How about we start a little easier this time round?
- Search
- Shortlist
- Interview
- Hire
- Full-Time
- Permanent
- Part-Time
- Contract
- Temporary
- Hybrid
- Flexible
- International/Foreign Workforce
- Salary/Wages (minimum wage)
- Benefits
- Paid/Unpaid Sick Leave
- Paid/Unpaid Vacation
- Paid/Unpaid Maternity/Paternity
- Paid/Unpaid Compassionate Leave
- Paid/Unpaid Personal Leave/Time Off
- Work From Home Allowance eg. Workstation, Internet, Electricity
21. Commissions
22. Bonuses
23. Deductions
24. Claims
25. Contributions (EPF, SOCSO, HRDC)
26. Work Schedules
27. Shifts
28. Timesheets
29. Overtime
30. Insurance/Health Insurance
31. Pension Fund
32. Employee Income Tax
33. Employer Income Tax
34. Special Tax Reliefs
35. Suspension
36. Severance/Redundancy Pay
37. Termination/Layoff
38. Distribute Payments/Payouts
39. Payslips/Digital Payslips
40. Statutory Reporting to Local Authorities
Ladies and gentlemen and especially to the uninitiated, are you aware that the HR and Payroll practice encompasses all of the above? In fact, the job scope is beyond just the “Top 40” because philosophically speaking, a HR professional should come with the skills and experience to strategically add to the organisation. To sit this person down to go through the laundry list, and to punch keys and tally figures on the spreadsheets is definitely counter productive to the investment.
If I may add too, the above is only the tip of the iceberg for say a mid-sized company. The complication increases and cascades through every single nook and cranny of the employee’s record as and when something new occurs in the market because up until now, we haven’t yet touched on:
- Regulatory changes
- Wage subsidies
- Treatment or definition of contractors with implications to payroll, taxes etc.
- Overtime policies
- Last-minute changes of plans, impacting paid/unpaid leaves, benefits etc.
- Progressive support eg. mental health, occupational healthcare etc.
- Multiple payroll cycles
- Payroll tax deferment & waivers
- Payroll infringements & its penalties
- Training/Upskilling/Reskilling
If we add these 10 to the earlier list, we’ve reached 50. Let’s just stop here and quiz ourselves for a while.
- Do we have adequate resources to manage the “50” for our company?
- Is our in-house HR employees conversant with the “50”?
- Do we hire more for the HR department so we can master the “50”?
- Is it viable for a small company to hire an experienced HR professional to tackle the “50”?
- Will we be breaking the law if we do not comply with the “50”?
- Is it just “50” or will there be more?
To answer the last question, there will be more I’m afraid because not only is the market landscape changing with time, so are employees’ aspirations and the regulatory framework supporting the workforce. It gets complicated too when different jurisdictions have very different sets of regulations.
Then, there is also the permutation impact the “50” will have when an organisation is manned by say as many as 48 football teams and their entourage.
“How big must my HR Department be to cope with this? How much knowledge is enough? Which HR ERP is suitable or can we just super-programme MS Excel and get it over with?”
The HR + Payroll + Tech Maze
Drawing from my personal experience of having been on the tech side of a headhunting company with offices, employees and clients across the Asia Pacific region, I have seen the archaic ways of managing HR and Payroll related matters. If I may say so, technology has been a real blessing to our industry.
Just about 20 years ago, processing payroll wasn’t a pretty sight. HR or the designated payroll staff were deskbound for days as payday inched closer. Although the Pentiums and client-servers were there to do the storing, processing and printing of information, it didn’t take away the labour intensive part of the job to enter data and verify records. The unfortunate thing is, some companies are still processing their payroll this way today.
To circumvent this thorny issue, progressive developments in technology have empowered users with a smarter way to input variables and allow them to resolve the complex matrix structures into the system. Such intricacies can now be embedded without much fuss so the wide variety of payment calculations and incentive schemes according to the bands and layers in organisations can be processed right down to the last decimal points.
But tech’s efficiency is also its own drawback because while it can process flawlessly, AI codes haven’t matured enough to independently attend to or understand matters relating to legislation and how it impacts the employment environment. For example, the mass layoffs of large and international companies that are happening right now, it’s more than just termination and severance pay if one is to comply with every set of rules the employees are domiciled in.
“Compliance becomes that much more important, to prevent companies from incurring fines and penalties.”
This is where our cognitive intelligence is required most, it’s also why areas like the Executive Search practice must chiefly be led by a senior practitioner to have a better grasp of the kind of professionals the client is looking to hire or in another instance, how we can better rationalise cost of employment as operational expenditure and not capital expenditure.
If technology is able to declutter the mountainous HR documents (read contracts, claims, reports) on the desk for the sake of having something tangible to sign on, today it has literally gone where no one thought was possible, like identifying geolocations to ascertain an employee’s attendance, capturing sophisticated tax and deduction calculations, protecting our data through advanced cyber security best practices and more.
It’s Complicated, but should it?
Last year in September, we wrote an article on Common Payroll Mistakes That Cause Big Problems where it raised our attention about Malaysia as the 2nd most complicated country in the world to process HR and Payroll records, 2nd only to Belgium (out of 77 jurisdictions measured by the research) but number 1 in Asia Pacific.
Now picture this, according to the ranking, we are more complicated than China, India and Indonesia. This is as mind boggling as pitting 32.9 million against hundreds of million to billions (sizes of the population of countries just mentioned).
So as we have just started the brand new year of 2023, it would be opportune for me to just say that at CXL, we are principally an HR company. Technology is merely our tool to complement our business in our effort to support our clients.
This means we’re first and foremost a HR organisation, nothing else comes beyond that. It’s also why we live and breathe HR every second of the day as we process our clients’ HR and Payroll needs – end to end, through every payroll cycle and most importantly, compliant to all statutory requirements.
About Fariz
Fariz Abdullah is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CXL Group. The organisation offers HR solutions which include Contingent Workforce, Executive Search and Payroll & HR Outsourcing. Under his purview, Fariz has transformed CXL Group into an HR organisation that believes in the importance of advancing through technology but with a deep focus on the human touch in an increasingly digital era.
