One ongoing political battle in many organisations is who the Payroll Service should report to. Finance wins over mostly because of the sheer expense that is payroll. Then there are those organisations that see the payment of their most valued assets as an integral function of the Human Resources team, so the Payroll Service sits under HRs’ wing. Politicking aside, if organisational leaders actually sat down and measured the pros and cons on either side, it would be evident that the Payroll Service must have a solid working relationship and open communication lines with both the HR and Finance teams.
An important consideration in the #HR-v-#Finance pull of the #Payroll Service is to attempt to understand the mentality of both players, in the most general sense. Pull out your organisations’ HR and Finance mission statements and try to find commonality between them… I dare you!
Human Resources people are typically “people people” whose purpose in life is to implement strategies and programs to recruit and retain proficient, nurtured, engaged and empowered employees and to keep them safe and well in the process. In HR, grey lines exist at every turn: special circumstances and impacts of decisions with on flow effects to other employment relation issues and/or future strategies. HR people regularly have to consider the bigger picture, often for what are seemingly the minutest of details to outsiders.
Finance people are typically “numbers people” who usually perform comfortably within the predetermined and unwavering confines of accountings’ legislated rules, local and international standards, authority levels and organisational policies. They are comfortable with black and white. Being very generalistic, the purpose of Finance is to compliantly account for and report on all financial transactions within the designated timeframes.
Picture putting your HR and Finance people in a room and performing a group personality test. The room would separate into three distinct groups. In one corner are the “creatives” and “counselors”, most of which happen to work in HR, and in the other corner are the majority of the Finance team who are the “methodicals”. Polar opposites in the personality spectrums.
Left standing in the middle of the room are the in-betweeners: a mix of bewildered people who may be wondering if they have chosen the right career path, and conversely, those people whose personality types allow them to move comfortably amongst the HR and Finance personalities. (Just a note… seriously consider the latter for Payroll Management positions.)
Back in the organisation, sitting in the middle of the HR and Finance personalities is your Payroll Team, a complex mix of all the personality types. Every sizeable payroll team seems to have at least one member who cannot function outside the documented rules, without exception and at least one who spends all their time bending over backwards to ensure the staff are kept happy, possibly at the expense of some of the rules.
One of the hardest tasks for Payroll Managers is to have their team provide outstanding service within the confines of such a regulated employment, taxation and accounting environment and in the timeframes established in the majority of industrial agreements. The primary objective of a payroll service is to consistently deliver fully compliant, on time, best practice, and cost and time efficient payroll processes at a minimal cost per employee, with a zero error rate and zero impact on employee relations. To achieve this in unison with the grey areas of HR, and the black white of Finance, is a constant struggle.
While it is important to understand the differences in personality and objective between Finance and HR, Payroll does not get to sit in the middle as an innocent pawn. Payroll Managers need to understand (and teach their team to understand) HR strategy and to know the impact of their service to employee relations, with the same veracity a Payroll manager will have their team understand the legislative, accounting and compliance issues.
While ever the conflicting requirements between HR and Finance continue on either side of the payroll function, this will not be achieved with any consistency. Your HR, Finance and Payroll Management need to come together and devise a workable strategy that keeps everybody working towards their common and individual goals. HR has to come to the party on the black and white deadlines and compliance, while Finance needs to work into to their authorisations and policies some of the grey HR requirements.
Only by understanding the personalities and the objectives of each of the business units and combining these into a workable solution for the benefit of the whole business, can the payroll team then begin to provide a consistently outstanding, service excellence focused and fully compliant payroll service. The absolute one certainty in all of this is that it doesn’t matter who the Payroll Team report to in the organisational chart. It matters that there is a solid working relationship between the HR, Finance and Payroll Teams so the best of both worlds can be achieved.
Food for thought for your organisation? I welcome your feedback!
If you have any questions you would like to raise personally, please email Louise Vidler at The Professional Payroll Manager.
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