Winning the Payroll Compliance and Productivity Battle
The Australian Sluggish Labour Productivity is Holding Business Back
- The Australian IR environment requires new thinking to deliver not only efficiency and productivity but also IR compliance.
- The financial costs of not taking action is substantial and business profitabity retarding
- The risk of non-compliance is not only reputation-destroying, but is a substantial $ Cost to the business
Labour Productivity in Australia has been on hold, and some say it has been declining, for the past 10 years, and this needs to change.
The Solution to Labour Compliance with Productivity Improvement is Inzenius
The change required is the adoption of HRM with integrated Labour planning and Payroll technology
Inznius bring th entire process into one integrated system, including HRM, Onboarding, Rostring, Timekeeping, Award Interpretation, and Payroll
The following case highlights the benefits behind the award-winning Inzenius difference in Payroll processing, with Inzenius all-in-one rostering to automated payroll innovation. “US 2006/122878 A1 Payroll Method and Apparatus”
In this case, for the USA skating team, the Inzenius approach to its design recognises the interface between employee scheduling, time tracking, and payroll award interpretation.
Inzenius’ system design shifted from a first-principles approach to traditional incremental enhancements in payroll system interpretation and processing.
This approach created a sound foundation for the design of what was needed to efficiently deliver then curreent aand chaanging payroll, suited to the modern, complex requirements.
The foundation’s architecture is the reason for the granted patent “US 2006/122878 A1 Payroll Method and Apparatus”
This design enhanced Payroll’s capability to deliver compliant, flexible, and ever-changing payroll requirements.
The Study from the 2026 Winter Olympics on Process Innovation
https://hbr.org/podcast/2026/02/innovations-in-olympic-speed-skating-when-to-reveal-a-novel-idea
Some comments from the interview
BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the groundbreaking ideas in Harvard Business School case studies. Today on Cold Call, we’re looking at a sport where innovation doesn’t come from flash or funding, but from rethinking first principles. with Rebecca Karp’s
REBECCA KARP: They had this really novel idea that they had developed, but this question about like, when should they launch this novel technique that really has come to dominate the field? So like pretty much everyone does the American Push now in the team pursuit events. And so that’s really what attracted me because it was such a good case of type situation for things that companies face, but sort of in this simple, scaled back way to really examine the dynamics of entry timing.
BRIAN KENNY: , the huge gap, and it seemed like in the case of the US Olympic team, incremental innovation wasn’t going to get the job done. And we’re talking about like milliseconds, like tiny, tiny amounts of time here, but it seemed like they needed something, a step change of some sort. Can you talk a little bit about that and why incremental innovation just wasn’t going to work?
REBECCA KARP: incremental innovation in this space was just not going to work, but there’s also this kind of approach or like mindset to innovation that is worth considering too. So in this case, incremental might not work, but also, if you take this back to kind of company perspective, you think there’s like companies that prefer incremental innovation or are strategically very good at executing on incremental innovation. And some companies that are not, that really their special sauce is really thinking and re-imagining the way that the system or the industry could work and that’s really where they kind of source their competitive advantage. And so that’s also kind of a strategic decision, like whether you want to kind of be focused incrementally or if you really think that you have the skill to be able to kind of reimagine the system at large. And I think the case also points out that this was not necessarily a matter of effort. Everybody was working really hard. The team was training hard. People were trying to get it done and just, it still wasn’t working. How was it that they sort of figured out a different way of looking at it rather than just saying, “Everybody put more effort in.”? So I think the story a little bit as they tell it is such that they realized the additional extra effort just wasn’t going to do it. And so they brought in someone from the outside, which is so interesting here. They brought in an expert who actually had expertise in biking. And it was kind of this outsider who could see the world differently, who was like, “Why are we so focused on this and not this?” And I think that’s true oftentimes when we think about innovating in terms of re-imagining the system. These outside perspectives and being able to draw on these outside perspectives end up being like really useful. And thinking about like innovation that takes you kind of, that makes a real step change in performance. And so what happened is, they brought in this expert with all this kind of expertise in the biking industry and he kind of figured out through watching them and they had this question, “Incidentally when we’re skating, we always end up kind of pushing each other, is this a good thing or is this actually a problematic thing?” And he learned through observing what they were doing that the pushing actually was critical. And if they could maximize the pushing, that they actually could kind of think about the whole way that they were approaching the race differently. But I’d reflect on again, it’s this outside perspective that really helped them figure this out.
BRIAN KENNY: But oftentimes, and I’m sure you’ve seen this in the firms that you’ve studied, we get this, I think we’ve referred to it as a not invented here mentality where, “That person doesn’t know our industry. They couldn’t possibly understand us well enough to be able to tell us how to do this better.”
REBECCA KARP: I think there was much of that there too. And that’s why partially this question about when to launch became such an important piece of the puzzle. So when you have an outsider who comes in and kind of helps you re-architect the entire system, you need more touch points, more experimentation, more proof points that it actually is going to work and that we’re going to believe it. A major challenge for the team was, okay, we can see an expectation that maybe this technique will work better, but can we get the right athletes, the right… So then the question of talent becomes more prominent. Like, okay, it’s not just that we re-engineer the technique, but then we also need to attract the very best skaters on our team to come and race it. But what’s the incentive for them to do that, especially when you have this outsider who’s kind of designed this new system?
BRIAN KENNY: the way that speed skating was done was you had a team and you had somebody in the front and they would stay in the front for a while and exert all their energy and then they would drop off and somebody else would move up to the front and they would exert all their energy. And so what you had at the end of that race was for exhausted skaters and here what they were developing came to be known as the American Push, I think that’s the term that you use in the case, where instead of having everybody up front, one person stays up front and the others get behind and literally push them physically. And that’s the sort of where you get the bike racing analogy.
REBECCA KARP: It’s very akin to biking. The way the race always traditionally was run is as you put it, you would have your strongest skater out front and when he or she got tired, he or she would rotate to the back. But can you imagine just thinking about like the aerodynamics of this? When you’re going towards the back, you’re getting all this drag. And so the innovation here was like, how do we eliminate that drag? And the way you eliminate that drag is to have no one rotate and to move your best skater from the front to the back and have that person just push basically everybody else forward. And that eliminates kind of this drag and improves kind of the aerodynamics of the system. And that’s what helped kind of erase this gap in timing with the Dutch.
It is a team event. It’s the team pursuit. So there’s a level of training that needs to go into practicing this. So you’re talking to all of these skaters who, by the way, are also doing these individual races who have to make the evaluation. Should I expend my extra energy on working on my individual race so that I can win gold? Or should I try this new technique that I’ve never skated before that requires coordination with these other athletes to layer another complication? It’s not like these athletes live next to each other, and so they still have to practice together. So now I have to do something I’ve never done and I have to locate with the people on my team that I’m doing it with. So this all adds complication and for someone who believes that they might medal in an individual race, should the very best talent be expending kind of their resources, time, budget, because remember, the US team is not funded by the government.
People are self-funded or they’re getting sponsors. So there’s this big, huge resource, time, attention, question associated with expending kind of those things on learning the technique. And I think, but this is like not untrue if we bring the contrast back to the business world of, we have this new approach and you want to get your very best people in the company working on the new approach, refining the new approach, but why should they expend their time, attention when they’re probably already working on their own projects, their own agenda? So this is like a very parallel type situation to I think what many companies face when they try to get their very best people to work on something that’s new.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s also a bit of an all-or-nothing thing. You can’t do this and say, “Well, we’re going to try this, but we’ll keep doing it the way that we used to do it.” You’ve got to make the decision. How does a leader think about that in a business context? When is it okay to do something, again, incrementally as we talked about before, or when do you need to just say, “We got to completely redo this thing.”
REBECCA KARP: I think in the case of the US team, it was very clear that they were not going to win unless they made a remarkably- Things are not always that clearcut in the business arena, but we can think, how much do you lag your competitors? Is it realistic that you’re really going to close the gap by increments, adding another feature to your product? But also, if you add another feature to your product, do you kind of make the product more similar to that of your competitor and thus you’re not creating any differentiation or distinction in the way that you can win anyway. And so, I think companies are quite afraid to reimagine the system often for the reasons we described. Convincing the best people to work on it is often hard. They have all sorts of other obligations, but in the same regard, sometimes that’s exactly what’s required if you want to win.
In this casee it is this question of timing is really the central question we ask in the case, and it’s whether the US team should launch the technique in the world championship, which is two years before the Olympics. And so spoiler alert, they decide to launch two years earlier. And the rationale for doing that is really to satisfy some of the questions you asked earlier. It was to show that the technique was quite good and it assured kind of the very best talent that it was worth their while to invest their time and effort in the technique. It also helped them get kind of other sponsors on board because they became more competitive. So it helped them mobilize and acquire resources, meaning like the US team. So that was sort of the rationale for doing it. The challenge is, the second they kind of let the genie out of the bottle, all of the other teams were able to observe what it was that the US was doing.
BRIAN KENNY: Which was their fear, which is a legitimate concern. So how do you think about that, again, in a business context? I mean, there is such a thing as first mover advantage, but we all know that there are fast followers who can sort of chip away at that. As a business leader, how would you think about the risks there?
REBECCA KARP: The first question you have to ask is, is it so that nobody really knows about this thing that we’re doing? Like, is it really- Novel or twin innovation happens all the time. And so what were teams really evaluating when the US raced was probably how well the technique worked. So it wasn’t that they were just becoming aware of it, it was really how well the technique worked. So that’s the first question you really have to ask is like, are your competitors already aware of it? And then secondly, what are they really learning from you when you launch something? Is it like awareness or is it really like they’re learning something about performance? And the third question you have to kind of ask is like, would you do anything differently if it changes one of those two things? And I think in the case for the US, they really couldn’t because of these needs to kind of get the best talent interested in the technique or to get kind of sponsors mobilized. I think there were these other reasons why they needed to launch at the time. Or it’s also possible that they mispredicted how long it would take others to perfect the techniques. So it took them about a year and a half, two years to perfect the technique. And it’s possible that they extrapolated that timing onto others, but that’s another question you have to ask. If I launch this now, what’s the learning curve for others? Is it that they will learn at the same speed that we learned or is it that they will learn at a faster clip? It is highly replicable. You see what people are doing and maybe to perfect it, you need some more specialized knowledge, but you can kind of start to, you understand what’s going on. Not all types of products, knowledge are so easily replicatable by others and thus thinking about the entry decision is different based on kind of the nature of the information that’s getting shared.
BRIAN KENNY: So some things might be harder to imitate than others, which means you might have a little more sustainable advantage than you actually realize that you had. Is it also about how winning changes sort of incentives around openness as you unveil this thing and it starts to work. Do you just sort of get excited by it and say, “You know what? We feel like we’re going to continue to innovate and we don’t care if people see how we do it because we think we can do it better.”
REBECCA KARP: I think that that’s exactly right. I think my guess, and having no real knowledge about their perspective, is the better you get at innovating, the more you do it. And so perhaps… So what ends up happening is they launch the technique in the world championship and when it comes to the Olympics, the Norwegian team and the Russian team follow suit and they end up beating the US team. And so the US team ends up competing for bronze and they do win the bronze medal, but certainly, which is fabulous because they haven’t won a medal in so long. It’s better than nothing, and kudos to them. And also, that was during COVID, there was so many complications associated with that win, but they certainly did not win gold and their competitors indeed did copy their technique. I think what it’s done is fostered this interest in innovation. And so I would expect that they continue to innovate in ways that kind of are really productive and help them kind of get on top.