Compensation Planning | Talent Junction

ROI on automating the Payroll Function

January 6th, 2010 Tushar Bhatia

It is difficult to anticipate the benefits of taking your payroll online. This was a challenge faced by one of our recent customers where the HR department found it challenging to estimate the ROI derived from implementation of an integrated Payroll software. Manual Payroll System

This article describes some of the benefits analyzed and presented to the senior management such that critical purchase dollars were allocated for the procurement.

The exercise which started as a small initiative actually helped me dive deeper into how a CFO or CEO perceive their human resources department and what are their expectations from an HR platform.

What I will share here is a small part of the study in how organizations are managing their human capital assets and the challenges being faced versus what are the best practices. In this, I will share what are the different metrics and how can organizations save costs in this critical area.

Elements of ROI

To determine the ROI, we had to first understand how the payroll process works in a manual environment. Our interactions revealed that there are three distinct steps in the successful processing of a payroll which are:

1. Data gathering
2. Processing
3. Disbursement and Reporting

For each of these steps above, there are multiple sub-processes which may take substantial effort and time.

To understand the complexities involved in payroll processing and gaining deeper insights into challenges being faced, we further analyzed many other companies across multiple industry verticals, different employee types (blue collared, white collared, management) and found a median effort for each of the sub-processes. Some of these sub-processes on which we could identify the metrics are: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Compensation Planning, HR Best Practices, HR Technology, Payroll | 8 Comments »

Post-Recession Challenges of Talent Management

October 12th, 2009 Gireesh Sharma

Recovering Economies

After a year or so the news on recession is taking a U-turn (not a V-turn though). Officially, analysts are reporting that recession is over, including Google CEO. While it will take some time for recession to pave the way for prosperity and growth for business in general, the prosperity is already on its way to certain economies such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

HR May be Caught Off Guard

Although this is good news for business operations, including marketing and sales, it poses new challenges for human capital. Businesses would no longer run on the old rules, but new out-of-the-box solutions, more comprehensive efforts, innovative thinking, and new skills and competencies would be required to grow and prosper. Needless to say, the demand for both the quantity and the quality of talented employees will grow worldwide. Companies that have fired employees in the past are already feeling the pinch, as they do not have enough bandwidth to execute.

Bloggers like Jon Ingham, who champion the cause of Human Capital Management, are being invited to speak on performance management. The need for performance management is pressing.

Talent Scenario During Recession

The law of demand and supply mercilessly applies to human resources, also. During the economic downturn, companies were able to downsize by getting rid of redundant work force and dead wood. They also restructured the employee compensation (mostly by decreasing) to stave off financial losses. Only those employees were retained who proved their worth. The employees had to accept all kinds of compensation-related compromises while maintaining the same or even higher level of efficiency and productivity. They could thus survive the financial tsunami.

These survivors got the opportunity to handle a variety of tasks that further sharpened their skills and made them multi-skilled. Thus, overall quality of talent has increased. At the same time, those who were out of job lost this opportunity to hone their skills in a new challenging environment. Adding to our woes, slashing of training and development budgets has led to a depletion of the number of skilled employees within the companies.

And a Difficult Road Ahead

Such steps from companies have created an altogether tricky scenario: The quality of talent within the companies has increased (raising the bar of the talent), while the quality of skills available in job market has dwindled. Now, recruiters can hire the required quality talent not from outside but from inside their competitors’ workplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Compensation Planning, Economy, Employee Appraisals, Employee Rewards, Performance Management | 9 Comments »

Do your rewards motivate or else!

December 4th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma

During one of my conversation with a CEO of a start-up company the discussion turned towards Compensation Planning to motivate employees, especially the talented ones. It was agreed that the most talented ones need a continuous motivation to maintain their momentum. During the discussion, the CEO narrated one of his bad experiences about one of his talented employees, whom he admired, wanted to reward, motivate and compensate appropriately.

Tom worked with John, the CEO of the company, and was a very talented employee who worked diligently. John being happy with the Tom’s work, rewarded him with a cash prize of $ 1000 (which was a significant amount ), in anticipation that Tom will be motivated to perform better. He also had lots of plans for Tom in the back of his mind. Both Tom and John seemed happy and thought that they did a good job.

Contrary to John’s belief Tom submitted his resignation within a much shorter span. During his exit interview, Tom did not state any specific reason for his resignation too (although, it was found later that he left for a better compensation package). His resignation came as a shock to John, who was genuinely interested in retaining good employees and did all what he could do to ensure it.