Shared services allow organizations to lean on partners for help with administrative work, like pay, HR, benefits and more.

ADP’s Mary Christie shares how this model can help free up workers’ time and reduce costs.

For more information, visit ADP.com/SPARK

Video Transcription: 

Mary Christie

A lot of organizations are looking at shared services for payroll because of a number of things that are going on in the market.

A lot of companies are reporting that they're struggling with a shortage of staff. And in one of the more recent ADP potential of payroll studies, the one that was conducted in 2026, there was a 68% of the respondents said that they were struggling with staff shortages, and that was impacting their ability to deliver good payroll service. So moving to a shared services environment helps to mitigate some of that risk.

A shared services structure is a good idea when organizations are looking at efficiency and cost, and we're finding that shared services with payroll is most successful when there are other parts of the business that are already in a shared services structure, it might be HR, shared services or IT or finance, so that the payroll function can move into a structure that's already well defined.

I would say if payroll is first up in shared services, to take your time and make sure that you have all of the technology and things in place for payroll to be successful. Some of the other reasons why shared services is a good idea, and especially in a global environment, is something that we call the lack of visibility.

So from regional or global areas, there may not be good visibility into what's going on for service delivery. A lot of variability in the quality. So another piece is if there's a single point of failure, that might be where there's only one person who understands, let's say the payroll process in Italy. And should that person move on to a new position, there's no one to follow up.

So moving multiple countries into a shared services environment gives you backup and allows you to reduce the risk of that single point of failure. It's also a great way to have role specialization so that you have with that role specialization you have job advancement. So someone may start as a payroll processor and move into a more specialist role like a data analyst.

So shared services helps to reduce risk. It also helps to reduce the cost of payroll service delivery.