The role of HR has changed.
No longer limited strictly to administration and politics, HR is increasingly taking on a more strategic role.
This is extremely exciting for the industry!
However, many HR professionals are stuck at the first step to act more strategically: using their employees’ data.
To fully transition to a strategic business function, HR professionals need accurate, up-to-date data.
Without it, you won’t have the full picture.
Employees suffer, problems go unchecked, and decisions are based on guesswork rather than facts.
Unfortunately, the reality for many small businesses is that a lack of HR and payroll integration, coupled with outdated reporting processes, impacts their ability to use data and hinders their strategic thinking.
The current state of data: disconnected HR systems
The CIPD recently published an article on maximizing the impact of people professionals, arguing that well-designed and strategically aligned HR systems can drive better organizational results.
However, for all the talk in the industry about HR working more strategically, the reality on the ground tells a completely different story.
Our research found that HR professionals lose an average of half a day of work (3.4 hours) each week due to poorly integrated systems.
Only 28% have a fully or largely integrated HR platform, and the rest navigate a patchwork of systems and spreadsheets (34%) or rely solely on manual processes (24%).
Nor is it exclusively a question of human resources.
CIPP cites a lack of integration as a major challenge for payroll, creating a fragmented landscape.
The role of integrated HR and payroll systems
I’m sure you have many burning questions about how to bridge the gap between where HR is today and where it should be.
Well, it starts with integrating your HR and payroll software, creating a single source of truth for HR.
The HR and payroll integration uses an application programming interface (API).
Think of an API as a digital bridge, connecting your HR and payroll software so that information flows automatically between systems.
Now, the real value isn’t just in a cleaner data stream.
That’s what connected data lets you do.
Data Visibility
Data visibility is more important than ever as demand for workforce information increases rapidly.
CIPD research urges businesses to prioritize clearer and more consistent workforce reporting.
Their findings indicate that stronger workforce reporting standards help build a future characterized by higher business performance, greater accountability and more meaningful engagement with shareholders and other stakeholders.
So, if you’re looking to elevate your role and be more strategic, presenting accurate, current numbers to leaders becomes a key part of the job.
To achieve this, integrated HR and payroll systems help break down HR data silos and provide visibility into your most critical information.
Rather than exporting from one system, reconciling with another, and rebuilding a spreadsheet each month, the information is available in the system, ready to be queried.
Now what gets interesting is that good HR software allows you to create customizable dashboards in the system for all the common data areas that you will need on a daily basis, as well as provide access to personalized and predefined reports.
Data Trust
The CIPD views people analytics as a core knowledge that HR professionals should be comfortable using to make sound business decisions.
But this is only possible when your employees’ data is accurate; Ultimately, your strategic decisions are only as reliable as the data behind them.
With modern HR software, much of the employee data is entered and managed by the employees themselves via self-service, which significantly contributes to its accuracy.
Now, not only does this make life easier for HR, but it also benefits payroll.
Thanks to software integration, data flows directly into payroll, eliminating manual transfers where errors usually creep in.
Use of data
When all your staff data is accurate and in one place, you can make magic happen.
Data patterns that you would have otherwise missed begin to surface, allowing you to act strategically.
Here are some examples of what good workforce data allows you to spot and address.
Absence Trends
Good workforce data allows you to break down absences at a granular level, by team, manager, reason and time of year.
So if a service is consistently above standard, HR can investigate the cause.
Maybe the workload is too high, management doesn’t offer enough help, or there’s a recurring seasonal spike.
Having this information allows you to offer targeted support, leading to fewer lost days and earlier intervention before wellness issues become worse.
With workplace illness costing businesses over £100 billion a year, this additional visibility presents an extremely strong business case.
Retention risks
Do employees on a certain team quit more regularly? Does a specific role generate more revenue? Is there anywhere where churn is noticeably higher?
Being able to answer these types of questions is crucial to your HR strategy, especially considering that hiring a new employee can end up costing nearly double their salary.
When employee turnover data sits alongside other information, such as compensation, performance, and general feedback, HR is not only better positioned to locate problems before they escalate, but also has the information needed to make a meaningful difference.
For example, a spike in attrition in a team may indicate:
- Management issues
- Non-competitive salary scales
- Professional burnout
Spotting it early means you can act quickly, whether that’s adjusting compensation, training managers, or offering additional support.
For your bottom line, this means less recruiting pressure and less disruption for the entire team.
Control of labor costs
HR and payroll integration gives you a live, accurate picture of what your labor is really costing.
Not just salaries, but also overtime, bonuses and the hidden cost of absences and lost days.
Working with finance, you can use this workforce data to accurately determine:
- The cost of a salary increase
- The impact of workforce changes
- Where overtime settles in quietly
Financial budgets based on facts rather than guesswork mean there will be far fewer unpleasant surprises along the way.
Don’t miss the full picture
HR strategy needs good data, and to get good data you need good systems.
Staffology HR and Staffology Payroll are designed to work together, so your staff data flows directly without the need for a manual bridge.
If you’re ready to make a change, check out Staffology!
Looking for more information on the systems? View our software brochures:
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.