Global HRIS: Why It’s the Best HR Solution for Global Teams

If you’ve already tapped into international hiring, it’s only a matter of time until your workforce becomes so complex and diverse that using multiple local HR management systems will become too costly and unsustainable.

Choosing a global HRIS software solution from the start means you’ll be able to scale and hire from new countries quickly, without having to migrate your entire system to a new platform later on.

Here’s how global HRIS makes HR professionals’ lives easier.

What is a global HRIS?

Global HRIS (Human Resources Information System) is a global workforce management tool designed to support workflows with different contract types, documentation requirements, languages, currencies, and other country-specific employee information.

These HR platforms typically include all the features that regular HRIS solutions have:

• Employee data management
• Employee onboarding and offboarding
• Documentation storage
• Benefits administration
• Organization charts
• Access management
• Payroll
• Time tracking
• Performance management
• Applicant tracking system
• Learning management
• Employee self-service portal
• Reporting

...only that the workflows and available fields are designed in a way that supports varying employment laws and tax systems.

Despite being cloud-based and centralized, localized HRIS software doesn’t work well for global companies. It doesn’t provide separate processes for workers with different employment statuses from different countries, requiring you to use a separate platform to manage workers from a new country that’s not available in your current HRIS.

For example, when onboarding workers from Peru or India, your chosen HRIS solution might require you to upload W-2 or 1099 tax forms because the software is US-oriented. This will likely cause disruption and delays in your onboarding and compliance processes.

In global HRIS platforms, you can manage everything for everyone, everywhere, without having to coordinate between several localized platforms. Thanks to a global HR platform, you can reduce the overall cost of your HR tech stack and the time needed to pull useful insights about your global team.

When do you need a global HRIS?

If you notice that your HR department:

• Struggles with admin work and has no time to strategize and do workforce planning
• Collects employee data from multiple sources (spreadsheets, tools) manually, which often leads to errors and miscalculations
• Can’t keep up with employment laws and tax regulations in countries you hire from
• Doesn’t have enough data visibility in real-time
• Has received complaints about a disorganized onboarding process

It’s undoubtedly the right moment to start looking for an HR system to streamline your HR tasks, improve company efficiency, and remove unnecessary stress from your HR team.

The case for a global HR software solution

Implementing a global HR software solution can benefit your company in the following ways:

HR and payroll consolidation for the entire workforce

With a local HR platform, you need to deal with several processes or reporting tools that might not always be consistent, or even compatible, which unnecessarily prolongs and complicates payroll processing, benefits administration, onboarding, and other workflows.

With a single, global HR platform, you have a unified human resource management and payroll system for your entire workforce, regardless of the worker’s employment status or country of residence.

Saving money on your tech stack

HRIS implementation doesn’t need to put a strain on your budget. Smart investment in one, global HR software solution reduces the total cost of your tech stack by tens of thousands of dollars annually, because you don’t need to use 16+ separate platforms to manage your global team.

For smaller teams, this can really make a difference, especially with Deel’s HR Core product: it’s available for free for companies with under 200 people—no setup or monthly fees.

A better team experience for all your employees, everywhere

You will be able to provide a same-level experience for all your employees across continents and time zones. Separate HR platforms may have different features, support availability, and other variable aspects of employee experience, which can cause dissatisfaction among your team members.

With global HR software, you’re sure that you can provide a uniform team experience for all your employees, not allowing technical implications to impact your employee engagement and satisfaction negatively.

Onboarding fields tailored to each country

Global employment and compliance documentation and processes vary by country, meaning you will need to have different workflows for each country you hire from. These requirements can include:

• Time off requests for employees
• Onboarding fields (like Social Security Number and similar data)
• Benefits for local markets
• Contract termination requirements

A localized HRIS platform simply won’t offer the fields you need to ensure a compliant process for your international employees, which will cause further complications in your processes. Global HR software offers country-specific workflows so you can manage everyone in one place without obstacles.

Faster access to better insights into your global workforce

Storing and managing employee data in several databases makes it more difficult and time-consuming to extract specific data about a worker or have an at-glance overview of your entire workforce. Lack of data visibility can create difficulties in managing your employees’ contracts, headcount planning, ensuring compliance, and more.

All employee data in one place, where you can choose different views of your team (by department, individual worker, employee performance, length of employment, etc.), provide you with better insight into your growth, headcount, onboarding, and more across the company, reducing the need to hire new HR managers.

Full compliance no matter where you hire

With multiple HR platforms and in-country legal service providers, it’s more challenging to stay on top of your tax deadlines, paperwork, employee benefits and contracts, and other aspects of compliance. Given that in each new country you need to deal with a new set of legal implications, the chance of making an honest mistake increases and your company may risk serious financial penalties or even lawsuits.

A single, global HR platform and a single partner to help you manage compliance in all locations significantly reduce the risk of noncompliance.

Simple scaling

Opting for a local HRIS when you’re still a small team will work for a while, but you’ll eventually need to migrate your system to a more comprehensive one. Think about your future business needs: you may have 10 employees from three countries today, but you might end up hiring 100 more from 20 other countries.

Setting up global HRIS software from the start helps you avoid the pain of migration of your entire HR to a new tool and allows you to quickly capture great candidates without thinking if your tech can support their onboarding.

Manage everything, for everyone, in one powerful platform

The best HRIS platform is the one that facilitates your processes and enables your global team to do their best work. 

Deel HR complements Deel’s Employer of Record and PEO services, catering to all your HR needs in all-in-one platform created with international teams in mind. Thanks to our integrations with your favorite HR platforms (like BambooHR, Workday, HiBob, and others), consolidating your global workforce in one place becomes a piece of cake.

We enable you to manage contractors, EOR employees, and direct workers, administer equipment and perks for the team, run background checks, consolidate global payroll, ensure full compliance with localized contracts, and so much more—all in one easy-to-use platform with self-service options for your team.

Save money on your tech stack and double your HR team’s effectiveness by avoiding the duplicate work of using multiple platforms.