I recently visited a large client who leases a beautiful downtown office space. It was a busy weekday morning, but the building was deserted. When I asked if I was forgetting about some kind of holiday, she laughed and said, “Since COVID there’s literally no one ever here.” What struck me about her comment was that she didn’t seem worried. She knew her staff was very productive working from home. Morale was high and they were getting their work done on time. Besides, the firm had several more years on its lease, and the cost was already in the budget. Her firm also had well-established telework best practices and updated metrics for measuring a remote workforce.Unfortunately, this firm is the exception, not the rule in our profession.
Like all professional service firms, accounting firms have to start asking themselves what kind of organization they want to be and what kind of culture they wish to have if no one is coming to the office. If your firm is big on recruiting, training and advancing young members of the profession, you need to maintain a physical presence for training and mentoring purposes. In other words, you need “butts in the seats.” But, if your growth strategy is based on hiring all-star talent and letting them do their work wherever they prefer, that’s a very different office setup.
Since COVID surfaced over two years ago, all the people who stopped coming to the office have developed well-established work-from-home habits. Despite the free parking, onsite gym and gourmet kitchen you built for them, they have no intention of returning to long commutes, less family time and a conventional office setup. You may have the best office furniture money can buy, but you can’t compete with an employee’s favorite chair at home or having their own kitchen right down the hall from their office.Do you want to disrupt your team’s momentum, simply to have more butts in the seats or to justify an expensive lease?
The way you do business keeps changing, and so will your office needs. I anticipate a second hit to commercial real estate when all the medium-term and longer-term leases expire. But for now, innovative firms are learning to rebuild their organizations based on the way things are likely to be in the future — not based on how they wish things were (or used to be).
Can’t remote workers be well-managed?
Veteran CPAs tell me they don’t feel like they can’t monitor teleworkers as efficiently as they can when they’re in the office. The issue is not working in the office vs. working from home. It’s about developing the right measurables to measure, motivate and promote your remote team. You need to address the core issue — your management style.
If you’ve been a CPA for 20 or 30 years, I’m sure you feel like you’ve paid your dues by burning the midnight oil at the office, with grumpy bosses, long commutes and diminished family time. Suddenly, you see younger team members expecting to advance without lots of face time at the office. It’s easy to assume they’re entitled and/or are unwilling to work as hard as you did coming up the ranks. That’s not the case anymore. They may be working just as hard as you did early in your career, maybe harder. Maybe time in the office is not the best metric for measuring productivity, advancement potential and commitment to the firm.Maybe you feel you can’t communicate as effectively with your team when they’re not physically present in the same office. Not true. Of course, you can communicate remotely. It’s just not your preferred way of interacting with (and managing) your team. You can try to impose more face time at the office. Some employees will be willing to come back to the office. But others, including some of your most talented team members, will opt out and move to other firms.
Work from home is not a fad
Just remember that the work-from-home trend is not going away soon. Where your people do their work is becoming less important than how they do your work and the results they can deliver. The same should apply to where and how you manage people.
Remember my client with the ultramodern downtown office? An awful lot was happening; it just wasn’t happening within the walls of the main office. As an accounting firm, you need to decide what kind of work do you need to get done and whether or not clients need to meet you in person to feel they’re getting the full value of your expertise.Again, if you are onboarding lots of recent graduates, you may find it hard to do your training fully remote from all over the country. Suppose that’s the case, fine. Just remember that your pool of applicants will be diminished quickly. But if your firm has mostly seasoned professionals doing primarily virtual CFO work, it doesn’t matter where they are. They don’t need much guidance from you and certainly don’t need close supervision. On the plus side, they don’t need a private corner office (and onsite administrative assistant) from you either. That cost savings eventually finds its way to your bottom line.
Be careful about falling back on the mindset of: “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” An incredible amount has changed in our profession over an incredibly short time. The rules are constantly changing, and you have to be willing to adjust as well. For more on adjusting to change, see my article
What’s your take on office space and managing a remote workforce? I’d
