example, you may know your current technology leaves some gaps that arecurrently being filled by manual processes. Finding the right softwaresolution or service provider is an opportunity for improvement that willeliminate manual processes and build scalability. But new tech is expensive.One potential barrier to success is budget constraints that put importantimprovements on the backburner.
Or, maybe you are working on getting better data to more accurately inform thebusiness’ decision-making. You know that your current processes are riddledwith data errors because of manual entries or shortcuts to overcome the factthat your technologies don’t integrate well.
As your plan takes shape and you can articulate differences between where youare today and where you want to go, you can begin having side conversationsthat explore opportunities for new partnerships that will serve your goals.
Strategic planning in multinational companies is a continuous process. You’llbe having these conversations today, tomorrow, and many months into thefuture. The key is to remain open to new opportunities and new partnerships sothat when they come along, you’re ready.
Support comes in many different forms—you just need to figure out what type ofhelp will benefit your strategic payroll plan the most. It could be thehelping hand of a Payroll 360that offers a streamlined, centralized process and proactive expertise.
Global payroll is a big part of strategic planning for multinational companies. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there is an increasing number of options available to help streamline your globalpayroll process.
Use your strategic planning sessions to figure out a global payroll strategythat will fit your needs. But more importantly, recognize that the process isnever finished. Businesses grow and needs change, so your payroll strategy issomething that you will continue to revisit often.