How can companies expand once they emerge from the pandemic and are ready to focus on growth? That was one of the main questions explored during the webinar “Creating a Borderless Organizational Structure With Global Payroll.”
Sponsored by Immedis, the webinar covered how companies could access talent across the globe, even in places where they’d never operated. Leading the webinar were two payroll and tax professionals from Immedis—Christine Keily, Chief Tax & Payroll Officer, and Emma Meehan, Head of Tax Services. Both discussed the trends organizations should consider when making a substantial change to their business landscapes, and some of the key components that businesses will need in order to process payroll for a larger workforce.
Keily began the webinar by defining what “expansion” means for a company. According to Keily, corporate expansion could refer to an increase in headcount, product offerings to customers, or an expansion into new locations. Some of the common themes that companies discover during their expansion phase are mergers and acquisitions, hypergrowth, and global mobility.
Keily explained that the added value of a payroll professional when examining a company’s expansion plans should not be overlooked. Payroll pros hold much of the data necessary for expansion, and the payroll department can also be seen as a “connector” between different parts of the organization.
“Payroll teams can also speak the same global payroll language across different companies at times,” Keily said. “A consolidated approach to global payroll can really help to drive the overall collaboration amongst the teams. It’s really about access to data … and that snapshot of truth at any point in time.”
A global payroll checklist for success during mergers and acquisitions includes the following steps:
- Define the project
- Country analysis
- Organization analysis
- Mapping the details
- Risk assessment
- Talent and training
- Payroll communications
Meanwhile, Meehan shared valuable insight outlining the use of global mobility to strategically support business growth. Meehan’s strategies include closing the skills gap and providing a better basis to solve localized shortages in talent and moving experienced employees to other countries to share in their knowledge and training skills.
“It’s important for businesses to have the right people in the right place doing the right job at the right time,” Meehan said.
During a poll question, webinar attendees were asked to share their top concern when it came to managing global mobility. Approximately 50% of the participants surveyed said meeting legislative and tax obligations was their top concern.
“It’s the one concern that costs companies money, so nobody wants to get that wrong,” Meehan said. “Sometimes you’ll also see the reputational damage when things aren’t handled correctly or overlooked.”
“Creating a Borderless Organizational Structure With Global Payroll” is currently available for free on demand through 31 August 2022.
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Kiko Martinez is Associate Editor of Membership Publications for APA and GPMI.