How Collaborative HR and Finance Leaders Can Unlock Lasting Business Value
There’s a simple solution to success, and it hardly matters what line of work you’re in.
It’s the key to a sports team winning a championship. It’s the core element in a band’s rise to fame. It’s the driving force behind a company’s triumph over its competitors.
What’s the trick? It’s collaboration.
In the business world, it’s crucial that professionals from different departments come together and lend their unique talents and perspectives to creating value for their companies. Human resources and finance leaders who unite can have a particularly profound impact.
Three game-changing ways teamwork generates results
Henry heads the HR department at a small textiles business in Pittsburgh. Francine is the company’s finance leader. By leveraging the right technology and working side by side, the pair can help the firm:
1. Gain better data visibility to improve strategic decision making: Henry and Francine may not have a ton in common, but one thing they do share is poor company-wide insight. And they’re not alone. Nearly a quarter of all finance leaders cite a lack of visibility into company spending as their biggest challenge. (1)
This inability to see what’s going on within the company prevents HR and finance executives from making strategic decisions designed to control costs and uncover lucrative business opportunities. For instance, with better data visibility, Henry and Francine can collaboratively find new ways to keep employee expenses low while hiring enough staff to fulfill a massive order.
2. Simplify workflows to increase employee engagement and productivity: Too many HR and finance employees are mired in manual processes. They waste hours of their time completing tedious administrative tasks when they could be focusing on strategic, revenue-generating activities. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. According to recent McKinsey & Company research, 50% of the work employees currently perform manually can be automated. (2)
By jointly deciding to deploy powerful human capital management (HCM) and spend management solutions, Henry and Francine can automate their processes to simplify workflows and optimize staff performance. For Francine’s finance team, automation helps eliminate costly errors during invoice processing. Henry’s HR team, meanwhile, can reduce the burden of time-consuming data-entry payroll tasks by automating. And on top of freeing up staff to lend their talents to growing the company’s bottom line, Henry and Francine can create more fulfilling and rewarding workplace experiences that keep staff motivated and engaged.
3. Stay flexible to meet and exceed revenue and growth goals: The business world is anything but predictable. Constant changes in the economy and the labor force require companies to stay agile to compete. As an HR leader, Henry must ensure his team can attract and retain exceptional employees that help spur sustainable business growth, even in the face of talent shortages. And Francine needs to guarantee her finance team can mitigate risk and pave the way for a more prosperous future, even during economic downturns.
By embracing scalable HCM and spend management technology, Henry and Francine can do exactly that. They can make sure they have the right staff in place to guide the business forward and the financial wherewithal to seize potentially rewarding business opportunities. And by combining their efforts, they can align their respective HR and financial strategies with the company’s overall business objectives to fuel the organization’s rise. In fact, 41% of finance and HR leaders who collaborate have experienced a 10% EBITDA growth. (3)
Build a productive partnership between HR and finance
When HR and finance leaders like Henry and Francine are on the same page, businesses can excel like never before. From lowering company costs to boosting employee productivity to climbing to the top of a particular industry, anything is possible.
To learn more about unlocking lasting business value by strengthening the connection between HR and finance, view our infographic, HR and Finance Leaders Who Work Together Win Together.
by SAP Concur and ADP
1 How Finance Leadership Pays Off: Six Ways CFOs Stay Ahead of the Pack, Oxford Economics, 2017
2 A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity, McKinsey&Company, 2017
3 Partnering for Performance – Part 2: The CFO and HR, EY, 2014