Salary planning is one of the most complex business challenges every organization faces. Data access, analysis, entry, and re-entry – multiple departments across the business dread the mere idea of the salary planning process.
Sometimes it requires many months, days, and hours of Finance, HR, and Management involvement. Effective salary planning can reduce the time spent by days or months. With the right technology, the HR staff has the ability to maintain overall control of the entire process.
The trouble with data extraction, calculation, and recombination is eliminated, and with managers having access to key employee data throughout the year, resource-intensive tasks such as data extraction can be finished in seconds.
Advanced technology helps businesses avoid some of the common pitfalls such as manual data extraction, verification, and validation, lack of integration with payroll systems, and more that are involved in the typical salary planning process.
Here, we present a few tips that help organizations in salary planning, while ensuring all company rules are enforced and confidential information is protected.
Make the Process Easy for Everyone
As briefly mentioned, salary planning presents a difficult challenge for many resources in an organization. It is, therefore, crucial to make the process as simple and efficient as possible to maximize resources and allow managers to continue doing what they do best.
Eventually, management wants to assess reports rather than spend the time creating them and making salary changes with complicated calculations taking place in the back-end. Implementing a system that can handle all of these complexities automatically, reacts to business-wide changes such as a merger or other acquisition activity, and auto-generates employee communications so that any written errors are avoided.
Allow HR to Manage the Entire Process
HR management is the foundation of every business; everything from specific HR strategies such as recruitment and appraisal to evolving HR rules which state the company’s policies, practices, and growth.
When planning, the HR department should have access to cover all business issues. With salary planning pulling data from multiple sources, processes, and employees, it enables HR to manage the complete process and will ensure consistency and eliminate reduplication efforts.
Perform Regular Audit Trails
Audit trails facilitate organizations to track activity. When going through a meticulous exercise such as salary planning, workflows guide managers in a planned way, ensuring improved collaboration and accountability.
Better access to data also negates the need to send multiple, often locally stored, documents, and limits all changes to one central record, almost eliminating risks to security and compliance.
Implement a unified HR platform
With compensation significantly dictated by many factors such as employee role, performance, etc., critical data that is required for salary planning can become fragmented and out of date very quickly.
To minimize the resource and complexities associated with data extraction and consolidation from various systems, consider the benefits that an integrated system could bring – a solution that holds all employee and HR data from personal details and compensation packages to performance tracking.
A system that acts as the single source of the truth for your workforce will enable a unified and consistent approach to salary planning that not only minimizes the time spent on data management but reduces the risk of security breaches.
