Joining us for this episode of the 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat is Richard Limpkin, chief product officer at Dublin, Ireland-based global payroll provider Immedis. Richard and I spoke at length a couple times prior this. The insights we unearthed in those conversations were intriguing and, fortunately, the podcast captured the gist of these idas as we reiterated previously covered ground.

When you think about it, payroll is perhaps the most concrete and most abstract aspect of human capital management. On the one hand, it's an indisputable number of outgoing money every one or two weeks (for some organizations, once monthly). Mess with that number or its delivery, and an organization can very quickly have a mutiny on its hands as job satisfaction suffers an acute, palpable blow.

Above all, what must payroll be, without fail? It absolutely has to be timely and accurate, Richard says. He's right, of course, and this applies to all payroll situations. Get payroll wrong or produce it late, and an organization immediately experiences the aforementioned potentially disastrous crisis of employee sentiment. Exacerbating matters is a strict regulatory environment reflecting the basic importance of payroll and governing how the organization must proceed to rectify the situation, whatever it is.

Here is where concrete and abstract HCM really come into play, and this gets us to the other two things payroll must do, in Richard's sage estimation: Be fully compliant with all applicable laws and fully protect the security and privacy of employees' data (for which some of that regulatory framework also applies).

Notably, as an organization's payroll becomes global, the complexities of all these factors behind payroll intensify. In a way, global payroll is the ultimate point solution, and there's essentially no way to implement that solution for global payroll until the moment you need one. We got into all that too, and I encourage readers to view this episode of the podcast. It was a pleasure to speak again with Richard, who brought deep expertise to this discussion.