If HR’s in a Silo, So Are You

A conversation with Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

When companies talk about scaling, they usually start with sales. But behind every growth curve is a people problem—hiring faster than you can onboard, managing teams across locations, and trying to lead culture from a spreadsheet.

Ancel Draai sees this play out daily. As Senior Director of Growth for Human Resource & Payroll Services at Sage (UKIA), he works with businesses that are growing fast—and sometimes painfully. He’s seen how admin-heavy HR systems slow things down, how disconnected tools lead to rework, and why strategic HR isn’t a “nice to have” when you’re trying to scale with intention.

In this conversation, he unpacks what’s changing in HR and payroll, what still holds companies back, and how the right systems can help teams do more than just keep up.

Upgrading HR for Business Growth

How can an HR system become a lever for growth—not just a place to store data—and what upgrades actually improve the employee experience?

Ancel Draai:
Very good question. When it comes to growth, that means that you’re thinking ahead, thinking about the future of your organization and how you can be advanced, far more advanced to the current situation that you find yourself in.

Now, we all know that with legacy payroll and HR systems, they’re quite heavy from an administrative perspective. So we’re putting a lot of data into the system where the employee’s name, master file information, address, et cetera, is getting put into the systems, and we’re not getting a lot of information out.

So why do I say think about what you need to do, what changes you need to put in place when it comes to growth? Is that with HR systems, more advanced HR systems, look at ways that we can automate functions within the application itself. So when I talk about automation, I’m talking about workflows—that we’re removing the manual processes that come into play with the HR systems of the past, where we hand wrote a note for leave, where we used manual signatures. We now have access to e-signatures. We now have automated workflows for approvals within the systems. We now have the capability to integrate various HR systems to finance systems, to payroll systems, to time and attendance applications.

And the whole goal is to make certain that solutions that we have from an HR perspective can be used strategically and to help us make informed decisions as to the way we want to grow our organization and instead of having it stagnate in the current situation we find ourselves in.

And with having great HR solutions, we are able to use those solutions to get great analytics from there, because if we understand where we are today, we have a better understanding of where we want to be within the future. There’s no guesswork with regard to that. So we can then create a trajectory for ourselves into the future based on a greater understanding through analytics within an HR system—that this is where we are, and now we know where we need to be.

The tools that are available in your HR systems is generally things like employee self-service. One of the things that the modern employee is looking for is a better type of engagement with the organization. And that generally happens through things like employee self-service.

So on employee self-service application, I am able to apply for leave, for example. I’m able to access my payslip. I’m able to apply for training. I’m able to access any of the policies of the organization. I’m able to see what the org structure looks like. So this gives me a lot more information than what we were able to get before.

So when we talk about growth, we need to talk about what is available and how are we implementing that, and how are we using that effectively to ensure that the organization and the employees within the organization have a far better experience than what they had in the past.

“The whole goal is to make certain that solutions from an HR perspective can be used strategically—and to help us make informed decisions as to the way we want to grow our organization.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

Solving Disconnects Between HR, Payroll, and Finance

How do siloed HR, payroll, and finance systems hurt performance—and what would you say to a company that’s still dealing with duplicate entries, miscommunication, or missed handoffs?

Ancel Draai:
So siloed systems has always been a challenge within organizations. I mean, HR and payroll was always seen as two different departments, and HR has always felt that payroll is sitting in the finance space and that payroll is not part of HR, and vice versa.

Now, that created a lot of challenges because generally, within organizations, you’d find that people will start working within an organization. They would submit their documents for onboarding, and the HR system will keep that data. The same person would then submit those same documents to payroll. That creates duplication. That also creates a whole lot of issues around data security. Where is your information stored? Who’s got access to that information? Is there an audit trail for that information?

So the challenge with having siloed systems is that you’re duplicating effort, you’re duplicating work, and the likelihood of errors increases significantly.

But if we can have one consolidated solution where we have a system that takes care of your HR data, takes care of your payroll data, allows for one single entry of information, then we are removing a lot of that risk. And not only are we removing that risk, but we’re becoming far more efficient as organizations in that we’re spending time on strategic things instead of duplicating work that has already been done.

It also gives us a central point of reporting where we can report holistically from an HR and payroll perspective and say, “This is where we are today, and this is how we want to grow our workforce.” And we have one system of record that provides us with that information. It helps us to remain compliant. It helps us to be far more efficient as organizations. And the time to produce any kind of reports becomes far shorter. The time to respond to any kind of request becomes far shorter because we have a system of record and we have a single version of the truth. And that’s what a consolidated HR and payroll system does for any organization.

“The likelihood of errors increases significantly when you’re duplicating effort—so let’s rather spend time on strategic things instead of repeating work that’s already been done.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

Scaling Beyond Spreadsheets

Why do spreadsheets eventually create more risk than value—and what advice would you give a team trying to move to a cloud-based payroll system that actually scales?

Ancel Draai:
So in the market, there’s still today many companies that are using Excel for various things. I’ll focus on payroll in this instance. There’s some guys who are really good at Excel and have created a payroll system from Excel. The emphasis is around their skills in Excel, not their skills in compliance.

So the dependency on the accuracy of the calculations from a tax perspective is dependent on the end user, the company itself. And that’s a massive risk to that organization, because even though the Excel spreadsheet may look perfect, if compliance doesn’t add up—so tax, your UIF, your skills—if that does not add up based on your taxable income and tax deductible deductions, there can be serious consequences that come into play.

So why put yourself in that risk? There are so many solutions out there, and most companies are gravitating towards cloud-based solutions. And the ones we use is, say, Trend People MCS or Paraprofessional. And in there, your systems are going to be one hundred percent correct from a compliance perspective.

The other is from a hybrid perspective where a lot of companies are working both at home and at the office. As you can see, I’m at home right now. This is my office. We can access that kind of information from anywhere, and that gives us that flexibility to be able to do so without having to actually go to the source where the data actually is, like in the olden days.

There is, from a data protection perspective as well, these cloud applications on highly secure data servers. We’ve seen it and I’ve seen it in the past where, recent past, where very small businesses have been hit by ransomware. And in the process has lost all their data. And some of those companies have actually ended up having to pay the hacker to get all their data back.

And by putting this into trusted cloud-based providers that we use as well, you’re able to have access to that information and take away the risk to your organization from a security perspective as well.

“The emphasis is around their skills in Excel, not their skills in compliance.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

Turning Dashboards into Better Decisions

What does shared, real-time reporting actually change for HR and finance teams—and what advice would you give to someone trying to get better collaboration from both sides?

Ancel Draai:
Dashboards has actually become a real buzzword in both finance as well as on the HR side, having instant access to information.

So in the past, most leaders or executives within businesses would have to wait on someone in a department, a financial manager or payroll manager at the end of month to give them print out a report, give them a paper, and they could have a look at that information and analyze the information in a very mundane way.

With the use of dashboards, what happens is that I now have instant access to the information within my company, whether it be finance information, whether it be payroll information in real time.

I’m not waiting till the end of the month once we’ve done everything and all the checks and balances have been put in place. And then once we’ve massaged the information a little because of all the silos that we have within our organization, I get a report and hope that the information is correct.

With dashboards, we now have the ability to go in and see what the truth is within our organization in real time.

And it helps in terms of making decisions a lot quicker for companies to be far more proactive rather than reactive.

“We now have the ability to go in and see what the truth is within our organization in real time.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

And also it drives collaboration within the organization as well, because we can see that the version of the truth—what that truly is—in real time.

And it’s important that from a costing perspective, even if we look on payroll, that we want to and many companies have gone down this route where they want to segment their biggest cost, which is payroll, into various revenue streams within the organization.

And we can see that profitability per revenue stream in real time with the use of dashboards.

And it is a game changer for the current scenario that a lot of companies find themselves in and for the future of most organizations.

Knowing When It’s Time to Outsource

How can a business tell when it’s time to stop hiring and start outsourcing payroll—and what advice would you give someone weighing the cost, risk, and long-term benefit of both options?

Ancel Draai:
So when it comes to outsourcing, you have to weigh up certain factors as to whether we insource or whether we outsource and whether it’s practical or not to do outsourcing or whether it’s practical to bring it in-house.

So there are a couple of things that a lot of companies look at. One would be if they’re a multinational, and there’s certain complexity that comes in, especially from a compliance perspective, as you move from one country to the next. If you’re in the States, possibly it could be one state to the next. And it gets really complicated.

And this complexity really came in during and after COVID, where people started working remotely. And we’ve advanced in the tools with things like Teams, Zoom, et cetera, in terms of the way we work in the current and for the future.

And in South Africa alone, there’s probably more than eighty percent of companies that have a hybrid approach to work. So when it came to outsourcing, companies thinking that actually this potentially is a better option for us because a large part of our staff is now situated in different countries.

So they’ve decided that because of the complexity that comes with payroll, they’d rather outsource the payroll from that perspective.

Also where outsourcing becomes more than just a nice to have is where the current resources they have in place is continuously making errors. Now with outsourcing service providers and most that I work with and we have internally as well, um you you’re dealing with specialists—people who have been in the industry for years and years, sometimes a decade, sometimes two decades—they’ve been in the industry working on payroll, really understanding the nuances of payroll.

“Companies think that from a risk perspective, it makes far more sense to outsource our payroll rather than keep that in-house.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

So companies think that from a risk perspective it makes far more sense to outsource our payroll rather than keep that in-house because the risk is then mitigated by shifting some of that to specialists within that field rather than a generalist that we currently have.

And also, as companies evolve and also evolve in the way they remunerate employees, they decide to maybe look at outsourcing because there are certain complexities, certain nuances that they’re driving for from a performance perspective that the employee’s remuneration is based on certain factors and nuances based on performance that needs to be automated within the payroll.

And that could be potentially too complicated for the resources they have internally. And it makes them business sense to bring that inside and have outsourcing done because of the fact that the complexity that exists in the way they want to grow the organization maybe just be a step too far for the resources they have internally.

So companies have to look at the cost of potentially outsourcing. And sometimes it is more expensive to outsource. In some cases, it’s not. For a smaller organization, it could be that to outsource the payroll, it’s going to cost them a few thousand rand. And it’s far cheaper than actually having somebody internal that will cost a few tens of thousands of rands. So it makes sense for them to then outsource their payroll.

So having a look at the cost, the risks associated internally—some large organizations have found themselves having ghost employees in their payroll because they just didn’t have the capability to manage the volumes of employees accurately. And that’s where they decided to outsource their payroll as well.

And if you also have a situation where payroll people come and go, come and go, it does bring a massive risk to your business as well. So outsourcing, you know it’s going to be steady. The processes that they have in there is well designed. It’s thoroughly researched. They assist you in guiding you in terms of processing, et cetera.

It does take a lot of the risk away from your organization to make certain that if you have this rolling door of payroll administrators coming and going, that’s a massive risk to your organization and it would make sense then to outsource.

Managing Payroll Across Hybrid and Remote Teams

What makes hybrid and remote payroll setups so vulnerable to compliance issues—and what advice would you give a team trying to track time, tax, and reporting accurately across locations?

Ancel Draai:
Yeah, so there’s multiple systems out there that can track time where employees can log into their computer and begin working. And this tool then tracks the time for a particular employee’s remuneration because that tracker then integrates into a payroll system.

There’s also risk when it comes to multi locations and remote work as well because of those multi locations. And it’s important to make certain that people are actually working and they’re being remunerated based on the work that they’re doing.

So going across various countries, the tax is going to change from one country to the other and making sure that you don’t put your business at risk.

“It’s important to partner with local experts to make certain that you adhere to the compliance within that particular region.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

Again, as I mentioned earlier, you could outsource your payroll and mitigate that risk. You could look at other avenues as well in terms of finding labor companies within those areas as well, those EORs that are able to do that.

And it’s important to partner with local experts as well to make certain that you adhere to the compliance within that particular region.

There are companies that obviously go a different route where they want to keep everything internal. So it’s important to have solutions that are able to cater to that. So various countries so that it gives you the outputs, the legislation, the reporting that is required for that particular country, within that particular application as well.

And with SAJA, the people that we use, it caters to almost every country within the African Middle East region. And it has the capability where we can actually configure the legislation within there as well to de-risk an organization when it comes to compliance.

Keeping Payroll Steady Through Team Changes

What happens when a payroll lead leaves—and how does outsourcing provide a more stable alternative to patching the gaps internally?

Ancel Draai:
So when a payroll lead leaves an organization, there’s always a jumpy feeling within the organization because that person was responsible for the happiness of the whole organization, making sure that people are paid on time.

And getting someone to be replaced isn’t always easy because the person you’re replacing—there is risk because they may not know the processes that the organization currently has in place. So there is some risk with regard to that. And a lot of companies then tend to think about potentially outsourcing.

“There’s always a jumpy feeling when your payroll lead leaves—because that person was responsible for the happiness of the whole organization.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

And again, with outsourcing, you will generally have a highly skilled resource on that end. And do your homework. Make certain that that company does have highly skilled resources and they are not just doing payroll outsourcing because it is a term used and we need to seize the moment.

So it is very, very important to make certain that they have highly skilled resource that can understand what your processes are and also maybe see how they can improve upon the process that you currently have. And in doing so, they bring stability to the payroll side and that there’s a seamless move from the situation you find yourself in, where somebody leaves—a payroll lead leaves the organization—to where things come into place thereafter.

So it is important to do those kind of investigations, although a lot of companies do look at ways to incentivize people for staying, because they play quite a crucial role to the smooth running of the organization.

But it is also important to have a look at where your key man dependencies are within your organization. And if somebody is a key man, you need to know that that is a risk and make certain that you are able to find a way—whether it’s through outsourcing or whether it is having someone in a different department, let’s say finance works closely with payroll or HR works closely with payroll—that someone in HR is able to step into that place, whether it be temporarily or permanently.

But you make sure that your organization is far less at risk should someone key to that company leave the organization.

Moving HR from Admin to Strategic Impact

Why do legacy systems stop HR from leading real change—and what features would you recommend to teams who want to move beyond admin and focus more on people?

Ancel Draai:
So at TydeCo™, we are constantly looking for ways to do things better—and how we can bring HR into our organization to play a more strategic role in the way we see and foresee our organization’s growth.

In the past—and in many cases for companies in the present as well—HR is generally a place where a lot of administration goes. Whether it be employee records get stored, disciplinary actions gets done… all of that information, very transactional information, is handled by HR.

“Most employees don’t leave for pay—they leave because they don’t feel part of the company. And that’s where HR can lead real change.”

Ancel Draai, Senior Director, Growth – HRP (Human Resource & Payroll Services), UKIA

And we don’t use that strategically to make any decisions within our organization. It’s almost like we need an HR department to plug a gap for when we actually need that.

For most people studying HR, they tend to not want to do that. That wasn’t the goal when they went into the field. They wanted to make a difference within the organization they entered—not to just be a pen-pusher or data capturer, which in many cases it still is.

They wanted more influence. Influence in how we grow the organization. How we retain talent. How we attract talent within our organization.

The focus tends to change when it comes to growth. A lot of times we focus on making sure we have multiple sales… but we need the right people to make those sales happen. We need to make certain that morale is high. And at TydeCo™, we’ve seen it—everyone understands that for us to grow, each person has to play their part.

If I sell software and the person is happy with the software I sold, we understand that for them to stay with us, our implementation team needs to deliver. And then our credit control team, when they follow up for renewals, it’s a seamless process—because the client is happy.

So there’s this commonality that needs to happen within the organization. And it’s generally driven from an HR perspective.

When our systems can give us real information—automated, not just manual inputs—it changes the way our employees engage with the business. The way they access information. The way they provide information.

And the more included they feel, the better it is for the organization.

Because the truth is—most employees don’t leave because of pay. They leave because they don’t feel part of it. And this is where HR can be far more strategic. Strategic to how we run. How we grow. How we retain and attract the right people.

That’s what we’re focused on at TydeCo™.