At Public Practice Recruitment Ltd we’ve finally seen a true shift in attitudes at the vast majority (and always the best) accountancy firms.
At last the best leaders and the best employers of people have grasped that employing staff who adopt the mindset that ‘the more they’re seen the more valuable they are’ is a big mistake.
The long era of presenteeism is dying and brilliantly successful firms are proud to be certain that a productive workforce isn’t usually made up of accountants who left the house at 5am and battled train strikes to sit at their desks for 10 hours straight.
Halleluja!
But if you’re a late adopter of a policy of autonomy and flexibility in the workplace, it can be overwhelming to know where to start and how to transfer your company’s culture to one of micro management where you clock staff in and out, to one where the proof is in the pudding and results are the only metric that matters.
Here’s some of our ideas that we hope will be helpful to you.
Big change is daunting and it’s often best to approach strategic planning by imagining the end result you’re trying to achieve and then working backwards.
So define the perfect picture. Here’s an idea:
- Your staff are consistently producing significant amounts of high quality work. Perhaps more than they already produce.
- Your clients are content and satisfied with the service levels they receive.
- Your staff are accessible and your firm is responsive to its customers’ needs.
- Problems are few and far between, but when you encounter them, your staff have all that they need to find solutions.
- Your firm is growing and becoming more profitable year on year.
- Your staff are happy, healthy, feel rewarded, challenged and trusted. Yourself included.
- You have a quick and robust procedure in place to recognise and manage poor performance or staff who are taking advantage of your trust.
You’ll have more desired outcomes we’re certain, but we hope that this list gets you started to create your own bespoke list.
The next step is to take every one of those outcomes and to list what’s currently stopping them from being achieved.
Here’s a couple of examples:
Your staff are accessible and your firm is responsive to customers’ needs:
Flexible working is brilliant. But you do need to have some clear guidelines in place to make it work. For instance your firm might identify the core hours that they expect everyone to be at their desks. These hours are the times that your service levels showcase to your customers that they can expect responses. Out of offices should be clear and always used.
Your firm is growing and becoming more profitable year on year.
Again this one is all about balance. If you trust your staff to work regularly from home and your team isn’t getting together on a regular basis to check that everyone is aligning themselves to the same goals and values, then your growth and profitability can stall.
The simple solution is never to become complacent that everyone is working cohesively from a distance. Working from home is great, but checking in, ideally in the same physical place, is really important.
You have a quick and robust procedure in place to recognise and manage poor performance or staff who are taking advantage of your trust.
When this one goes wrong, everyone suffers. Your staff, your clients and you yourself! It’s so much easier to gently nurture your staff and ensure systems are in place to manage problems as soon as they pop up.
If you notice that a member of staff to whom you have offered trust and autonomy is struggling to get the results you know they are capable of, it’s time to look at why that might be. Maybe they are taking advantage of your trust or maybe they just don’t work well from a distance and would actually be better suited to a different way of working.
If you put off managing these issues, your trusted and productive workforce can switch to one of resentment and a culture of ‘if they get away with it then why should’t I?’
At Public Practice Recruitment Ltd we can support you to tailor your recruitment to work alongside your firms’ intentions to move away from presenteeism. We’re certain that if you employ the right accountants who have a brilliant work ethic, great skills, qualifications and the commitment and loyalty to do a great job, your firm will reap the rewards.
You can reach out to us today for a registration call with our MD Garry Howling.
And if you found this article helpful, don’t forget that we have a comprehensive library of leadership relevant reading in our Employers’ Hub.
