Name: Maximise Payroll Performance with AI and Automation
Uploaded: 2025-09-17T02:56:04.565Z
Duration: 40 min 8 s
Description: Maximise Payroll Performance with AI and Automation

Transcript for "Maximise Payroll Performance with AI and Automation": There are two kinds of people in the world, backward thinkers and forward thinkers. Forward thinkers have plans fifteen minutes from now and fifteen years from now. They're not just one step ahead. They're a thousand steps ahead. It's not easy being a forward thinker. It knows that's never gonna work. It's setbacks and breakthroughs. But the world needs forward thinkers like you to keep us all looking forward, to break records and barriers, to move us, to help us compete and win, to boldly grow in every sense of the word, to reinvent what could be. At Workday, we're the forward thinkers edge, illuminating your decision making with the power of AI, delivering continuous innovation so that your organization is ready for tomorrow, and helping your entire workforce thrive through change. Even forward thinkers need a champion, so let's turn our minds to the future together. Let's keep moving travel forward, moving peace of mind forward, moving people forward. Because being a forward thinker doesn't just move your business forward, it moves the world forward. Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining me today. It's great to have you with me to talk about the future of Australian payroll and AI as well as automation alongside our customers' equity trustees. So before we start, let me introduce myself and tell you a little bit about what I do here at Workday. I'm Alison Skein, and I'm the vice president of global product vision and experience based in Sydney. So my role at Workday is really focused on showcasing to our community the power of Workday's AI platform. And a big part of that is talking to leaders like you about the future of their workforce and, specifically, how Workday can help you solve your company's strategic challenges. So that gets us to today's webinar, which is really having this close look at how AI and automation are really transforming payroll in Australia and the benefits that first movers are already unlocking. So first, some housekeeping. We've got forty five minutes together. So the session is going to be recorded, which enables you to check back later if you need to. Please also use the chat to ask questions as we go along, and make sure you save some time for questions for our customer joining us today, equity trustees. So upfront, we've got fifteen minutes that I'm gonna share with you some insights. Then we're going to welcome Georgie and Jordan from equity trustees for our fireside chat, and that's really the centerpiece of the session today. It'll take around twenty minutes. So get ready to share payroll challenges, how you're tackling them, what's working and what's not, and when you need help from Workday. And, obviously, I'm happy to explain how AI and automation can help organizations like yours as well as our vision for deepening these features in Workday payroll for Australia going forward. At the end, we'll have a couple of minutes to wrap up. So let's get started. First of all, I'm sure you're feeling this. Our payroll world has shifted in dramatic ways. Workforce and regulation keeps on changing, and it's very dynamic and challenging landscape. As the Australian Payroll Association's 2025 industry report outlined, payroll legislation just keeps getting more complex, and payroll errors and compliance challenges are more of a headache than ever before. When we think about the disruption from the pandemic, you know, companies needed these robust payroll solutions just to manage all the diverse work arrangements that emerge from hybrid and remote work. And a side effect of the acute skill shortage that we've experienced here in Australia is this host of very specific salary arrangements devised to help you keep top talent, and it's just one curveball after another. If you take a look at the statistics on the screen, you see that Australian payroll leaders are really scrambling to feel them. The numbers tell the story, don't they? With 23.6% of payroll officers saying they have poor integration between systems. 19.9% of payroll officers are really challenged with keeping up to date with as well as understanding legislation. And in a recent research study that Workday undertook, we found that 89% of payroll practitioners surveyed either strongly agree or somewhat agree that keeping up with regulation is a challenge. And I'm sure your own experiences are similar to this, and I'm keen to know more about that. So we'll circle back on that later when we have our chat. So thinking about all of this, we're actually here to also talk to you about Workday payroll and how that can be utilized to help you manage those challenges and really come out on top. There's lots of ways that we can help. But today, we're going to zoom in on AI and automation, and you probably heard those two words thrown around a lot. And maybe you suspect that they're just buzzwords, but they're really not. They're reshaping the entire business landscape. I can't go into any conversation with organizations today where they don't ask me about what we're doing around AI, how it can support them, allow them to be more efficient, and be more productive. And we're starting to see how Australia's first movers are positioning themselves to really reap the benefits in this area. So what's emerging is this dynamic environment where payroll isn't just a basic business function. It's a strategic key that allows for greater efficiency and productivity. So what can it unlock? Well, for starters, faster growth, easier compliance, more workforce insights, and a more productive and happier team. So how do you use it to start to bank these benefits? Well, in this webinar, we'll explore together some of those strategic insights, what you can achieve, as well as how. So let's get into it. So first of all, payroll faces a serious strategy gap according to our research. We talked to over 300 payroll practitioners in APAC Enterprises, and that covered a range of sectors as well as roles. And this is what they said. 93% either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that payroll does play a strategic role within their organizations, but 91% of them felt that their current solution wasn't doing enough to really bring them the data that they needed. And a huge 92% wanted more transparency into workforce cost insights and metrics associated with that. So if you're convinced that your payroll data has strategic value, but you're really struggling to extract that value from it, you're in good company. So if you could get access to this data, how would organizations look to use it? And you'll notice on the slide here that areas such as cost control, decision making, and global expansion ranked highly and, of course, compliance. You'd expect to see that there given everything that we've just talked about. So there's no argument that these are all strategic priorities of any organization. And then when we look at what's, like, holding organizations back from maximizing this strategic value of the payroll data that they have. Well, there's a number of things as you can see here. A lot of them are related to the non strategic role that payroll has played so far with basic things such as the fact that, you know, this perception of payroll being a transactional function, that there's this disconnect between the data and the business systems as well as this resistance to change. So thinking about those areas, there's a lot of problems as you saw from that previous line that related back to these disconnected systems. And you can see here that over 34% of Australian payroll leaders said that disconnected data and business systems stopped payroll from being more strategic. And a bit of a breakdown on where we saw those numbers associated with different components associated with the data from that standpoint. So if we're hearing that payroll leaders don't actually feel that their payroll vendors are coming to their party, what can we start to do to think about how we can change this narrative? We've had the 50% strongly feeling that there were concerns in a number of areas. So we'd like to break it down really into allowing you to take two big steps as a starting point to driving change. And if you think about that starting point with those disconnected systems that you have in place, what would step one be? Well, it's really having this single source of truth, And that means having a single unified platform for HR and payroll that really spans across your business functions. Once you've got that, the possibilities really start to open up, and you're gonna see this step by step change. You can eliminate manual data entry and time consuming workflows. You will be able to remove delays and discrepancies by providing you with this accurate real time data, the ability to identify errors early and be able to fix them. And when you think about that data thinking in real time, it allows for real time decision making across HR and the wider business. This then provides you with a few things. You can then have contextual insights into the tools that you use every day, making more informed decisions across your workbooks. So once we've got that in place, you're then ready for step two. And this second step is really around AI and automation. So if we have this unified platform, let's think about how we can then start to automate a lot of the busy work that you have across your businesses. And this is where AI can really come to the fore to help make people be more productive. So how does this actually work in practice? Well, let's talk about a few different ideas. Our industry leading approach to AI can really be used for many things across the business. It can supercharge productivity as well as speed up and simplify and automate your payroll processing. So the possibilities are enormous. And what we're hearing a lot lately is it's a great way to also improve employee job satisfaction. Actually, it turns out that people really like it when they can speed up the route routine task, so there's no surprise there. But there's other ways that we can actually leverage AI to make teams happier and more efficient. It can guide workers to their tasks faster and help to prevent errors that waste a lot of time and thinking about those tedious errors that it can start to fix. So any one of those benefits could start to make your team feel better about work. But what if you could have an AI payroll assistant that could answer common payroll related questions for your employees about their pay slips, deductions, company policies, providing this quickly and accurately, allowing you to actually free up your payroll team's time and reduce their workload. Well, that's a win in anyone's books. What about also then having AI powered prop recommendations for your payroll teams that allows you to complete tasks quickly by selecting those commonly used prompts that it learns about from what your users are importing. Looks at real time data based on how often you select a prompt or thinking about how it could provide you with real time alerts when input amounts are outside of historical norms that you have. That can also then to help reduce input errors that are typed in by mistakes. So all of this allowing you to provide AI with the tool that can help you plan better. You can manage those payroll anomalies by flagging unusual patterns in payroll data. So, again, the system can actually learn from what your organization's doing, highlight deviation such as unexpected overtime or sudden salary changes, allowing your teams to review increasing accuracy and, therefore, preventing fraud with less manual effort. So like I said, the possibilities are really enormous. And by acting on them, we'll allow you to provide these goals to realizing the payroll can actually be a strategic asset within your organization. So how are we then looking at building out Workday payroll for Australia to help you move through these steps, one and two, that I've mentioned? So Workday payroll can then do things such as recalculating your payroll dynamically. That can save time and reduce the errors. You can save worker costs in real time so that you know where you stand. And as I mentioned before, having that real time visibility and reporting so people can actually make decisions based on the latest information that you have. So we're building Workday payroll for Australia to really help get you forward with steps one and two, and we're doing this in a few different ways. Firstly, we're going to provide you with payroll that's fully connected to the Workday suite so you can move to having a single powerful platform that allows you to accomplish step one. And then step two, automate, automate, automate. As I mentioned previously, Workday payroll can recalculate your payroll dynamically, and that saves time and it reduces errors. You can also have that real time visibility and reporting, allowing you to make those decisions based on the latest information. You can set up automated audits that surface exceptions in real time, allowing you to fix problems before they become entrenched and limit fallout. And you don't have to add AI. It's already there. What their payroll for Australia leverages it in multiple ways built in to the core of the application. As I mentioned, areas such as identifying invalid payroll order with data, simplifying audit workflows, and those insights that it can surface up. So all of this is critical. Workbench Australian experts support you to look at compliance and then alert you when regulations change. So we're always on the watch to help make sure that you're not caught unawares. So now you've heard about how Workday payroll can help move you forward. Let's hear from one of our Workday customers, equity trustees. I'd like to welcome Georgie Taylor and Jordan Grubb to our fireside chat. Georgie, Jordan, can you please introduce yourselves and your roles at Equity Trustees? Thanks for having us today, Alison. I'm Georgie Taylor, executive general manager of people here at Equity Trustees, and I lead the people function. I was also the project sponsor of phase one and two Workday implementation, which for us included payroll implementation in phase one. That's it. And Jordan? Yes. Thank you. My name is Jordan Grubb, and I'm the people systems analyst at Equity Trustees. I've been at the company for just over three years now. And with the implementation of Workday and the efficiencies gained, I've been able to move into a payroll and systems role. Prior to this, I had worked in payroll for eight years, and I used systems such as Chris 21, PeopleSoft, Orion, and now Workday. I also processed payrolls for employees in Australia, New Zealand, and India. Sounds like a lot of time within the payroll space. So, Georgia, I'm just gonna start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about equity trustees? Yes. Absolutely. Well, we are Australia's leading specialist trustee company, and our core purpose is providing independent trustee and fiduciary services to ensure that wealth and assets are managed in the best interests of clients, beneficiaries, investors, and members. And, essentially, we have three key business lines. Firstly, our private wealth business, which is predominantly for individuals and families. This includes wills and estates, executor and trustee services, and we also act as power of attorney on behalf of incapacitated clients. And our philanthropic services is another really important service that's provided as part of our private wealth business. Our second business line is corporate trustee services where we are the responsible entity for investment schemes, and we also provide custody and debt capital market services. And our third business line is superannuation where we act as the independent trustee for superannuation funds. All things that I'm sure are front of mind for our listeners here today. And, Jordan, passing over to you, can you tell tell us a little bit about Equity Trustees workforce and what makes you unique? Of course. So Equity Trustees has changed a lot, over the past decade. We've acquired two organizations that came on board with legacy EVAs that we had to bring on. We have, at the moment, around 470 employees, and that includes five different agreements in place. This causes us to have different variations of full time, including thirty seven point five hour week, thirty eight hour week, and a forty hour week, which, as we all know, would change employee salary, leave entitlements, all of which Workday is able to manage, which is really good. And, Georgie, Equity Trustees has been on a journey with Workday over the last year. Would you like to talk to us a little bit about the process that you've gone through implementing Workday at Equity Trustees? Absolutely. And our story is quite unique, I think, on a a number of fronts. And firstly, in that finance, we're the first business unit at Equity Trustees to implement Workday, and this focused on core financials and revenue management modules and a light version of core HCM and occurred over about a eighteen month period. And then it was our turn. So as a people team, we were initially committed to two phases, phase one being core HCM, compensation and absence, and integration with our incumbent payroll system. Phase two included recruitment, advanced compensation, performance, and learning modules. So as we commenced our phase one scope of work, the question was again raised about potentially implementing Workday payroll. And, initially, our response was that we absolutely did not wanna be the guinea pig and and third company in Australia to implement this system. I mean, you know, payroll implementations are huge. Right? There's a lot at stake, and we already had a pretty packed rapid deployment schedule. So, essentially, our first position was a a hard no. And then as our project team formed, our architects and technology team made us aware of the complexities that were going to be associated with integrating to our current payroll provider. And that got us thinking, but we were still unsure. So to help us make this decision, we then had an independent consultant come in and share the pros and cons of both scenarios, and this individual was an expert both in Workday but also our current payroll provider. And it then became really benefit, all the benefits we could achieve in having payroll, HCM, and finance on the same platform. So a hard no then became a yes. Which we're very thankful for. So are we. And, Jordan, I'm sure you probably also got some insights that you'd like to add to that as well. Yes. Definitely. So as Georgie mentioned, we moved from a hard no to, I would probably say, a soft yes. I was it was more of a no to the integrations and all the trouble that would form from that rather than a yes to Workday payroll because we still had a lot of fear around being, you know, an early adopter of the system. It was from here that I did the payroll fundamentals Workday training course, and I was, funnily enough, the first Australian that my Workday trainer was to train, which I thought was interesting. But it became really apparent during the training that Workday payroll was a global engine. And just like the taxes vary in California and San Francisco, the taxes vary in The US and Australia. So it was building off an already built system just to make things a bit more Australia specific. So it made me realize that the system wasn't as new as I once thought it was. It was just being built up to incorporate Australia. So so, Jordan, given all of that, what have you found have been some of the biggest benefits? Some of the biggest benefits that I've seen through implementing Workday payroll Australia has definitely been the compliance. Through running a pay cycle, a lot of the things that previously you could only check once the pay was finalized is now live and ready to check before finalizing. For example, you create the STP file before the pay is finalized, which means that you can catch any errors before they go through. And we all know it's much easier to fix an error before a pay is finalized than it is to correct it afterwards, so that's made a huge difference in our payroll processing. We've also been able to check the journal, errors before finalizing as well. So once you open up a pay, you've got your STP file, you've got your journal, and it just makes sure that no errors are going through to that final step. So all of our STP files are accepted. And our journal, although we do have the extra benefit of finance being live, the journal never goes through in error state, which has made a massive impact in our compliance. We also notice how much the workday delivered fields are utilized in the system as well. For example, the tax rates and the redundancy tax free rates, the public holidays, all these fields are completely maintained by Workday, which means that the payroll team doesn't have as much responsibility in keeping those updated, with legislation changes. There's also a lot of, information available for the tax. So for example, if an employee was to receive ordinary salary, a bonus, and an ETP all in one pay, you'll see three different tax codes being processed. One for regular tax, one for method b, two tax, and one for a ETP tax, which all follow different tax calculations as well. It's really easy to read and decipher how the tax is calculated as well, which has meant that it brings up a lot of my time to be able to focus on the more hard hitting questions than just our everyday tax calculations. More on that, we the system also is able to process back payments really well. Once, a retro pay is what the system would call it. And it will essentially check the whole system and see if any employees have had, employment change or any bonuses or anything that's due to be paid from a previous pay. And the system will automatically add that to the correct pay and adjust the tax as well. So all of these things are completely accurate, and there's just I'm here to check to make sure the system's correct, which it generally is. And we always love to be able to free up time to be able to do other things in our days as well. And then, Georgie, we all know the importance of change management and, you know, that our operating models will change when we're putting new systems into place. But talk to us about, you know, what you found from the importance of that change management process. Yeah. Thanks, Alison. And as you say, change management is a critical success factor for any technology implementation project and was a key focus for us. Workday's a brand new platform and way of working, and our focus was very much on regular communication, education, and training. Essentially, I view that we had two audiences. The first audience was the enterprise made up of people leaders and all of our employees, and the second audience was our own people team. And a point I'd like to hoke highlight, and I'm focusing here on core HCM more so than payroll, is that change management for the people team is far bigger than the change management for the enterprise. Both are critical, but the change in ways of working and operating model is something you really need to get your whole team across. And as an example, preworkday, if an employee received a promotion, I'd be able to generate a letter, have it reviewed by a manager, then give it to Jordy for updating in the payroll system, and it was pretty quick and simple. And now with Workday, the request needs to be raised. We need to ensure that all the, position details in the system are correct, and there are a series of checks and approvals. And it may involve up to 10 people across the whole business. And the other key difference is it may not, in this example, even touch Jordy. So the key people from our team, involved would be our people associate, the HR business partner, our remuneration manager, and myself. So in all, the administrative requirements in Workday are much higher, but the benefits from a risk and an audit perspective are huge. Our operating model and ways of working really have changed significantly. And as a as a team, throughout the process, we made sure that we had regular workday education and decision making sessions in our weekly team meetings, and these were facilitated by the people team SMEs. So I guess in short, I'd recommend that you're very focused on the change management and operating model changes in your own team for successful implementation. And, of course, having that leadership by your teams to focus on the importance of of actually putting a system in place and what it's going to mean to the business also becomes key within that. Without a doubt. Okay. And then, Jordan, from your perspective, looking at the change management and and because you're coming at it from the actual user that's having to deal with all of this, what were some of the the areas of insight that you could share? Yeah. So the change management for EQT was definitely one of our key areas of the implementation. However, I found the change management was much more prevalent in HCM module. The HCM is much more organization specific with the various business processes and structures in place, whereas payroll is a bit less flexible based because it's based on legislation, EBAs, and policies. Rest allowances and one time payments will be housed in HCM module. And once they're approved based on the business process and ready for payment, they'll flow through to payroll. Similar with employee changes, leave taken, etcetera, payroll absorbs all the changes made in other modules. Although there is flexibility to process things straight from payroll if the business processes are being held up, But alternatively, if you want the business processes to be finalized, you can process them as retro payments, and this feature allows the back payments to be processed correctly and the tax to be adjusted. If customers already have HCM live, the change management for employees in implementing Workday payroll is pretty minimal. There's not a huge amount of employee manager exposure to the Workday payroll module itself, apart from employees having the ability to manage their own bank super and tax details, having a single source of truth for all their payroll information. Perfect. Sounds great. So what advice do you have for your peers that are looking to go down this same path with what they payroll? I've got, fast five tips. And my number one tip as a project sponsor is, to absolutely make sure that you have your a team working on the project as your people team SMEs and as much as possible to ensure that you backfill these people so that they can focus on being dedicated to the project. Rapid deployment is just that. It's fast and furious, and you need to be really organized and prepared to ensure that you stick to the project timeline. Second tip would be don't try and lift and shift your processes into Workday. Workday is an out of the box solution, and this really needs to be the mindset of the people working on the project. The more you lift and shift, the more you have to configure the system, and this is where I see a lot of teams and companies trip up and lose the benefits of Workday. Tip number three would be to consider an independent consultant to support you on an ad hoc basis with key decisions. This really was a game changer for us. Tip four, in addition to the change management and op model changes that we talked about for the people team, when you're thinking about, change management for the business, absolutely focus always on the user experience. Make sure that you've got key stakeholders engaged on important decisions and that you involve change champions as much as possible. As we all know, you can have the best system, but if you haven't engaged, trained, and supported your users, you may not have successful implementation. And tip number five will be to make sure that you celebrate and recognize your wins, your milestones, and achievements, big and small. I hope the champagne was popping on that first payroll run that you had, Georgie. We were very excited. And, Jordan, for from your standpoint, what advice would you give to your peers? Yeah. I think Georgie definitely covered the the main areas. I think from being on the project and hands on, the key area for me was definitely spreadsheets. Someone that knows Excel, that can reformat reports. The way that the reports are loaded into Workday, the formatting, the EIBs as Workday call them, they are very, specific in how they're formatted and most payroll systems probably won't be able to export reports in the exact format required. So definitely someone that can read for format spreadsheets. That was a game changer for us, because of the amount of spreadsheets involved and time. That was really important as well. Well, Georgie and Jordan, you know, that was great. Really appreciate you sharing those insights for today's webinar both on your journey from a Workday HCM and then leading through into Workday payroll for Australia. And I'm conscious that we're almost at time, so let's wrap up. Firstly, if you'd like to learn more, about what we've been through, the team can be in touch with you, and you can use that by the vote box that you will see on the screen. And thinking about all of that, we always have to have some takeaways for you. And I think, first of all, it's really around embracing this higher level of automation and AI that can really make it easier to allow you to grow while, again, managing those compliance risks and making sure that you're also satisfying your team when you're using AI. It's also to remember that the value of automation should extend beyond this efficient record keeping and tax filings to enable you to do that forward looking data analysis as well. You're generating the automated insights that can go deeper. Finding those root causes and looking at the future forecast that may be related to areas such as overtime costs, integrating that payroll data with your other operational and HR data as well. And then lastly, that having that unified system that really allows you to connect the dots between all of those areas, providing you with those valuable insights into employee performance, productivity, and engagement that you can use to drive your business results. So if you'd like to learn more about some of the information that I shared with you, we provided a QR code so you can download this strategic payroll report that I mentioned during the presentation. So once again, thank you for taking the time to join me talking through the future of payroll, AI, and automation. And a final big thanks to our guests, Jordy and Jordan from Equity Trust for giving us insights into their experience. With that, I'd like to thank you, and have a great work day.