September 26th is HR Appreciation Day. We hope that on this day HR practitioners will be showered with praise, flowers, and nice lunches. But HR does not live by soup and sandwich alone. The truest way to honor the heroes in this thankless profession, who look out for the rest of us, is to make their job easier.
One HR professional told us that what she needs most is “a tool that makes my life easier so I can deal with the crying person interrupting my day.” Such is life in Human Resources.
HR digital transformation is the way to take the drudgery and grind out of running HR processes so that staff can handle the “human” aspect of their job, while at the same time making a difference by ensuring efficient operations and a talented, motivated, effective workforce.
The underrated challenges of compensation management
One of the most onerous but perhaps underestimated HR processes to manage is compensation. Employees and management may not appreciate the hoops that HR comp & ben teams jump through to make compensation work.
But when you know, you know. If you are involved in managing compensation processes at your company, you likely are no stranger to late nights spent compiling numbers, searching for missing data, dealing with version control issues, hunting down errors, checking spreadsheet calculations, running reports, and checking those calculations again.
You may be pulling data from different sources to try to generate and distribute total rewards statements for employees and produce the data and analysis required by management, the board, and auditors. At planning time, you are juggling all kinds of salary survey data from providers like Radford or Payscale or Culpepper and trying to reconcile those benchmarks to your own merit matrix.
You have systems for managing compensation, like maybe a compensation module in your HR suite, but they only do what they do, like base and bonus. The rest you are doing in spreadsheets. “You” may be a comp administrator, but “you” may also be the VP or the CHRO/CPO. And we haven’t even touched on sales compensation, which maybe isn’t managed by HR, but maybe should be, or at least be on the same platform.
In a small business, it might be possible to manage comp with spreadsheets and basic tools, but in a large enterprise, especially a global one, to plan and manage a strategic compensation program with many permutations across the business can be a complex and highly demanding task. No pressure: all that’s at stake is employee satisfaction, your company culture, your recruitment and retention efforts, legal and compliance risks, and company performance against goals.
HR, we appreciate you! And we want to make your life better.
How compensation automation makes life better in HR
Imagine if all of “that” were handled by a total rewards platform that could:
- manage and centralize data feeds for consistency and compliance
- calculate according to business rules to eliminate errors
- provide workflows, track approvals, generate audit trails
- handle exceptions in a traceable way
- create simulations, forecasts and accruals
- change compensation plans on the fly as needed
- generate stakeholder reports in real time, on demand
Not only does compensation automation deliver a better result, it dramatically reduces the workload in HR, yielding real, measurable results. For example, customers using beqom’s total rewards solution have reported that digitizing their compensation processes produced ROI such as:
- 80% reduction in spreadsheets used for compensation tracking and management
- 65% less support needed from HR to resolve compensation data quality issues
- 35% reduction in errors made when calculating salary and bonus
- 6x faster salary review processes
- 100% elimination of night work to support compensation data quality
How compensation automation benefits the company
Automating compensation with a total rewards platform is a win-win-win for HR, employees, and the company.
Suddenly, HR can move from being number crunchers to being valuable business partners who are helping to guide company strategy by implementing total rewards programs that drive results across all businesses, all geographies, and all roles. And dealing with that crying person in their office won’t have to mean staying late into the night to get everything else done.
Employees benefit from a smooth user experience, visibility into their rewards, and clarity on how their rewards are calculated and related to their contribution. Managers have all the data and guidance they need to better manage the performance and rewards of their teams, through an efficient and transparent process.
The company benefits from streamlined processes, yielding more time for people to do their jobs. Perhaps most importantly, compensation can be used as a strategic lever to direct and motivate people in reaching their goals, helping the company to deliver on its objectives.
Help HR, help the business
It’s bad to stress out the HR folks, that’s for sure. But the same inefficiencies and outdated ways of working that are causing HR stress may be holding back your business as well. Check out our free eGuide, 8 Signs Your Compensation System is Holding Back Your Business to see where there may be opportunities for breakthroughs for your business, and a chance to make life easier for the good people in Human Resources … like you!
