The Human Capital Management (HCM), payroll and HR markets, while beset with challenges, remain amongst the most significant and influential to businesses today. Advice from HR experts is the sooner businesses tackle compliance with legislation, concentrate on skills development and embrace technology, the better.

One of the main challenges facing businesses is to keep abreast of legislative and statutory changes on an ongoing basis to ensure compliance and effective employee excellence claims executive leadership at CRS Technologies South Africa.

The Company is a leading local provider of HR & payroll services and solutions. CEO James McKerrell believes that the level of legislation can be overwhelming and, at times, seem un-important – however, more detailed explanations as to why the changes are necessary would certainly counter the sentiment.

“The biggest problems are around ‘pay’ and what is perceived as fair. In all likelihood it relates to skills development or lack thereof in focussed areas,” McKerrell explains.

Skills development remains a key issue impacting on the success of HR in business McKerrell adds.

“This is a key problem in my opinion – too little has been done in the wrong places. Employment Equity reporting has highlighted this in that there is a whole level of skill missing. Hopefully the SETA’s will re-focus their efforts and ensure that the skills are developed in the right areas,” he continues.

General perception and sentiment of HR practice in business has also been influenced significantly by the advent of game-changing technology.

McKerrell acknowledges that it is difficult to get business to understand that transactional volumes actually convert to meaningful information. “Professionals quite often struggle to grasp the fact that technology enables strategy and that we can move away from the traditional paper based reporting. Compliance is generally always used as the “stick” to get business to use technology. So I guess we have to present a balanced picture and provide the sexy, exciting user interface to the technology and allow the business to see the results,” he adds.

In terms of technology, CRS is positioned at the front-end of solution integration and application to strengthen HR, HCM and payroll practice in business.

The Company’s view is that technology should enable business to have real-time, accurate online information in order to make strategic decisions quickly and effectively. Systems should enable businesses to better communicate and connect with employees thus ensuring employee excellence.

“Technology is available to enable employee alignment and engagement, which gets everyone working towards the same goal and improves productivity and bottom line. Employee and Management Self Service should enable much of the communication side, and Business Intelligence adds a lot of value in the strategic decision making process,” McKerrell adds.