How workforce technology can enable public sector agencies to secure sustainable savings

Optimising the people and payroll functions may help cost conscious administrations balance the books.

Containing costs has become an urgent imperative for state and local governments around Australia. Government borrowing burgeoned during the Covid crisis and, five years on, cost overruns on infrastructure upgrades and overall debt remains unsustainably high.

For example, borrowings per capita in FY2025-26 are greater than $23,000 per capita in every state bar Western Australia.

Searching for savings

Bringing debt levels down inevitably entails making some prudent calls. 

In Queensland, for example, the Crisafulli government has cancelled a $37 billion pumped hydro project in north Queensland. At the same time, a new inhouse consulting service has been established within the state's Treasury department, to build expertise within the public sector and reduce reliance on highly priced external consultants.

Further south, the Victorian government has embarked on a similar cost cutting quest, tasking former departmental secretary Helen Silver with the job of analysing expenditure and identifying inefficiencies, duplications and outmoded spending programs.

Eliminating inefficient and outdated systems

While reducing headcount may be one unavoidable move for administrations determined to get back into the black, it's very often controversial and fraught.

Eliminating inefficiencies in the back office tends to be a less contentious exercise and it's something many state and local government entities and agencies have scope to do.

Take human capital management (HCM) and payroll, for example – two essential functions which are ripe for renovation. Reliance on outdated solutions to manage both is common. Paper print-outs, spreadsheets and other disparate legacy systems can still be found in many back offices, as can small armies of payroll officers manually checking rostering data and hours worked.

It's a modus operandi that's error prone as well as inefficient. Government pay scales and awards can be complex, particularly when individuals perform multiple roles over the course of a single pay period. 

That's not uncommon in the local government sphere, where a frontline worker might staff the desk in a library one day and be on pool duty the next. Both roles are paid at different rates and calculating the correct remuneration and entitlements can be a time consuming process that lends itself to clerical errors.

Embracing automation

There is a better and cheaper way. Automation technology can help enable HCM and payroll departments to perform these and other complex calculations quickly and accurately, at scale.

It can be deployed to supercharge efficiency and compliance by helping to eliminate errors and improve data security, and providing a single source of truth for all people and payroll-related matters.

Work with a partner whose all-in-one HCM and payroll platform can be customised to accommodate the public sector pay scales applicable to your organisation, and you'll be positioned to achieve better outcomes with fewer resources.

Reducing total cost of ownership

The savings you achieve won't be confined to the HCM sphere. 

Outmoded HR and payroll software can be expensive to maintain and support and if you're running several programs simultaneously, the complexity and cost will rise accordingly. Persist with a solution that's no longer supported by the vendor that sold it to you and remediating urgent issues could be an unplanned expense your agency is forced to weather.

Swap that patchwork of programs out for a single unified platform from a premium vendor that invests in ongoing optimisation and support and it's a very different story. 

Your total cost of ownership can plummet, courtesy of the fact that your system can be administered by just one or two staff; freeing the rest of your IT and HR teams up to focus on higher value tasks.

Securing the savings that will put your agency on firmer financial footing

Identifying and implementing cost cutting measures is likely to remain an imperative for public sector agencies and entities at all levels of government over the upcoming months and years.

Deploying a latest generation payroll and HCM platform is one way to deliver measurable savings. If you're serious about supporting your payroll and HR teams to do their jobs more efficiently and cost effectively, it's essential technology that should sit at the heart of your ICT stack.