As firms up and down the country gallop at full pace towards a festive break with deadline season following swiftly behind, your staff will be working hard to keep up and hopefully offer you the enhanced level of productivity and output that your clients expect and deserve.
And if that’s the situation at your firm, you’re in a brilliant position and our advice to you today is to work hard to maintain and protect it.
What does that mean in practice?
Take stock of the efforts that you’re putting in to prevent employee burnout. We can’t stress enough that not allowing your team to be stretched to breaking point is in the interest of leaders, employees and clients alike. It’s a really important priority for all.
Today we thought we’d share 5 quick tips for how you can bolster your workforce’s stamina and wellbeing and ensure that burnout is not a problem you’re having to overcome.
1. Ensure your line management system is in tip top condition and it’s working as it’s designed to be.
Do all of your staff have a clearly defined line manager who is accessible and keeping their finger on the pulse of workflow and capacity? Do your staff have the opportunity to talk openly and honestly about how they are managing their workload and any barriers that they encounter in completing their work?
And in turn are the line managers acting on genuine feedback and spotting problems before they become insurmountable?
Essentially what we mean here is check that your firm is proactively adapting to accommodate workload and seasonal changes. Are your staff and leaders anticipating problems before they arrive or are they simply fire fighting?
2. Does your engine room team understand your firm’s priorities when things get busy?
When there’s more work to be done than people to do it, communication from leadership becomes mission critical. Are your leaders making sure that your team know what to focus their efforts on and what tasks can wait until deadline season has passed. It’s always better to over communicate instructions rather than the other way around.
3. What are you doing to encourage work life balance?
Are your trusted staff offered as much trust and autonomy as you can reasonably give to ensure that they are able to complete an enhanced level of work but also maintain their physical and mental health?
If you spy a member of staff sending emails in the dead of night are you asking them why they need to do that?
You’ll want to be keeping a really close eye on your team to make sure deadlines are being met, but not at the expense of their health and happiness. That’s a proven recipe for disaster in 2022/23.
4. Is your firm united by common goals and rewards?
If your team is cohesive there will be a feeling of ‘it may be busy but we’re all in it together’ and everyone will be working together for a clear common goal and ideally a set of rewards. Can you schedule in a team social after deadline season has passed and reward everyone for their hard work?
Working really hard for an employer you don’t feel values you leads to resentment, frustration and anger and that in turn makes burnout far more likely to occur.
5. Are you addressing blatant gaps in your workforce?
There is nothing more demoralising for great accountants than the knowledge that there is substantially more work to do than there is manpower hours to do it. If you’re the leader of your firm you’ll want to be working hard to fill any gaps with permanent or interim staff.
If your staff are struggling to keep up with demand, they need your help! And in turn if you’re struggling to give them that help, we are here to be your trusted recruitment partners and you can reach out to us today to access our vast database of job hunting accountants all over the UK.
‘Employee burnout is like a contagious disease and the knock on effect of losing one member of staff to it can be devastating to a firm – it’s like a domino effect! Now is definitely the time to be anticipating any issues that might contribute towards staff burnout and to be addressing them at full throttle in advance of deadline season. We’re here to help year round but we understand the additional pressures you’ll all be under now and you can trust my team to find the support your staff need and to find it now.’
Garry Howling, MD
For a fresh pair of eyes on the needs of your workforce call us today, we’ll be delighted to help.
