While the term "innovation" isn't necessarily associated with most CPA firms, this perception can easily be changed with the right strategic moves.
But before you take the first step to drive innovation in your firm, you must ask yourself about the areas of the business that need the most influx of new ideas. It can be anything from employee productivity, client communication and operational efficiency to recruitment; any function that you see being blocked, consuming more time or prone to errors.
Once you have identified these areas, you can then begin to build systems fostering innovation. However, it is essential everyone in the firm is responsible for contributing. For this, leadership must inspire staff to be creative if any change is to occur.
Here are seven ways I believe you can help to drive innovation in your firm:
1. Identify the challenges
As mentioned, the very first step before even thinking of driving innovation in your CPA firm is to identify the challenges resisting it. We've all heard about change management, and this is part of the process. For innovation to really happen in your business, you need to first evaluate your working conditions objectively and mark areas most in need of improvement.
There can be various factors behind a lack of innovation in your CPA firm.
These can be:
- Not enough encouragement from the superiors in the office;
- Absence of a common platform to share ideas with others;
- Lack of a reward system for employees;
- Departmental silos leading to low response to good ideas;
- Fear of failure; and
- Employees work schedule.
The best way to identify these challenges is to take regular feedback from employees as they are the ones with a clear picture. After evaluating these, draw a roadmap to tackle them individually.
2. Create the best working environment
Innovation is predominantly a creative process that can be enhanced only if your firm's working conditions are employee-centric. For instance, there can be employees with great ideas to improve productivity. However, if you or other management are not receptive to these ideas, they will never be able to share them with confidence.
Hence, you need to
3. Discover and embrace newer technologies
Adopting more modern accounting solutions gives employees the leverage to actually be tech-savvy and even innovate along the way. They can use these tools to come up with solutions to improve productivity, reduce operational costs and foster better working conditions, to name a few.
For instance, CPAs can work remotely only if their accounting firm has adopted cloud hosting services. Only then can an employee come up with ideas to make the working conditions more flexible. Many of the advanced accounting tools available today improve employee efficiency, giving them more time to think of the bigger picture.
Moreover, technologies such as cloud, AI and machine learning offer features like data insights, predictive analysis and error detection. These features help you foster innovation in your service offerings, ensuring you are one step ahead of competitors or, at the least, on pace with more forward-minded firms.
4. Encourage collaboration
It's been said that ideas on their own are just thoughts. But when shared with others, they can be built upon collectively to create an actionable process.
As mentioned earlier, to foster innovation in your firm, it is imperative to create a collaborative environment where all the ideas are welcomed and also shared on a common platform so they can be worked on by anyone in the firm. For this, I recommend adopting digital platforms that can enable real-time collaboration.
Moreover, to create a successful collaborative environment, you must ensure inter-department collaboration. Irrespective of any department, all employees must be encouraged to come forward and share their ideas so that others can build upon them.
5. Create a reward system
Encouraging innovation in the firm through words is good. But, if it does not transform into tangible rewards, most employees lose motivation. To successfully drive innovation in your firm, create a reward system for employees based on different parameters.
Moreover, you should ensure employees are rewarded for pitching good ideas, even if you don't implement them. This approach will motivate your team to think of more innovative ideas in the future.
6. Don't fear experimentation (or even failure)
As we know, accountants tend to like certainty. One of the primary reasons for the lack of innovation in the profession is the fear of failure. However, the premise of innovation involves taking risks. As such, you need to accept that sometimes failures happen and move on or learn from them. The only thing to evaluate is the level of risk involved in the idea.
7. Allow time to innovate
Innovation is a creative process. However, employees who are always busy will have no time to think of anything apart from daily work.
To truly drive innovation in your firm, you must create a flexible working environment that not only motivates employees to develop good ideas, but provides the time needed to create them. For one, you can allow employees time off of their regular tasks to ideate or plan events centered around innovation for them to rejuvenate from their daily work lives. Whatever you choose, it should be fairly open or even focused around the goal of encouraging creativity and new ideas.
Creating pathways to innovation in your CPA firm ensures guaranteed growth for the firm and the employees. First, an innovation-friendly firm attracts great talent. These days professionals prefer workplaces that encourage out-of-the-box thinking.
Secondly, as the firm comes up with ideas to enhance operational efficiency, client communication and customer satisfaction, retention increases. Allowing time for employees to be innovative nurtures growth, increases productivity and cultivates loyalty.
If your firm has not yet started the journey toward innovation, I hope these tips suggest how to move forward.
