Establishing resilient and reputable payroll solutions in Australian higher education

Underpayment is widespread in the higher education sector. Since 2009, unpaid wages and superannuation equal close to $400m, in a sector where many workers face insecurity and underpayment due to the irregularity of ‘teaching time’.

Australia’s higher education sector relies on talented teaching staff to ensure a world class standard of education and research. However, of the 130,000 people employed by Australian universities in a range of academic and professional roles, over two-thirds are employed on a casual basis.

Furthermore, already thousands of talented professionals have left the sector to find more stable, better-paying roles elsewhere. The financial impact of missed superannuation returns due to underpayment or the stress of working without job security during a cost-of-living crisis has been deemed too costly for many workers.

Ultimately, it will be higher education that bears the cost of driving passionate employees away from the sector. It will have a profound impact on academic outcomes, student experiences and staff workloads – likely resulting in attrition and poorer learning outcomes.

To alleviate these challenges, the complex workforce conditions of higher education require a robust payroll solution that ensures work is correctly renumerated, and that the reputation of Australia’s educational institutions can continue to attract world class talent.

However, to resolve the payroll discrepancies currently affecting Australian higher education, institutions must choose a solution that is equipped to deal with Australian-specific requirements. For example, changing employment laws and entitlements, and varying commencement dates.

Overseas vendors of payroll software often have limited understanding of Australia’s tertiary sector and its complex award interpretations and compliance requirements. Without contextual experience, they are unable to provide upgrades at pace with industry challenges and legislative changes.

However, by embracing a a responsive, purpose-built and Australian-made software solution, the higher education sector can begin to resolve the systemic underpayment of university staff.

TechnologyOne’s trusted and innovative Australian-made payroll alternative, built on decades of investment in the higher education sector and billion’s worth of investment in R&D, already exists. Furthermore, the entire software solution can be implemented in record time to quickly address this systemic underpayment issue.

Human Resources and Payroll (HRP) is a TechnologyOne solution designed to enable universities to streamline payroll processes and ensure compliance. The solution seamlessly integrates across HR, payroll and finance, meaning universities have a single source of truth across their entire system.

Institutions can save resources by re-allocating time and money otherwise spent manually calculating entitlements and entering numbers, and finance teams can maximise the accuracy of payments, while minimising compliance risks.

While typical digital transformations in education can often span three to five years, taking staff away from their day-to-day roles and draining resources, TechnologyOne has put an end to the three greatest impediments to investing in digital transformation – time to value, cost and complexity.

At TechnologyOne, we call this Solution as a Service, or SaaS+. It reinvents the implementation process to reduce costs and risk and rapidly accelerates time to value. Built as an all-inclusive industry-specific offering, SaaS+ delivers all aspects of TechnologyOne’s enterprise solution, including implementation, running, support and upgrades, for one single yearly fee.

And most importantly, for higher education providers, it drastically reduces implementation timeframes and costs while improving customer satisfaction.

By establishing continuous feedback loops, refining implementation methodologies and leveraging our three decades of experience in higher education, our pre-configured HRP solution automates common business functions. This also means it accelerates implementation time and reduces resource allocation by up to 80 per cent.

By leveraging our deep understanding of the communities we serve, we have drastically reduced the timeframe for software implementations, from six to nine months, to just 16 weeks. The SaaS+ vision is bold, with the long term goal of achieving a core ERP implementation in 30 days by 2030.

As the University Accord recommendations stated, the desire is to have 80 per cent of the nation’s workforce expected to need tertiary qualifications by 2050. Higher education providers should be deploying their most passionate staff on providing our workforce with the knowledge and skills to ensure Australia’s resilience and prosperity, not managing complex software implementations.