he age of remote work is breaking down long-established barriers to talent acquisition for businesses across a variety of international sectors. Today, talent can be discovered and onboarded anywhere. This requires an adaptive payroll system that can empower small and large-scale businesses alike.
By 2030, there are estimated to be over 90 million remote jobs around the world, growing at a rate of 25% over the coming years. This will pave the way for a distributed talent pool that’s unprecedented in its scale for businesses.
But this remote work boom will come with new payroll challenges for businesses. How can employers adapt to borderless payments as well as the security and adaptability that employees will expect? Fortunately, emerging technologies appear to already be paving the way for an integrated future built on smarter payroll management:
Blockchain to the Rescue
Payments beyond borders can come with a number of security and transparency risks, but blockchain offers a level of protection that other technologies can’t replicate.
Built on distributed digital ledgers, blockchains are immutable and fully transparent, helping to eliminate the risk of fraud while offering a clear, auditable trail of transactions that can help employers keep track of their remote hires, their contractual obligations, and the domestic compliance they must adhere to.
Additionally, blockchain helps to remove the human error aspect of data entry, helping to ensure employers adhere to payroll agreements and payment schedules for all remote staff across different time zones.
Democratizing Payroll
The level of data accuracy errors in payroll can be highly damaging for internationally-focused businesses. According to a recent report, 63% of all captured and corrected payroll issues are caused by data input mistakes.
It’s for this reason that adding an Employer of Record (EOR) service is essential for all businesses seeking to onboard multiple overseas remote hires.
EOR platforms like Remofirst are functional solutions for managing payroll throughout different nations and a diverse range of currencies. The service lists bills in national currencies before being invoiced in the client’s currency of choice. Furthermore, all monthly payments are aggregated into a single invoice, which can be billed in US dollars, British pounds, euros, or many more local currencies.
According to a recent Remofirst review, the platform also leads the way in compliance monitoring, helping businesses adhere to all local laws in their employees’ countries of residence.
Paving the Way for Self-Service
The world of remote work means that employees need more than a company intranet to access core payroll and HR information. Utilizing a mobile experience for ease of access can be essential in helping workers review their payslips, request holidays, look at their benefits, and study HR policies while on the go.
This calls for self-service portals that are easy to use for everyone, regardless of where they’re accessing their information from and in what language they would prefer to receive their information.
Generative AI is helping to bridge the payroll gaps for remote workers to access vital information in a preferred language by using machine learning (ML) to automatically adapt information into their perceived language of choice.
Building Communication Channels
Factors like time zones and language barriers can make it more difficult for employees to access the information they need and have their pressing queries answered in a timely manner.
While communication tools like Slack and other instant messaging applications can offer some points of contact between remote employees and staff, these platforms can be inefficient for communication between, say, a team leader in New York and an employee based in Poland.
Making sure you have open avenues for communication between employees on payroll matters, including email, phone, or video conferencing, is still important, but focusing on the needs of all employees calls for a more holistic approach.
With advances in natural language processing (NLP), it’s possible for employees to run queries in their language of choice for AI and ML models to quickly supply a satisfactory answer. This can help to automatically adapt to the contextual cues of remote workers to respond in a satisfactory and recognizable manner that assists them with their concerns.
AI can even help to preempt upcoming queries based on the user’s behavior and may summon documents from company portals that may assist with any concerns before they become more pressing or a source of dissatisfaction.
Creating a Globally-Focused Payroll
Having a globally remote workforce can help businesses reap the rewards of wider talent pools and more competitive salary expectations in nations around the world. However, it also poses fresh challenges in payroll management.
With the right tools, it’s easy for businesses to run an efficient global operation that manages payments in expected currencies and communicates directly to employees in a way that’s easy and comfortable for them to understand.
These advancements offer peace of mind that operating a globally-focused workforce can be frictionless. It also helps to form a strong foundation for future growth among ambitious businesses.
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