Businesses in Hong Kong and throughout the world is constantly changing and companies are continuously thinking about what to do next. Where should the company invest next? Which company should be acquired next? Where should the next plant be built? What will we do about retirement risk? As a result, business leaders are reassessing whether the current workforce is skilled enough to meet the evolving needs of the company.
However, these same leaders often struggle to manage human capital because they lack the timely insight necessary to match resources with current and future business needs. The lack of proper visibility into workforce dynamics can frequently be traced to inefficient manual processes and outdated and disconnected systems that make it difficult to analyse key metrics and make better business decisions.
To enhance business managers' understanding and control of human capital, integrating core HCM, finance, and back office data in a single cloud system that efficiently supports all core ERP and HR-related processes can provide the right information in real time to every user, within a reasonable economic cost. With the cloud, companies can manage a high-performing workforce following three key practices.
Table Stakes: Automate the Back Office
Your back offices systems, including HR, accounting, and other ERP functions, need to provide the flexibility and agility required to adapt to business change, such as an acquisition or an entry into a new market or territory, with minimal overhead to keep the organisation moving forward. To manage your growing workforce, leverage a full-service payroll and HCM solution that's integrated with your ERP. Compensate your global workforce, including full-time staff, temporary hires and contractors, in any currency using automated capabilities that can calculate earnings, deductions, contributions and taxes accurately and in timely fashion.
At the same time, you should be able to maintain regulatory compliance worldwide with tax jurisdictions of various government authorities utilising capabilities for automated tax filings and remittances. During your month-end close, your ERP should produce integrated financial statements that automatically tie underlying workforce-related financial detail to the values appearing in your reports.
Goal Setting: Align the Workforce with Financial Targets and Projections
As you budget and forecast projections for the business, integrate a workforce planning process with your overall company strategy. Because it's not always easy to know up front how much to spend on what resources, managers can use the cloud to do financial planning and perform "what-if" analysis on different workforce and HR-related assumptions and assess the financial impact to operating margin and bonuses quickly and accurately.
While measuring progress throughout the year, business managers can access real-time actuals information, do comparisons on the fly between actuals and budget, and update forecasts to reflect economic changes affecting the business. A financial planning module that's integrated with your cloud-based HR management and ERP suite can unlock value in providing variance analysis in real time to improve decision-making and better align your workforce with company targets.
Staying Competitive: Groom Future Leaders
To remain competitive, position your organisation to attract, retain and motivate future leaders and any other high-potential human capital. Future leaders no longer have to reside at the corporate home office but can be sourced from any place in the world.
Optimise your HR management processes with a cloud-based talent management and recruiting solution to foster a workplace culture where employees can track their performance relative to their goals, identify their strengths and development needs for management consideration and career opportunities, and receive continuous feedback from managers and peers without having to rely on manual or inefficient HR processes. As a result, companies can improve transparency in identifying potential candidates for advancement, and employees can have better insight into their current standing within the organisation and their prospects for advancement.