Remote capabilities and implementation tools remain critical success factors for ongoing business success in the post-Covid-19 world
Pandemic fatigue has become a very real phenomenon. From the organisation to the employee, everyone is tired of talking about the virus and managing the new ways of living and working that it demands. But that doesn’t change the fact that organisations still have to function, that employees still need to work, and that the pandemic is affecting every part of the process, including legislation. In South Africa, regulations and legislation around work, payroll and rights are changing rapidly, putting companies at risk if they don’t implement and manage these changes correctly. According to CRS Technologies General Manager Ian McAlister, organisations need a proper HR and payroll system to correctly handle this complexity.
“You need to be able to optimise the money spent on the employee and ensure that any spend or payment structure is aligned with regulation,” he explains. “To do this, your payroll system has to be capable of monitoring and engaging with your people. As the impact of the virus continues to be felt across South Africa and the world, this is the right time to integrate a robust and reliable payroll and HR solution that can provide you with clear visibility into the truth.”
What truth? A robust HR and payroll platform provides one version of the truth when it can identify where employees are, what clearance they have, what roles they undertake, and how best to support them during remote working. It’s the insight into who should or should not be accessing premises during the shutdown, and which people will require more comprehensive protection and support as the country opens up. This truth helps IT, HR, management and leadership make relevant decisions about employee access, movement and equipment provisioning – now, during the crisis and going forward. This is the one version of the truth that shapes an employee’s journey through the organisation and allows for the organisation to maintain rigorous oversight of that employee’s payroll and status.
“What we’ve found is that organisations are struggling to replicate data across multiple systems, so each one has some version of the truth,” says McAlister. “This can impact on the efficiency of the HR environment and on how systems are managed. What we’ve done is to develop an intelligent solution that doesn’t replicate all these different versions of the truth, but rather pulls all the threads from all the systems together into one central space that holds the absolute truth. Then, all the other systems can access information that’s centralised, up to date, and relevant.”
This implementation can also be managed completely remotely. Thanks to the evolution of cloud-based computing and intelligent APIs and applications, solutions can be remotely integrated into organisations struggling to manage data during the pandemic. With a cloud environment, systems can be hosted anywhere, which means that nobody needs to physically access premises in order to obtain information.
“You can implement a complete HR and payroll ecosystem into an organisation without having access to those premises,” says McAlister. “In the past, people had a psychological barrier where they felt they needed to sit in front of someone and talk about how complicated their system was. Now, as remote implementations become a way of life, people are realising that the technology has been waiting for them all along.”
CRS has been remotely integrating HR and payroll solutions from its offices in Johannesburg to multiple global locations for many years – fine tuning the process to ensure it is seamless and efficient. The company has set down significant roots within the hosted, remote space, and has solid expertise and experience working with myriad organisations and markets to develop HR and payroll platforms that suit their very specific, industry-relevant requirements.
“We’ve developed templates that require the customer to enter relevant information regarding their system from their remote location,” says McAlister. “Once these templates have been populated, we input them into the system. This has been designed to validate the data throughout the process, throwing out any information that doesn’t match or isn’t clean. So mismatched ID numbers or employee details are caught at the start, eliminating legacy issues, ghost employees and forgotten problems.”
Because the information is verified as it’s implemented, the organisation starts its new system with a fresh data set that’s rigorously tested. It has also been developed to mitigate one of the biggest concerns that companies have when considering moving to a new system – relevance.
“Companies worry that their requirements are unique or too complex to allow for them to move across to our system,” says McAlister. “The truth is that we’ve engineered our platform alongside multiple applications and requirements so it is designed to cater for anomalies. We can provide a comprehensive solution for 99% of clients without having to redevelop the software. This makes it easy, simple and accessible for any organisation wanting to upgrade its systems to cope with the pandemic.”
Organisations that are struggling to keep up with constantly changing legislation and regulation can benefit immensely from a highly intelligent and capable investment into HR and payroll. It will ensure that they are always in line with the law, protecting their employees, and managing their assets more efficiently, no matter how remote their people and platforms may be.
For more information, go to www.crs.co.za
