HR Tech Interview with Kim McKenna, Director for Product Management, (Americas) Payroll & Workforce Management at IRIS Software Group
Kim McKenna, discusses the latest trends in Payroll and Workforce Management in this catch-up with HRTech Series:
________
Hi Kim, welcome to our interview series. Tell us a little about yourself.
Thanks for having me. I’m Director of Product Management for Americas Payroll and Workforce Management at IRIS Software Group. My job is to lead product strategy for the payroll, time-tracking, scheduling, and HR tools that accountants, payroll service bureaus, and small- and mid-sized businesses rely on every day.
I’ve spent more than 15 years in the HCM industry, including over a decade in senior product roles at ADP before joining IRIS, building payroll and workforce management solutions for companies of all sizes. Across every stop, the thread has stayed the same: people need to get paid accurately and on time, and the teams behind that work deserve tools that actually make the job easier.
These days, my focus is helping accountants and payroll service bureaus navigate an increasingly complex regulatory landscape on behalf of the businesses they serve, everything from earned wage access and multi-state wage laws to pay transparency and reporting requirements. I’m also spending a lot of time thinking about the unique, multi-layered relationship we sit inside: IRIS, the accountants and payroll service bureaus who are our direct customers, the businesses those firms serve, and ultimately the employees who need to be paid accurately and on time. Every decision we make has to hold up at every one of those layers, all the way down to the employee actually getting paid.
Navigating state-wise (and for larger organizations, international) regulations for workforce management and scheduling can be challenging. At a deeper level, how can HR teams use modern HRTech to implement more informed processes based on different local policies? What fundamentals should they keep in mind when setting up their systems?
State-by-state complexity has only intensified. Remote work means the threshold for creating a new state tax or compliance obligation is essentially zero: one employee working from a new state can trigger withholding, unemployment, and paid leave requirements. Add in pay transparency laws now active in 17 states plus DC, and it’s easy to see why manual tracking breaks down fast.
This isn’t just a large-enterprise problem anymore. Employer of record platforms have made it possible for a business with one or two employees to hire someone in another country without setting up a local entity, and a lot of very small businesses, even solo founders hiring their first contractor, are doing exactly that. The catch is that confidence hasn’t kept pace with adoption. Very few small businesses feel genuinely confident they’re compliant when hiring across borders, and a two-person business rarely has a compliance team to catch a misclassification or a missed local filing. That gap is exactly what modern HRTech and employer of record (EOR) partnerships need to close: cross-border compliance should be built into the hiring process itself, so a business owner never has to become a specialist just to get it right.
The fundamental HR teams need to get right first is location data. You can’t apply the correct rule set if you don’t know, accurately and in real time, where work is actually being performed. From there, the system needs configurable, jurisdiction-aware rules rather than static tables, because requirements change every legislative session, sometimes mid-year.
Finally, think of compliance as something you keep tuning, because the rules underneath it never sit still. The states with the loosest thresholds two years ago may have the strictest ones today. Software should make it easy to update policy logic without a full re-implementation every time a law changes.
Catch more HRTech Insights: HRTech Interview With Hari Kolam, CEO and Co-founder of Findem: Featuring Findem’s GliderAI
Using an AI layer for this also requires significant human intervention to ensure a healthy balance. What practices work best?
The clearest rule I’ve seen work is this: AI should surface information; people should make the decision. That distinction matters most in payroll and workforce management because the stakes are personal: someone’s pay, someone’s schedule, someone’s performance rating, someone’s benefits.
In practice, that means being explicit about where AI stops and a person starts. Anomaly detection flagging a pay discrepancy? Let AI do that well; it’s fast and consistent. Deciding whether to change someone’s classification, pay rate, or schedule because of what it found? That stays with a person who understands context AI can’t see.
Performance management deserves the same discipline. AI can spot patterns- a dip in output, a string of missed deadlines, a shift in engagement- often before a manager would. But deciding what that pattern means, and what to do about it, has to stay human. An algorithm doesn’t know an employee is covering for a teammate on leave or working through something outside of work. Flagging the signal is its job; writing the review is still ours.
Explainability is the next piece. If a manager or an employee asks why a system flagged or recommended something, you need an answer that isn’t “the model said so.” In 2026, that’s not optional; black-box decisions don’t hold up to an audit, a regulator, or an employee grievance.
Finally, build review into the workflow itself rather than treating it as an afterthought. The best implementations I’ve seen don’t ask people to double-check AI output after the fact; they route anything touching pay, performance ratings, termination, or compensation equity through a human checkpoint before it becomes an action. That’s what turns the balance from a stated policy into an actual practice.
Can you talk a little about how larger organizations are using HRtech to ease these problems for multi-state and global business units? Is it common to implement multiple systems, and what other trends are you observing around HRTech, specifically payroll and workforce automation adoption trends?
It’s still common to see multiple systems, though that’s shifting. A lot of large organizations grew their stack through acquisitions and regional expansion, so they end up running different payroll, time, and scheduling tools by business unit or country. It works, but it creates blind spots. When workforce data lives in six systems, it’s hard to get one accurate view of headcount, cost or compliance risk.
The trend I’m watching most closely is consolidation. Enterprises are increasingly choosing fewer, more connected platforms over stitching together best-of-breed tools, largely because integrated systems significantly outperform siloed ones on efficiency, and because the compliance risk of disconnected data is becoming too expensive to ignore.
The piece I’d add to that is visibility: one full picture of their workforce across every country they operate in. When that data is split across regional systems, leaders end up stitching together spreadsheets to answer basic questions. Local payroll processing can, and often should, stay tailored to each jurisdiction, but the data behind it should still roll up into one view leaders can act on.
None of that works without a strong ecosystem underneath it, though. Consolidation doesn’t mean one vendor has to own everything, and for most organizations that isn’t realistic anyway. What matters more is how well core payroll and workforce systems connect to the tools already feeding them data: time and attendance, benefits, expense platforms, accounting and ERP systems, even frontline scheduling tools. Payroll is only as accurate as the inputs flowing into it.
The other big trend is automation adoption in payroll specifically. Most HR leaders I talk to are now using AI somewhere in their payroll process, mainly for anomaly detection, validation and reducing manual review time. Earned wage access is also moving from a nice-to-have benefit to a retention expectation, especially for organizations with hourly or shift-based workforces. That’s pulling payroll, scheduling, and financial wellness tools closer together than they’ve ever been.
What aspects of the current state of HRTech and AI in HR interest and worry you the most?
What interests me most is how much time AI can give back to HR and payroll teams for the work that actually needs a human: coaching a manager, having a real conversation with someone about a promotion, or walking a new hire through their benefits choices during onboarding so they actually feel supported as they’re getting started. When AI handles the repetitive validation work well, people get to spend more time on the moments that matter.
What worries me is the pace of adoption outstripping governance. A lot of organizations are moving fast on agentic AI in hiring, performance, and even pay decisions without clearly defining where AI’s role ends and human accountability begins. Employers are still on the hook for outcomes, even when a third-party AI tool made the recommendation. That gap between adoption speed and governance maturity is where I think the real risk sits right now; the technology itself is usually fine, it’s the thoughtfulness of the rollout that varies.
I’d also flag the regulatory patchwork. Pay transparency, AI employment law, and paid leave requirements are all evolving state by state, sometimes inconsistently. HR teams are being asked to keep pace with that complexity manually in a lot of cases, and that’s simply not sustainable without better tooling and clearer internal ownership of compliance.
Five parting thoughts and notes on HR and HRTech you’d leave our readers with before we wrap up?
Location data is compliance infrastructure. If you don’t know where work happens, you can’t get pay or tax right; get this foundation solid before layering on anything else.
AI should surface, not decide, especially in pay, hiring, and termination. Keep a person accountable for every high-stakes decision.
Treat compliance as continuous. State and local rules change constantly, and your systems need to update without a full re-implementation each time.
Earned wage access and financial wellness aren’t perks anymore. For hourly and shift-based workforces especially, they’re becoming baseline expectations tied directly to retention.
Lead with empathy as much as rigor. AI, shifting state and global regulations, new expectations around pay and flexibility- it’s a lot of change to absorb at once, and it’s disorienting for everyone. The strongest HR teams I see pair technical rigor with real empathy, because behind every policy change and every system rollout is a person still learning how to work in a world that keeps shifting under them.
Read More on Hrtech : Why SWIFT is Too Slow for Your Global Workforce?
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com ]
Founded in 1978, IRIS Software Group is a global provider of mission-critical, cloud-hosted software solutions and services to more than 100,000 customers across 135 countries. IRIS is a trusted partner to businesses, finance, HR and payroll teams, educational organisations, and accountancy firms of all sizes, providing innovative operational solutions that streamline complex processes, maintain compliance, and unlock growth. Through simplifying, automating and providing insights on everyday mission-critical tasks for organisations of all shapes and sizes, IRIS ensures customers can look forward with certainty and confidence. IRIS is certified as a 2024 Great Place to Work® in the UK, Ireland, India, Romania, Canada and the USA.
Kim McKenna is the Director of Product Management, Americas Payroll and Workforce Management, at IRIS Software Group. She has over 15 years of experience in HCM, including more than a decade in senior payroll and workforce management product roles at ADP. She currently leads product strategy across payroll, time tracking, scheduling, and employee experience.
The post HR Tech Interview with Kim McKenna, Director for Product Management, (Americas) Payroll & Workforce Management at IRIS Software Group appeared first on TecHR.
Comments
Post a Comment