Picture this: Margaret, your company's payroll manager for 28 years, announces her retirement. She's the one who knows exactly why certain employees get that mysterious quarterly adjustment, how to navigate the labyrinthine state tax codes for your multi-location business, and which vendor relationships took years to cultivate. In three weeks, she'll be gone—and with her, nearly three decades of hard-earned expertise that no manual or system documentation could ever capture. 

Margaret's story isn't unique. Across organisations worldwide, a seismic shift is reshaping the HR and payroll landscape as baby boomers retire at a rate of 10,000 a day, taking with them an irreplaceable treasury of institutional knowledge, relationship dynamics, and battle-tested problem-solving approaches that can't be easily transferred through a handover document. 

In today’s competitive talent landscape, work-life balance is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic priority. At SD Worx, we’ve made it part of our DNA, not only to attract and retain top talent, but to foster a culture where people thrive. Here are five practical ways organisations can support work-life balance, with examples from our own journey.

What happens if we keep treating sustainability as someone else’s job? What if short-term wins come at the cost of long-term well-being, equity or adaptability? And what happens if your people outgrow the systems around them? 

AI won’t replace HR, but HR that doesn’t evolve is quietly slipping out of relevance. It’s a reality many leaders are slowly waking up to. We’re entering a new chapter in how people and performance intersect, shaped by intelligent systems, changing expectations and more fluid ways of working.  

Flexible working has shifted from fringe benefit to business norm. Yet many organisations are still stuck in reactive mode, tweaking policies or reverting to old defaults instead of leaning into the change and leveraging it.  

At work with Europe.

Explore the biggest workplace shifts from Europe’s largest annual HR study, including what employees and HR leaders really think about careers, trust, payroll and sustainability. 

The research involved 16,000 employees and 5,625 HR decision makers from 16 European countries. 

If you ask employees how they feel about their pay, you’ll rarely hear: “It’s perfect.”  

And that’s not surprising. In organisations across Europe, most people believe they’re underpaid, even when their salary is above the market rate. And while pay rises can create a short-lived sense of progress, the satisfaction often fades fast. So the real question is: can pay actually motivate people, and if so, how? 

Today’s digital world moves fast. Keeping up – and pushing ahead – means choosing the right applications for your business and using them properly to stay competitive and keep your customers happy. However, the challenge of managing these applications effectively turns many business owners away. Luckily, we have Application Maintenance Services (AMS) to make sense of the chaos. 

How SD Worx SAP Solutions' integrated system renders Belgium's emergency telecom provider futureproof.

Discover how Deplasse & Associés, now part of ALTEO Group, transformed from technical excellence to human connection, where values, vision, and people thrive.

Discover how smart HR teams simplify global compliance with insights from Chris Blinkhorne, head of international compliance & governance at SD Worx.