Press

What a difference a year makes. Last year, European companies were still mainly concerned with operational HR tasks: payroll calculation and payment, and HR service to employees were seen as their main challenges. This year, the focus is more than ever on people. Employers, from Spain to the Nordics, consider staff welfare and resilience their number one HR challenge for the coming years. Next in line: employee experience and engagement. “The Covid pandemic has had a serious impact on how we organise our work. It is no coincidence that businesses are investing more time and efforts in their most important assets: the people. Businesses care for their people, more than ever, and that’s their main challenge for next year”, says Cathy Geerts, Chief HR Officer at SD Worx, a leading European HR and payroll services provider.

Payroll outsourcing is on the rise all across Europe. That’s one of the main conclusions from a large-scale employer survey conducted by SD Worx, a leading European HR and payroll services provider. Today, a whopping 6 in 10 European companies contract or consider contracting an outsourcing partner to (partially) take care of their payroll. Belgium leads the way: only 27% of Belgian companies are prepared to completely manage their own payroll themselves. The fast-changing business environment and complex legislation lay at the root of this trend.

SD Worx has sold ASPEX to Trustteam, a Belgian IT partner for SMEs. Aspex has been helping clients migrate their systems to the cloud for over fifteen years. It is particularly specialised in the public cloud, to which more and more companies are turning in order to keep their ever-increasing amounts of data safe. ASPEX's core business has little to do with that of SD Worx and in Trustteam we have found a partner who can further expand the scale of ASPEX.

A European employer survey conducted by the leading European HR and payroll services provider SD Worx shows that HR digitalisation is primarily aimed at making HR’s life easier, but not so much that of employees. To illustrate: digital maturity has been mainly achieved for highly transactional processes, while management systems far outweigh more employee-focused tools such as self-service systems, employee experience platforms and digital assistants. Meanwhile, HR tech providers try to turn the tide to meet the employees’ cry for help.

A survey conducted by HR and payroll specialist SD Worx across companies in eight European countries shows that one in four companies have little or no insight into their HRM and personnel costs, while almost three in ten companies monitor staff efficiency very little or not at all. In other words, there is still quite a lot left to do to map out – and refine if needed – a large number of companies' human resources.

SD Worx, a leading European HR & payroll services provider, continues to grow and opens an office in Milan, Italy. This move strengthens the firm’s presence in Southern Europe, after announcing in early July that it will also provide payroll and HR services in Spain and Portugal.