Name: The Future of Global Payroll: Unlocking Workday’s Latest Payroll Solutions
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T19:30:06.611Z
Duration: 40 min 26 s
Description: The Future of Global Payroll: Unlocking Workday’s Latest Payroll Solutions

Transcript for "The Future of Global Payroll: Unlocking Workday’s Latest Payroll Solutions": Gonna kick it off in just a few moments. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our latest installment of our Looking Forward with Workday webinar series. Today we will be covering the future of global payroll and highlighting Workday's latest payroll solutions. My name is Taya Burns and I'm a product marketing manager for Global Payroll. I'm joined by my amazing workmates and payroll experts, Sherry Yarbrough, principal outbound product manager for payroll, and Leon Nussbaumer, Senior Partner Development Manager for Payroll Partnerships. During this presentation, we may have a few forward looking statements that are subject to change. Please note this is covered under our product statement agreement and you should make all buying decisions based on what's currently available. And before we get started, we do have a few housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded and will be emailed to you within twenty four to forty eight hours. If you have any questions, you can select the Q and A button on the right hand side and if time permits, we will leave some time at the end to help answer any questions that come in. And lastly, you will be prompted with a survey after the webinar concludes. We truly appreciate your feedback. So we've structured today's session to move beyond technical how to and focus on the strategic why with the goal to show you ways to drive efficiency and simplify global payroll operations. We'll start by sharing Workday's approach to bridging the gap between data and context you need to make informed decisions. Then we'll share how you can reimagine human and AI collaboration to drive efficiency with your payroll with our payroll agent. And then next we'll segue to highlighting our dedicated approach to simplify global payroll for the medium enterprise with an easier way for implementation and scale. And lastly, we'll wrap up with the latest on our ecosystem of trusted partners that help you stay compliant in over 180 countries without adding complexity. We all know that payroll is high stakes. There is no option to get payroll wrong or late and can be especially more critical for smaller payroll teams having to do more with less resources. Payroll is more than a back office function and 92% of leaders agree and recognize the strategic impact of payroll and the imperative to elevate payroll to be a strategic guide of workforce investment. However, the road to achieving strategic payroll isn't easy. Managing global payroll comes with unique challenges, some that the industry just can't shake. On average, an organization manages five payroll systems, five connections, five vendors, and data compatibility continues to be a challenge. The bridge between data compatibility, managing evolving complexity, and the ability to leverage real time insights quickly seems like an uphill feat and makes it hard to make confident decisions around workforce planning, managing costs, and global growth and scale. This is why we see the future of global payroll being all about data and context. The goal is to bridge this gap, making it seamless to bring data together to give you and the leaders you support clarity. Now this isn't about native Workday payrolls or partner payrolls. It's not about just adding new technology to your suite. It's about rethinking the way payroll works. It's about one experience, one source for data so you can make better insight driven decisions, embrace and apply AI, and drive new skills for a destination payroll team. Our global payroll strategy acknowledges the need for flexibility and prioritizes data with context. We understand that in order for payroll to even take advantage of AI, your data needs to be consistent in one place for you to view across your HR and payroll systems. And this is exactly where we've been investing. Bringing your global payroll data together with simplified buying experiences in collaboration with our partners for broader coverage and next next generation integrations regardless of your organization or employee size or where you do payroll. I also wanted to call out that at Rising this year we announced that the development of New Zealand payroll is underway. And core to this strategy is Global Payroll Connect. This is the next generation of global payroll integration with a unified global payroll solution that connects seamlessly with payroll providers by leveraging bidirectional APIs, enabling near real time data exchange between Workday and our global payroll partner network, powered with AI to enhance, automate, and suggest to simplify your global payroll experience all while giving you one place to view and manage payroll data across payrolls. Global Payroll Connect empowers global visibility with the Global Payroll Hub as your command center, enabling you to monitor payroll status across the globe, identifying errors, and taking action without leaving Workday. Visibility and context is key. Within the hub, you can instantly compare current and previous periods. For example, seeing a 1.61 increase in gross pay and immediately identifying exactly which employees drove that change. These examples are just a glimpse of the context in insights GPC surfaces, giving you a seamless end to end experience. And now that we've set the stage for global payroll, I'm gonna pass it over to my fellow workmate, Sherry, to take a deeper look into how we're reimagining this work with human AI collaboration with our Workday payroll agent. Sherry, take it away. Alright. Thanks, Taya. Okay. Let's go ahead and jump to the next slide. First of all, I wanna take a minute and wish everyone a wonderful new year. Hope everything is going as you expect. A little bit about myself. My name is Sherry Yarbrough, as Taya mentioned. And I've been with Workday actually twelve years today. So today is my anniversary, and I have been in the payroll space my entire career. So my time at Workday has been spent in the payroll product management space. I'm really excited to share with you today a little bit about what's going on in our native payroll offerings around the new payroll agent and imagining payroll with this human AI collaboration. So let's go ahead and jump into the why we are doing this. Well, we're doing it because in a survey that Taya actually probably already mentioned, we found that two days a week when talking to leaders of organizations across geographies, sizes, etcetera, that two days a week was really spent in just doing manual effort. 47% of the time they said that their payrolls were using manual processes. Okay? And then almost 90% of the time they were saying that the organization's payroll system was purely transactional. Right? And wasn't really adding value. So what did this leave us from a problem perspective? Well, if two days a week are manual, then the workers that are doing payroll aren't able to do more value added work. And when things are done manual in payroll, you know that that leaves us open to, other things like missed compliance issues, errors, rework. And because the systems were purely transactional, what we found was that what they said was that we weren't able to surface insights to help the organizations make strategic decisions. So that kind of is why we started down this path. So then the question was, in this world that we have with payroll and how we reimagine it with AI collaboration, we need to think incrementally differently about how we look at efficiency and accuracy and take a bigger leap into making changes. Basically, a different way of getting people paid. Now it's still payroll, but with better outcomes. We go from manual processing to processing in real time. We go from predictive or from start using predictive analytics to look at error validation. And all of this frees up time for the payroll professional. It increases accuracy. And the other thing that we know is that when payroll is accurate that all of the workers, their engagement within the organization is improved. And so where payroll seems like it's back office, this concept of being able to get payroll more accurate and be more efficient and add value really only increases engagement for the entire organization. Now, how do we do it? Well, we start with AgenTic AI built for payroll by payroll experts. So what does this really mean? It's purpose built. It's built in Workday with a purpose. It has end to end orchestration. And that means that when you're running payroll, it knows upstream, downstream, and across all the payroll processes. We know that we have are able to deal with unmatched scale, and we have unrivaled trust within the industry. And most importantly, when we build this AI agent, we built it with human in the loop design. So not trying to take over the role and automate the payroll practitioner professional, whatever nomenclature you choose, but it's really providing that person with tools and capabilities to be able to do their job much easier, much more efficient. So how are we doing it? Well, with our twenty sixth release coming up, we're gonna be adding skills. Now we call the payroll agent, think of that as the umbrella. When we think of skills, these are some of the skills that we are looking to add to our agent. So things around compliance, putting compliance front and center. Right? We know that everything in payroll you could call compliance. But when you put it front and center, it really does help be predictive as opposed to, dealing with it on the back end. Payroll insights. It's looking at the data and showing different ways to be able to get information quickly versus what we're used to doing. Right? Running reports, maybe taking those reports, massaging them and trying to figure out the information. And then lastly, this concept around pay input and how we can engage managers when they wanna do things to be able to do it themselves. And then also that takes into account making sure that they stay in the loop as well as the workers. So we'll talk a little bit about these three things as we move forward. Let's start with the minimum wage skill. Now, I mentioned earlier that I've been in payroll basically my entire career. And I know firsthand after running large payrolls, US, domestic, some payrolls in Europe, etcetera, that compliance is top of mind, and it's not the same from country to country. Right? We all know that. But for what I'm gonna show you here is I'm gonna show you something that we're doing compliance wise for The US just to give you a flavor on what it is we're delivering. This is basically the ability for a tool to go out and monitor the environment and look for changes in minimum wage. So it's proactively monitoring and it will then tell compensation and payroll that, hey, the minimum wage in a given state has changed, therefore allowing future business decisions to be made. So it's adding value back there because it's not after the fact, it's upfront. And it allows for the continuance of payroll to look at not just what's coming or what's been in the past, but making sure that the future of paying people is accurate. The last thing you want is a worker contacting you and saying that, hey, I don't think my pay was accurate because I'm not even making minimum wage. So saves time, increases accuracy, and potentially saves a lot of rework with these types of compliance changes. Again, compliance putting it first and foremost, as it relates to pay. Let's go into the payroll results skill. So the payroll results skill is where you can use, I'm gonna say natural data language as a payroll administrator. Right? Don't you love those Friday afternoons when you get contacted and they ask you for, hey, can you show me the difference between my payroll for 2024 and 2025 from a gross standpoint? Oh, and then show me the primary drivers as to why it's different. So we spend going through all of this analytics. We run reports. We do all this stuff to try to get to their answer. And we're still not sure because we're basically building a haystack of data and then trying to data mine and find that one golden piece of hay that's the answer to what they're asking for. With this, the power is at your fingertips. I simply go in and I ask the system, what is the difference between my gross pay in 2024 and 2025 and what are the main drivers? And it immediately comes back. So instead of searching for the needle in the haystack, it's delivered right there first and foremost to me right there. Now think of the power of this. So just take one of the pay groups that I have showing on this slide. And let's say somebody asks, can you tell me the amount of overtime in the last six months? And what are the main causes or what's the main locations where this overtime is happening? You'd be able to ask the system the same type of question and get a result pretty instantaneously, to be able to answer that question. So definitely adding value back to the organization. And again, this is only for payroll practitioners, right? This is not something that someone, any worker would be able to use. It's role based. Now let's look at our one off payment skills, and I mentioned this earlier. When we talk about this skill and you think about, say enterprises that are 500 to 1,500 employees, you're really probably doing more than just running pay. You might be helping with expense reports, you might be helping with purchasing invoices. There might be a lot of things that you are doing. So how can we help streamline your payroll portion of your job? Now, this concept of one off payment skills, think about it this way. How many times when you're in pay do you get an email? Do you get a phone call, a Slack, a text? Whatever that looks like that says, hey, I'd like to give someone a one off bonus. Or maybe I gave them a gift card and in the country that you're in that needs to be taxed. Well, this takes this away from the payroll practitioner having to enter it and it utilizes managers. So managers have the ability to have this conversation with the agent as well. So as a manager, I would go in and I would say, I'd like to give a bonus. And the system would come back and go, who would you like to give it to? And I would say Sherry Yarbrough as the manager. And the and the system would prompt then, okay. How much do you wanna give? And maybe it's $50. Maybe it was a gift card for 50 that I wanted to add. And so what happens then is the system says, okay. You wanna give $50 to Sherry Yarbrough. Is this what you wanna do? I say, yes. That's what I wanna do. I submit it. Now that request, the entry, the payment goes directly to payroll again, keeping payroll professionals in the loop. Payroll then has the ability based on your organizational policy to say, hey, you know what? Yeah. This is within policy. It's within a certain dollar limit. Within payroll, I approve that. Now that notification gets sent to the manager that, hey, payroll has approved. And the worker gets notified that says, hey, you're gonna be getting a onetime payment added to your payroll in the next pay cycle. So again, this increases the accuracy because the entry is being done right there, so no potential manual error input. And it also increases capability within payroll to allow more value added work to be done versus having to get all this information off of the various sources to be able to do this data entry. Again, all of this is using conversational capability within the payroll agent. So with that, I'm gonna leave you with this quote from Panera Bread. And it's basically the payroll agent reduces manual processes, drives compliance, and easily assists with data insights. Going back to the problems that I first showed and how we are helping to move the needle on those problems for organizations. It's an exciting time within payroll. How we reimagine payroll is going to be very big, especially when we think of reimagining with the payroll practitioner in the forefront of the design. With that, I'm gonna pass this over to my colleague Leon to take you through the next portion of the webinar. Leon? Thank you very much, Sherry, and love the fact about thinking of the payroll practitioner. I think that's going to be core of what we're going to talk about here. Similarly to to Sherry, my background is in payroll as well. I am very excited to be here today and to talk more about how we're going to think about the payroll practitioner, specifically also when we look at the medium enterprise. From that, we, as Workday, have made a significant amount of investments to really elevating the experience of what shared described of, let's say, the the split load of many of our payroll practitioners that we find for smaller organizations as well that often juggle between both the HR, the expenses side, and many other tasks besides the payroll side and how we're trying to elevate that experience. Similarly, there's there are other struggles that these organizations go through, and those are parts that we also want to go through as well. So having said that, one of the parts that I would love to start off with a little bit here is really going over to saying, hey, what are the problem sets of what each and every single one of those organizations currently struggles with? As we go through it here, what you're able to see is a little bit, let's say, the day to day mix that might seem all too familiar for you already in what you experience on a day to day basis. On the left hand side, if we go through it, there's often the component of what we have, let's say, received with our if you're in the situation that you currently don't use our native payroll offering, that often the payroll that is used at core does not scale with the business. So if you're here in The US and you're looking to grow out your business, part of that is also being able to build in building in scalable processes that grow as your organization does with you. Not doing so often causes data issues and then affects not only those that process the payroll, but the employees receiving that on the back end side of it. If we go to the middle one, and let's say we expand beyond The US, there's also another major struggle that we have beyond North America, which is looking for those organizations that are also present internationally. Too often, there's zero visibility that's granted to each and every single one of those local payrolls. What does that look like? Well, if we look at it, there's often, let's say, a decentralized system that's detached somewhere that sits at a local level. There is not often the flow between the HCM or the pay the the people platform downstream into payroll. There's zero insights into what, let's say, the the pro the people that are processing it and ultimately leaving you with inefficient processes that depend on the person that you have in every single country. Lastly, if we look at the right hand side, there's the additional struggle that is increasingly becoming a familiarity as well to many of you is that besides managing a lot of these, let's say, low cost smaller payrolls, there's also the struggle around being able or be having the struggle that there's the next talent that might not be sitting around the corner or not where you have your entities today. So it's finding solutions where you are able to bring that forward, not once, not twice, but having a scalable process that helps you grow alongside of that. Now let me let me give you a little bit of an overview of how we make plan to make that easier for you. We are launching for our medium enterprise our Go global payroll offering. This helps you to grow without limits. How do we do that? Well, at the very core on the left hand side, as Sherry already explained, We have the most flexible native payroll solution out there already across The US, Canada, and many of the other countries that we're present in today. That helps you having a core process sitting within Workday directly that helps you manage every single aspect in it and also focus about making sure that, let's say, regardless of whether you're 4,400, or 4,000 people tomorrow, just go and scale along with your native payroll solution. For all other countries, and if we're looking at the component of how to manage these countries today, we're making it available to customers and prospects alike that you are able to take advantage of our managed payroll offering. This means that we're looking in to say, how can we make it easier for you to manage those, let's say, long we we often, in the payroll world, call them the long tail countries of having many smaller populations dispersed around many countries globally and with giving you the ability to access them and control them exactly in the same way as if we're looking at these larger countries that you might be more familiar with already. So it's driving the integration side. And as a very last pillar, it is expanding the ability for you to also go through it in our expanded partnership with Remote to also go through it of saying, hey. With Remote's employer record offering, we're able to expand and enhance our offering by giving you, at the fingertips, the availability to hire people via an employer record via them directly in 90 plus countries within a matter of two to three days. Conjunctly, those three pillars deliver the most flexible solution when it comes to looking at the payroll side by making sure that you go through step by step. Now, what does that look like? If we look at, let's say, the component, we really start with Workday as the core global system record that becomes the central place of storage where every single employee is locked. Master data, pay changes, variable parts, everything flows in via Workday and then flows downstream into each and every single one of those options. If we look, for example, at an organization that might be leveraging US native payroll, it would be going through it of saying the master data feeds from Workday into native payroll and makes you as an organization more efficient in your core. If we're looking at the managed payroll sites for your satellite offices, which is the majority of what we're trying to intend here, is to go over it and say that data feeds from Workday seamlessly via our Global Payroll Connect integration into the downstream managed payrolls offering itself as well. Via Global Payroll Hub, you're able to access the full overview. We'll see that in a minute of what that looks like as well, but that gives you the unique ability to control the current status, insights, and analytics across web across each and every single one of those solutions. So rather whether you are using a managed payroll solution in Germany tomorrow, a native payroll offering in The US, or a managed payroll solution for for Costa Rica, All of those ones can be combined, and we're able to pull all of these ones together. So that drives simplicity at your edge via the managed payroll offering. Lastly, we also have the ability to add the employee record component. So from that, that gives you the agility to test out new markets, to hire new candidates regardless of where they're based, without needing to build the full out infrastructure for those countries as you go along. That gives you the ability to scale within days to new countries as you move along and making sure you are able to answer that question over and over again. If we now look at it, I'd like to show you a little bit of what the Global Payroll Hub functionality is going to look like. In the middle of what you're able to see here is basically your day to day call. Global Payroll Connect enables the functionality to pulling in the managed payroll offering directly via the Global Payroll Hub. So as you can see here in the central piece already, you are able to see the various countries with the run type, the period end date, when it's foreseen that you're going to have to pay out to employees, what the current processing status is, and what next action item needs to be done. Similarly, as we can see with the examples here for Germany, if there are errors that are occurring, what that basically enables you to do is to directly have that visibility in one central overview without needing to log into hundreds of different systems, all depending on many of these local tax advisers or admins that you might be depending on today. That gives you simplified HR and payroll combined and reducing significantly the complexity. In a minute, you'll be seeing a little bit of what that's going to look like when we talk about our managed payroll offering for the satellite countries. But what we'll talk about afterwards slightly very briefly as well is the Global Payroll Connect functionality that underlines it and what that means for every single employee. So having said that, let me expand further and try to activate this component. One second. I think just give me two seconds to activate the video. One second. Sorry. I'm just trying to I'm just trying to to go through it. So just give me two seconds, and I'm just going to because it's it's my completely my fault that I'm looking at trying to share it here. So I'm just gonna have to reshare my own screen, and, hopefully, that should work in a second. So screen share. It seems that not everybody was able to hear the volume from that perspective, so I apologize for that. But really, what we're trying to showcase here is an admin view of where we went over it to showcase an admin experience of what that looks like as we go through it. So what that means is as an admin, as you're able to log in to remote, what you're able to see through is going over, let's say, that global payroll hub experience here. For that satellite, let's say, managed payroll offering, our component is that we're partnering with remote to deliver that experience. For that, their integrated offering is seamlessly integrated to what we do from a Workday perspective. And as we click through the component of processing a payroll, what you are able to see is the admin over hub, which showcases the compliance features, tracking each and every single one of those regulatory changes as you have to go through as they are applicable for you in that local country. There's an experience that currently was mainly limited to large enterprise customers that were able to bring in those types of experiences for larger entities, and most of these smaller ones were prone to having local admins managing those ones. With this embedded partnership with remote, we're bringing this ability and compliance overview to organizations at the smallest of sizes across 70 plus countries by by mid of this year. When we go through that, the part that excites me around it is really, let's say, that seamless ability to deliver that end to end process, and rather than depending on managing spreadsheets and other components to tracking local payroll data, we're able to now unite that in Workday. So having said that, one of the parts that I briefly wanted to touch upon again is really just, let's say, as some of you may already be familiar with, our Global Payroll Connect technology, which sits at the heart of making that possible. So in that component of our managed payroll offering, we will see a fully GPC certified offer, which means that each and every single one of these five pillars is available for our Go Global Payroll managed payroll offering. It means that if we go through it, the global payroll hub becomes the central place of where people are able to interact with with with their individual payroll and across each and every single one of those countries. It is the central place for analytics, process status, and every single sub overview in itself. The second pillar, which is equally exciting, is additional payroll data. For this, we're able to expand our master template to give the ability for each and every single one of those countries to also track local required fields directly within a Workday UX and UI for both employees and managers to self manage, if desired, in Workday directly itself. What that could look like, and using the example of Australia, could be that if you're using native payroll in The US, but you decide for a managed payroll solution in Australia, what you would be able to do is to track the superannuation addendum that every single employee needs to track in Australia directly within Workday and unite that functionality of having local payroll experience and what is required on a global scale in one unique platform, and that being Workday, all enabled by the additional payroll data. The third pillar, and equally important, is going through let's say, we we talked a lot about the payroll practitioner. As we talk about it, data changes on demand is what drives that practitioner experience. It means that data can be quoted and retrieved directly between the payroll system and Workday alike, resulting in a seamless process. So going back to using Sherry as an example here, that if we were to make a change in Sherry's salary, we would be able to say, hey. That change is processed, and it directly pulls through onto the payroll side itself. Equally, if I were a new starter, then I could go through it. If, for example, my bank account data is still missing, then that is directly flagged on the back end side, then I can go back into Workday to correcting that information piece, and it feeds downstream into the payroll process just alike and results in a seamless experience to manage across both platforms. Lastly, and those are equally important, is the employee experience. We talked about the payroll practitioner, but what does it look like for the for the employee itself? If we look at the employee, the main part that I want to understand is does my payroll work? Am I getting paid at the end of the month? That is the single biggest trigger for me as an employee to interact with the payroll site. So with that particular, what we're able to offer with this component directly is via XPD, pay slips, tax documents, and payroll related documents can be directly uploaded into Workday and made available to those employees directly to retrieve that data themselves. Lastly, we also have the results feature, Being able to compare those results, pulling them in, comparing actual costs versus budgets, but also giving employees the ability to monitor and track what pay looks like from a month to month perspective rather than just in a PDF but also in a data field, you're able to pull in these data features directly themselves. Together, those five features really go through it as well. Let's go through it, and I'm just going to see whether we can try once more to showcase the experience to see whether we're able to hear the video with sound this time. So with that, in the background, I'm just going to see whether that's going to work. With Workday Go global payroll, customers can easily access all their multi country payrolls in one hub. The global compliance hub monitors global legal and regulatory changes that may impact your work force. These changes are monitored with the assistance of AI and verified by Remote's global team of in country experts. You get global compliance insights at your fingertips with remote AI available through Workday Agent system of record. Easy to deploy global payroll. Implementation is made easy with AI powered agentic flows to migrate from your old payroll provider to Workday Go. Now all employees are uploaded directly into Workday Go with their payroll details in the system. Fantastic. It seems that we were now able to watch it. From that perspective, I think what excites me the most about it is we go over it, and what you're able to see is as a very last one, coming from the payroll world, is how easy it is to pull these employee data in. So when we go through it and deploying this now also means that you are able to go through it directly and are able to see how quickly an employee or new entities can be added by directly having those fields validated, mapped accordingly to what they are required for the local payroll itself to be used. Now, we've teased a lot about it already, but really what we wanted to talk about and touch base upon very briefly here is going over our new partnerships component. If we look at the partnership side, what we're trying to do is simplify what that is going to look like as we expand, as we go along. Primarily, as you can see in here, is we're going to have multinational organizations have the ability to manage their international payroll site via our embedded payroll partnership with Remote. That is also applicable for our existing partnership that we have for OneSource Virtual, as well as ShapeN's Data Connector, which is particularly prone to German customers as we go along, as well as the ability to tapping into our existing global payroll network beyond those sizes as well, that if you are looking to have the Global Payroll Connect experience and have larger entities as well, where there's also the full availability of our existing global payroll network. With that, what we're trying to do is really simplify the component of saying any small entities, any of the international workforce, we can manage via our embedded partnership together with remote here, as well as making sure that every single one is delivered by the most flexible integration that's out there, which is our Global Payroll Connect certifier. With that, we've had a ton of these inputs already. You've seen a lot around, let's say, our native payroll. You've seen a lot around our latest innovations around the medium enterprise. And if you'd like to learn more in any of these components, there's a couple of parts that we could help for. One, on the left hand side, if you're not yet a Workday customer and want to have more information on how to manage your international entities on payroll, or two, if you're already a Workday customer and want more information on how to manage payroll for your international entities. So on the right hand side, you you'll be able to see that there are, let's say, two options. So if you would like us to reach out to you directly to understand more around it, then please click one of select one of the options and hit submit, and then we'll make sure to get in touch with you. With that, I'm just going to hand over once more to my colleague, Sherry. Sorry. I'm Taya. Taya, Sherry. Hi, everyone. Yeah, so thank you for your time today. We don't have any what I can see is any outstanding questions in the Q and A. But if there's anything that comes up later, please reach out to us and let us know, or make sure to submit the poll question so we can answer your questions. I think that is all for today. Thank you all.