Everything you need to know about recruiting and retention

Building on more than a decade's worth of data from our Best Firms to Work For, this session will explore the top strategies for attracting and retaining staff, covering tried-and-tested methods to develop employees that are engaged for the long-term.

Transcription:

Dan Hood (00:11):

We're going to kick off our next session, which is also our last session right now, which is just me talking. I know everyone's very excited about last session, right? And I can't see you, so if you slip out early, I won't know and I won't hold it against you when I come off the stage in 50 minutes and there's no one here. I'm not going to blame any of you, but it is a pretty important topic that we wanted to cover in some detail, and it's everything you need to know about recruiting and retention. This is obviously an issue that has been talked about probably in every session over the past three years, right? Three years, well true over the past three years, but really the last three days here, it is just a huge issue for accounting firms, a huge challenge, the pipeline shortage, the lack of staff, all those sorts of issues to creating capacity problems for every firm or almost every firm I should say.

(00:59)

There are some firms that are pretty comfortable. They're in the very, very, very small minority and in many cases they've figured out a lot of the things that I'm going to be talking about over the course of this session. And I'm going to do two things. I'm going to take a sort of broader, high level look at recruiting and retention, different ways to think about it on a broad strategic level and almost a professional level the way the profession needs to think about it and that'll impact how firms need to think about it. And then I'm going to talk very specifically about some actual small, almost micro level tactics that you can use to recruit and retain more successfully and for longer. For the longer term, I should say, a lot of the information I'm going to be talking about here comes from our best firms to work for survey, which we've been running for about 16 years.

(01:47)

So a lot of the data we're getting from that, it's literally, it's stuff we know from firms that are very successful, that have low turnover rates that are firing on all cylinders when it comes to recruiting and retention, that's where a lot of this information comes from, and I'll make it clear as we go through where I'm bringing that stuff in, but that's really what we use to back up a lot of what we're going to be talking about today. So let's start with the fact that when it comes to hiring and recruiting and retention, hiring accountants isn't the only solution. There are lots of other options, and this is the thing we've talked about in a number of different sessions. I've mentioned it. A lot of our speakers have mentioned it is the need to stop assuming that everything needs a person. Everything needs an accountant to be done.

(02:27)

Every role should be filled by an accountant. Now, firms have been moving away from this for a while, but they need to continue that and accelerate it. There are lots and lots and lots and lots of things done in your firm, particularly tasks done in your firm that do not to need to be done by an accountant. There is lots of work that your accountants and your CPAs are doing that they don't need to be doing. Things like onboarding things, a lot of client service sort of stuff. Where you want your CPAs and your accountants to be engaged primarily is in stuff that requires that high level expertise. Stuff that requires the genius level technical skills that the C P A and accountants bring. A lot of that other work shouldn't be done by accountants and CVAs. It should be done by the many, many other people who are out there who bring skill sets that actually in some cases make them better at that than accountants.

(03:13)

We'll dive into that a little bit more deeply. But you think about things like I talk about onboarding or client relationship management. Often the skills that go into that are not the skills that make a strong accountant, which isn't to say that there aren't plenty of accountants that have those. I'm going to say there aren't plenty of accountants that have those, but it doesn't mean accountants can't have those, but it means that you can find them in lots of places outside of accounting graduates and CPA candidates. So think about that in terms of remember that a lot of the roles you have in your firm don't need to be filled by accountants and anyone's that don't shouldn't be because that's going to open up your candidate pool much, much more broadly and allow you to find ways to bring in more people and to fill the roles you need to fill.

(03:53)

Fractional staffing is another solution the firms should be looking at. More and more, this is available. Someone mentioned audit club, which offers fractional auditors, which is a relatively new offering, but there's plenty of places out there offering you fractional tax staff, fractional accounting staff, people who want a different way of a different career, a different form of accounting career for themselves. They often bring technical skills, but they're available to you in a stopgap kind of measure. So again, you don't need to have a full-time person in place for that outsourcing and offshoring, we've talked about this a tremendous amount over the course of the last couple of days. It is a big and growing area, particularly over the last three or four years. This is an option when you look at, again, you look at a set of tasks or a job description, say which parts of this are, can be hard, can be outsourced, can go to somebody else.

(04:41)

In some cases it can even go to another accounting firm, but there are also plenty of outsourcers and offshoring opportunities for that. So think about that as you look at a position, say, do we need to fill this position or we're unable to hold people in this position over the course of time. Hiring non-accountants. Again, I think that's the biggest opportunity for accounting firms really to help with the staff shortage is to just say what doesn't require an accountant and what's the actual skillset there? Again, a lot of times it's a soft skills kind of thing. It's a client relationship. In some cases it may be a technical, but non accounting technical, it may be an engineering issue. It may be something that's specific to an industry you're serving, right? Where the expertise can come from Someone who's been in the industry for a long time doesn't necessarily have an accounting background, but they may know a lot about the industry that they worked in and they can come on and partner with the accountants in your firm to put out better services and to solve those capacity issues.

(05:35)

Partnering, this is an option I think we're going to see a lot more of over the future. If anybody was in the session with Mike Maxim and Bob Lewis a little bit earlier talked about the, he looks ahead to three to five years and sees accounting firms doing very narrow specific work for a very narrow specific set of clients and then providing a lot of the other traditional accounting services that a lot of people have expected to from a one-stop shop providing those through a sort of network of other accounting firms that focus each of them individually on those services. So you may have a client, you're helping them with building a business in airplane manufacturing, but you're not handling their accounting or their tax. You partner with an accounting firm that focuses on tax for that industry or focuses it on accounting or bookkeeping for that industry, whatever the case may be.

(06:19)

And then also partnering with all kinds of other professional services organizations to fill out the range of services that may have the past. Have accounting firms might have said, well, should we providing them be providing that ourselves, that'll reduce your capacity issues, reduce your need to hire all the staff necessarily internally because you're partnering with other firms that have already hopefully solved those capacity and hiring problems themselves, or at least it's their problem and it's not yours anymore. And finally, automation integration and AI can't be ignored in this. Any task at your firm that can be automated should be automated. Any task that can be made easier through integration of different software's should be done that way. Anything that AI can apply to, a lot of that's going to happen sort of automatically. You're, the software you use is going to bake AI into it, so it'll make things better.

(07:10)

But be aware that, be aware that you can find solutions that will remove the need to hire a person. Now, we're not going to find that accounting firms are getting smaller in staff because they're automating this work and we're not hiring any more accountants. There's plenty of work that accountants need to do. You're going to be hiring them, but you're not going to be having them do a lot of the, well, I'll call it grunt work. We'll go ahead and call it grunt work. They're not going to have to do a lot of that, right? That's going to make them make you a more attractive workplace that you've taken care of that. It's also going to mean as you look at your headcount, you're going to say, well, I may not have to have that many accountants for that work. You're going to want them for other work, for your advisory services, for all the other high level technical accounting work that you're going to be doing for the auditing work that you may be doing, whatever the case it may be.

(07:51)

You're going to want those accountants, but you're not going to want them for that grunt work, which will make you a more attractive workplace. So I think as a sort of a broad idea, when you look at your recruiting and retention issues, say, what is this job that I'm looking at? Break it into its component parts and look at each one of those and say, all right, does a person need to do this? Does an accountant need to do this? Could I automate this? Could I offshore it? Could I partner for it? Just approach them differently. The whole thing is there's a great, if anybody knows Dan Burris who used to work with, I still does work with the Maryland Association of CPAs on what's called the anticipatory CPA. He's got a whole thing where the idea is you can kind of predict the future by asking the right questions and thinking about it in a different way.

(08:31)

And he says, one of the ways you do it is should skip. If you're going to try to get ahead of things, you skip the problem. So he talks about working with a company that said, we cannot find enough, we can't hire enough engineers. And he said, well, the answer is just don't hire engineers. Find some other way to solve that problem. Instead of saying, our problem is that we can't hire enough engineers. The problem is what do we use the engineers for and we need to get that done. How else can we do it? So there's a similar thing here. Instead of saying we can't hire enough CPAs, we can't hire enough accountants, say, what are we doing and what do we need to have done and who can do it? As opposed to saying, we just can't find enough accountants. So again, think as broadly as you can.

(09:06)

Break your roles and responsibilities down as narrowly and as granularly as you can and then just start finding ways to assign them to non-accountants. Now, there will still be difficulties finding staff for anything in general. The expectation, as I said, I mentioned a little bit earlier, there's expectation that a significant number of people are dropping out of the workforce because of covid, because of long covid in some cases or just because they went through the pandemic and enjoyed whatever, found things in that lifestyle that they enjoyed and they're just leaving the workforce as a sort of regular employees. That's happening all across the board, not just in accounting. So we're expecting that this shortage is going to last for the next 10 years. So this is a constant problem, but you can get around it or start getting around it by thinking differently about hiring and retention.

(09:54)

Instead of saying how we can't hire enough people start saying, how do we get these tasks done without hiring people or with hiring different kinds of people? So that's one thing I wanted to talk about at a higher level to think about. Second one, if I can hit this button is now to move on before I get to very specific strategies and tactics that can use for recruiting and retention is to talk about the importance of engagement. This is specifically obviously for retention. This list comes directly from our best firms to work for list and it's slightly different every year, but it's basically ends up with the same larger message. There's 10 things that they rate every year saying, Hey, what's the most important thing to you about your work? And I should probably explain this survey in a little bit more detail so you understand where it's coming from.

(10:37)

This is a survey we do every year, So it's only firms that want to participate in and do, it's not controlled or anything like that. So most of the firms that are in it tend to be firms that are doing fairly well. And what we do is two things. There's a survey that firm administration fills out that talks about all the benefits they offer, all the mentoring, they offer all their literally things like do you pay for insurance and when do you pay for insurance and how many vacation days do you give and what kind other kind of benefits are there? And literally what do you think people like about your firm? It's a huge long spreadsheet that they fill out. I'm always impressed by the patients and endurance of the firm administrators that have to fill it out, but it yields this tremendous amount of information about what firms are doing to recruit and chain people.

(11:18)

We're going to get into that in a minute. The other part of it is an anonymous survey of staff on a whole host of different issues, most of which amount to do You like it there? What do you like about it? What keeps you there? What's engaging to you? And there's a bunch of things that come out of it, but one of the best parts is this list of what's engaging you at your firm, what keeps you at your firm? Why do you like working at the place you work at? And it's this list of 10 things. Like I said, this list often looks very similar. Some things may move up and may move down. I'm not going to read you through every point of it. You'll get the slide and you can through it. But the most important thing about it is if you look at most of them, they're emotional.

(11:59)

They are not. I get paid though. Pay is somewhere in there. I think I always forget what number is because it moves around from year to year. But anyways, pay is obviously a thing that keeps people in place and it's important and you can't skimp on it. But most of the things that make people feel really good about a place and want to stay are emotional. It's things like I feel like I'm part of a team. I have confidence. I like the work I do. The organization treats me like a person, not a number that if I do good work, I'll be rewarded. That's more of a straightforward compensation kind of thing. But a lot of the other ones are really how they feel about you, and that is not something that can be accomplished with money. You have to have money, you have to pay them enough money and you have to keep on that regularly.

(12:40)

But a lot of the other things that are strongly related correlated to engagement are these emotional feelings, these emotional things of I work for a team, we're all closely knit. People pay attention to what I want. People pay attention to what I need. I feel listened to, I feel heard. And that's a really difficult thing to create that it is very easy to say, well, relatively easy to say, we will pay you market plus salary. It is very easy to say a relatively easy again to say, we will have great perks in the office or we'll give you extra technology to work from home or we'll be flexible about that. It is hard to create that sort of emotional connection. And this is a big issue as we work remotely because most firms, most businesses across the country have no idea or have less of an idea about how to create a strong retention culture in a remote or hybrid environment.

(13:30)

So there is a lot of learning going on in this area and it's difficult, there is no question because the old models often don't apply, particularly when you have mixed teams of some people who are in the office on a regular basis. Some people are not in the office in the regular basis, even if they're in the area and then some people who knows where they are, they're half a continent away. These present some serious management challenges and it requires managers and leaders to go a little bit further beyond to create that emotional connection with staff. It's means things like scheduling regular check-ins with people who work remotely or hybrid or are literally geographically distant, used to be right. You can create some of that emotional connection just by passing people in the hall, cracking a joke, you talk to them for a couple minutes, how was your weekend?

(14:12)

Those bonds get created almost automatically if you're physically present with people, but when you're not, you have to work at them. And like I said, it's stuff like setting up a regularly scheduled 10 to 15 minute catch up with remote staff on a regular basis. That creates an emotional connection. It also gives you a chance obviously, to monitor their work and make sure that they're doing what you need them to do, but you need to include as part of that, a sense of them getting to know you as a person and knowing that you're getting to know them as a person and that there is that sort of connection there. It's not really a sort of touchy feely lovey thing. It's really just familiarity and a sense of, Hey, listen, we're paying attention to you. You're not just work that you submit. You are also somebody we think of as an employee, just like any employee here, just like anybody was for the last 80 years of the profession before we got into the current remote and hybrid environment.

(14:59)

So building those emotional connections are important. Some of the things we're going to talk about later will be specific tactics about creating that kind of emotional engagement. And some of them, my favorite ones involve things like involving their family in corporate events or firm events, caring about their paying attention to their family. These are questions you're going to have to make sure that you ask in a hybrid or remote environment that you wouldn't even think about asking in person. They would just come up, they'd be like, oh, you're doing over the weekend? Yeah, I did this. I was my kids. Oh, you have kids? How many kids have that sort of stuff comes up naturally in person. You kind of have to force it a little bit for the remote and hybrid environment. But it's important because as I said, look at this list, the vast majority of it is that sort of emotional feeling and that emotional connection to their job.

(15:41)

I will throw one thing other thing in here we I'd the type of work that I do. So if everyone's ever had a chance to see Marcus Buckingham, he's a workplace engagement expert and he goes around and spends pretty much his whole life studying what makes people like their jobs and their work and he does a lot of work with ADP. That's where I first ran into him. He talked about one of the keys to engagement is making sure that people like a certain percentage of their work specific tasks that they're doing. And he said it's around 20%. You want to make sure that everybody on a regular basis likes very much likes 20% of what they do. And it should be almost at the task level. It's not a broad sort of, oh, well I like working with clients. Oh well I like getting the tax return filed and finished.

(16:25)

It's very much specific sort of things like, I like planning and strategy meetings with clients, or I like saving my clients specific money in this kind of way, or I like mentoring staff on a regular basis or whatever the case may be. Specifically, you want them to at least 20% of the tasks that they're doing, not just their broad job and not just broad definitions of what they're doing but specific tasks. And he says that if you go over 20%, if someone loves 50% of what they do, they will be no more engaged than if they like 20% or love 20%, I should say love 20%. But if you start dropping below 20% at 19%, 18%, 17%, if they're spending that much less of their time doing things that they love, it has almost a catastrophic effect. Each percentage point below really drives people away and really gets some grit in their teeth and really gets them thinking about going somewhere else.

(17:14)

So you want to check in on that. That is a great question to ask. What are the things you love doing every day on a regular basis and think about and think about how you can maximize their time spent on that. I dunno how you would measure whether it's exactly 20% of what they do, but it's worth paying attention to that because they'll, as I said, according to his data and he's done actual sort of statistically meaningful surveys on this kind of stuff. Every percentage point below that drives people away. So you want to have a sense of what their workload looks like, looks specifically in terms of the things they like doing, the work they enjoy. So it's worth paying attention to as I said, because that all feeds into that sort of emotional satisfaction with the work they're doing and that you're making sure that there's a certain threshold that they're hitting and wherever possible to maximize that.

(17:59)

And one of the great things, obviously the larger staff you have, you may be able to switch tasks around somebody may really enjoy one task that somebody else really hates and you can arbitrage that and move things around. You may find you can't, but you may find that you can automate tasks that they don't like. You may be able to find a solution that takes care of some of the work they really don't like or you may be able to assign them more of the work they really do, but paying attention to that level will go a long way to building that sort of emotional satisfaction with what they're doing. And then you tie that with an interest in them as a person and making sure that they feel connected to the firm and doing the extra work necessary to create that bond through a hybrid or remote environment.

(18:38)

And you're starting to really get at one of the key elements of retention, which again is that emotional engagement with what they do. I always talk about, I assume we've been doing the best firms to work for list for a long time. They also do obviously do a lot of extra statistical analysis of what's what drives engagement beyond this sort of thing. And one of the key stories they always talk about is you want to make memories. You want staff to be making memories with you and you want to be making memories with them and for them and it's, we're going to get into some of the sort of specific things that you can do with your staff, but you want them to feel a connection through shared experiences. In a lot of cases that's firm outings interesting or weird or unusual firm outings, but it's also as simple as the annual summer outing, the annual summer day.

(19:23)

That kind thing doesn't necessarily need to be axe throwing or something crazy or escape rooms, but you need them to create those shared emotional memories and shared emotional events that bind them together and create sort of the shared memory. That's a lot of the culture of Affirm is that sense of, hey, we've all been doing these things together and we did that. Remember that time we went out for karaoke or when we all went out for mountain climbing or whatever the case may be, or do you remember that time we were all there over the weekend preparing for that major client presentation or getting that giant deliverable in place, whatever the case may be, those kinds of things go to a long way towards, again, binding people to your firm. Alright, with that, I'm going to go on to some more specific things. This is a combined list from things we learned from the best firms to work for but also as part of our top 100 firm survey.

(20:12)

We ask a lot of firms, what are you doing? What are you paying attention to? Obviously staffing has been a big issue for them. For, well for I would say the past three or four years, it's really more like the past 10 years, but over the past three or four years it's really risen to absolutely the top constant. We ask them what's the three biggest problems you're having and it's always staffing, staffing, staffing. We get a lot of that. The top three issues we're facing of that, so they're paying a lot of attention to that. So between the best firms to work for which are not just large firms, it goes down to firms as small as 15 people, but also the top 100 firms in terms of their strategies and what they're paying attention to. This is sort of a distillation of all that.

(20:49)

I'm going to run through these because some of them are not clear from the short notes that I made here, but more money, obviously this is table stakes. I've talked about the importance of emotional engagement and you can't overestimate overstate that, but you also can't overstate the importance of making sure that you are at least paying market rate and I don't mean market rate for just your area, I mean market rate for accounting and that is rising across the country. One of the downsides of remote work and the ability for people to work from anywhere, for anyone from any part of the country is that there is, it's not yet complete and it's not yet even all the way, even halfway to where it's going to be, but there is a degree to which salaries are regularizing across the country so that some firms said, well this is great.

(21:35)

I'm in New York City where salaries are in crazy high and I can hire people in Idaho where salaries may be low. I don't know if salaries in Idaho are low, I assume they are, but let's assume they are for this story or remote rural Maine or wherever the case may be. I can hire people in all those places and arbitrage that difference. That difference is going away and one of the reasons it's going away is because all those firms are rushing in and saying, well, I'll hire the guy from Idaho. So that ability to differentiate is disappearing and that means sort of everybody's rates are rising, you just have to be able to pay them. We saw not in the top 100 firms list this year because it was a year after the great resignation, but I'll tell you during the great resignation, a lot of top 100 firms talked about doing salary reviews two and in some cases three times a year.

(22:19)

Now that was like I said, the height of the great resignation when gazillions of people were leaving and we were all panicking that everyone was going to leave every job ever, and I don't know where they were all going to go because everyone was leaving, but there was a big issue and they literally did salary reviews too, and in some cases three years to make sure people would stay. It's a little bit past that now, but we are still very serious about making sure that you're paying people what they need and that this will often be a thing that will drive them away and it's the kind of thing that goes on top of, well, I'm not really emotionally engaged with the work I do or with the firm that I'm with and I can make more money elsewhere, so you don't want to give them any excuse to leave more benefits.

(22:58)

We're seeing every year we see new benefits added. They're often different. This year the big benefit was extended parental leave, not just maternal or paternal, but just extended parental including for adoptions significantly across a lot of the top one firms. This was a benefit they added and the reason they added it in some cases was clearly they didn't have a lot of it before or their parental leaves were a little bit shorter, and so they've extended that and you see that every year you see a new benefit added and it generally tends to sweep through a lot of accounting firms as they all pick it up and go, Ooh, that's a great benefit, and it's one we haven't been offering because what happens is more and more we're seeing the firms that are best able to recruit and retain staff are converging on a large set of tactics and strategies.

(23:45)

A lot of them are talked about here. A lot of them were in the engagement thing, but we're finding there's less differentiation. So when we started, the best firms worked for list, for instance, 16 years ago. The difference between the number one firm and the number 100 firm was enormous. They were all pretty good firms doing well at working with their staff, but the number one firm was really amazing and you looked at everything they were doing and all they were offering their employees and all the different ways they went after engagement and made sure that the benefits were top notch and made sure that people felt were enjoyed their work and that they were mentored and coached in all the different ways in which you could be make an employee happy. That top firm was hitting all of those, the bottom firm and a lot of the firms weren't hitting all those.

(24:24)

They might be hitting if there's 10 great ways to keep employees, they might have only been hitting two or three or four over the course of the 16 years that we've been doing that list. However, that's changed. Every firm on the list is now doing everything. You can't pick and choose which things you're going to do use to recruit and retain staff. You need to use all of them or a lot of them. You really need to be firing on all cylinders to make sure that you're keeping staff because lots of other firms are ready to do all the other things. So there's no magic bullet or silver bullet or whatever kind of bullet you want to think of, and we probably shouldn't be using bullets. That goes back to the war on talent, which is what we don't want to have. It's not a war on talent, it's a war for talent, and we want them to feel comfortable and not like they're facing a bullet.

(25:07)

But point is you really need to be hitting all of the different ways to make people feel engaged, valued, and it's your place. Your firm is a place they want to work. So again, more benefits. We see that, like I said, every year we see new sets of benefits as firms explore new ways, they're looking for new solutions to make themselves more attractive. There's a little bit of, it's not really a race at the bottom, it's kind of a race at the top, but there's a little bit of that. You're constantly looking for ways to differentiate yourself from other firms. Pay is always great, but there's a limit to how much you can pay before you start being unable to run a profitable firm, and that's why they look for some of these other areas. He going through career development, this is one of those ones that works for everybody.

(25:46)

This is a great way to recruit and retain staff to give them the skills they need to help them build their career. But it's also great for the firm. There's the old line about the managing partner. Someone says, Hey, we now need to start a training program, and the managing partner says, well, if I start a training program, they'll just leave. And somebody says, well, if you don't have a training program, they'll stay and then they won't have any training and they won't know what they're doing. So this is a benefit for both. You train them, give them new skills, give them new capabilities, expose them to new areas, build, help them build up their long-term value in their career. They will also then be able to apply all those skills at your firm. So we see a lot of that career development. We also see that particularly as more and more firms move towards advisory services, they're training their staff in those skills.

(26:31)

A lot of them are the soft skills or the client handling skills, client development skills, the presentation skills, the communication skills that go to those advisory services. That's a big area for career development. We also a lot of leadership training. How do you manage people? There's not a, accounting firms have not traditionally been, and most businesses to be fair are not good at this. At training people how to manage people and how to be good leaders. It's a very difficult set of skills. No, very few people have them naturally, and so we're seeing that a lot more as firms realize, wow, we need to be better at leadership. We need to be better at management because we need to make sure that we're retaining these people and because we need to make sure that we're getting the most out of them while making them feel engaged and want to stay at the firm, they're focusing on those kinds of skills as well.

(27:12)

So all those things that go into making people better in their careers, better in leadership roles, better able to advance, whether it's at your firm or elsewhere, those are big things that firms are doing to help keep people on board for as long as possible. We're also seeing, as a part of that, I should say we're seeing more and more, particularly at larger firms, but we are seeing more and more people go away and come back. Sort of the boomerang thing. They maybe they work in industry for a while, maybe they start their own firm, either it doesn't work out or it's successful, but then they realize, Hey, I wasn't really meant to run a firm a lot of work. Whereas as everybody here who's a managing partner or a partner firm, it's a lot of work. Everybody knows that and they realize it. In some cases, they want to come back or they develop some expertise. They go into industry and work as a CFO somewhere for a while, and then you know what, after a while they want to move to a different career or try something different and they can come back to a firm as an expert with more expertise at their firm. So we're seeing more of that. Firms making an effort to keep track of people who leave and just keeping in front of them being like, Hey, how's it going? You're an alumni. We have an interest in you. We always had an interest in you as an employee. That doesn't stop just because you left, and that's an opportunity in some cases to bring them back later on in their career when they change what they're doing. So that's all a big part of career development. Slightly different but related is mentoring and coaching obviously, and a lot of things I should say.

(28:33)

A lot of these things are, I don't want to say easier for large firms, but they're more within reach, right? They have more resources, they have more money to devote to these things. They have more staff, they have larger HR departments, for instance, to coordinate a lot of these efforts and that's certainly true, but some of these things are also available to anybody, and I would say that career development, mentoring and coaching are available to anybody if you're willing to put the time in, no matter how small a firm you're running, if you're willing to put the time in to work with your younger staff, teach them what's, how to develop what's important in their career and in some cases that's figuring out helping them figure out what they want. We were talking earlier with David Wolf, Gale and Bob Lewis about understanding what you want.

(29:13)

As much as firm leaders need to understand what they want, staff need to understand what you want. There is too many options in accounting to just sort of figure that the flow will take you where you need to go. There's too many ways to be an accountant. Too many ways to have a career path throughout the profession in this era to just sort of float. You really need to as early as possible, take some control of your career, make some decisions, figure out where you want to go. You can change it as you do, but you need to be thinking about it throughout your career from the very first moment and helping staff do that is a great way. One, to help make them aware of the opportunities at your firm for a career path, but also to help them feel engaged. If you're taking an interest in where they're going, what their career looks like, what kind of skills they need to develop to move up, whether it's within your firm or outside, that is a huge indication of engagement and of the value you place on them.

(30:04)

They sense if someone's telling me, we don't really, it doesn't matter where you go, we just want to make sure that you going, you're going where you need to go and we'll help you get there. That tells them a lot about you, and that's a place, that's a place a lot of people want to be. Is it a place where somebody says, where of an interest in you as a person regardless, just as someone who completes a lot of tasks. So mentoring and coaching is a big issue and one that's worth spending a lot of time on, and again, that is not an area that requires money, salary, right? Absolutely. Technology. These are areas that cost money, benefits that'll often cost money, but that career development, mentoring and coaching is just a level of interest and the willingness to do it. Empowerment, this is one that people talk a lot about, particularly because of the decline in grunt work, right?

(30:45)

We're automating a lot of tasks, software's doing a lot of the work for, or we're offshoring or outsourcing, so a lot of that entry level grunt work is out of the way and people say, well, this is great. You can empower staff. They can start doing exciting work with clients right away, or they can start doing exciting work in advisory services or whatever the case may be. They're often not ready for that when they come in, they're not necessarily ready to be empowered that way, but there are other ways you can empower them. You can bring them along. We talk, a bunch of people have mentioned bringing staff along on sales calls. That doesn't mean you expect them to make sales calls or to be a meaningful part of the presentation. Some of it's a presentation to clients say, listen, we've got staff and some of our staff are less than 50 years old.

(31:23)

That's great, but the flip side of it is it gives them a sense. Again, it's that career building, the mentoring, coaching. There's a bit of power just to be in the room just to hear what's going on, to understand it. Then there's other ways you can empower them, and we see this a lot with firms where they internally will give younger staff control over certain areas of the firm. In some cases, it's as simple as like you're the party planning committee, you're the fund committee, you're the event committee, but in some cases it's we make you responsible or partially responsible or a big part of are recruiting efforts. We send younger staff out to colleges to talk to the people who are roughly their age or who are just a few years behind them. That kind of involvement of younger staff is great. You can also bring them in to elements that are a little bit more core or strategic to the firm.

(32:11)

You can do that. You may want to be careful about how you manage it. Don't make it clear that you're not turning over control of the firm to them, but there is no reason that you can't say, get the input of high potential partners or high potential potential partners on the direction of the firm. Say, listen, this is what we're thinking about. Does this kind of thing make sense to you? Do you have thoughts on it? You may work in an area that we're specifically focused on expanding our services and what do you see when you talk to clients when you're on sales call? Do these things make sense to you? Some of it may be internal. You can talk to them about technology you're using, bringing them in on things like evaluating news, new tools, new technologies that you're using. Again, it doesn't mean that you're turning control of it over to them, but it means you're listening to them and asking their opinion and getting their advice.

(32:50)

You do and should take that advice into account, but again, you're not giving them control of the process. You're just making them heard and then you will benefit from it. There's no question, so it's two a two-pronged thing, right? You get the benefit of their expertise, but you also make them know that you're listening to them and their input is valuable things, and this is another one I always love because relatively easy to do is after tax season, sort of post tax season reviews, how things went after action reviews, this is a great opportunity for people to know that you listen to them, you care about what they think, do that at all levels of the firm. Say what went right this season? What went wrong? You can't just sit on it. You need to act on some of it, but again, you're not turning control over it.

(33:33)

You're listening to what they have to say and you're taking into account their suggestions, their criticisms, their problems. It'll make your tax season better next year. It will make any process you do better if you take that into account on a reasonable basis. The other issue there is make sure it all points that you're making it clear that you're not turning control over. Not saying, we're asking you how to run our firm. It's saying, we want your input on it. We're going to listen to it. Next up, regular recognition. There are a million ways to do this, but it is important. It does not always need to involve money, though it often does. We hear lots and lots of stories from best firms to work for where managers, partners and managers are given discretionary budgets of, it could be as little as a hundred bucks a quarter, but in some cases it's much more where they're able to just on the spot say, that's spectacular.

(34:21)

What you just did was great. The way you solved that client problem, the way you went above and beyond to do that or the way you went above and beyond to help a colleague with a problem, the way you crossed departmental boundaries to solve somebody else's issue or to work as a collaborative team, whatever the case may be, they're giving people the ability to on the spot, recognize people. Now, sometimes it's money, sometimes it's it's ringing a bell sometimes there are a lot of surprising of technology tools that allow you to do that kind of instant recognition across a platform that says, Hey, I'm Pat and so-and-so on the back. Everybody in the firm should know they did this great thing. There are firms that do that on a sort of weekly basis at a town hall kind of calls say, Hey, who are we calling out?

(34:59)

Or a departmental basis saying, who are we calling out? Who went above and beyond that? Regular recognition is great. If you can tie it to money, fantastic, but it's not necessary that it'd be tied to money. A particular wrinkle on this that I really like is allowing peer recognition. This doesn't all have to come for partners and managers. This can come from other people at the firm. Anybody at any level can say, Hey, I saw Bob do this, or I saw Marcia do that. It was great. It made my life easier, or I think it made that client client's life easier or it made the firm look good. Whatever the case may be. Allowing recognition to come from all levels, from the bottom, from middle, from peers, from partners, from managers. I don't know of any firms that allow clients to do that, but anytime you hear from a client who says, Hey, so and so was great, they really solved my problem or they helped me out, or they're just a nice person, or I really like listening to them or talking to them, that is worth sharing and sharing beyond just with the person it involves, share it with the rest of the firm.

(35:54)

This all goes to things on a broader level. You can talk about things like making sure you're communicating. We're going to talk about that a little bit with regular communication, but celebrating wherever possible, anything you can celebrate, you should be celebrating because that again makes people feel they understand, listen, I'm part of a bigger team. It's not just me. It's all in this together. Don't be annoying. This is one of those ones that is a target that moves every year, but it's things like it used to be was a big one was don't worry about business dress. Allow people to do dress for your day. This is the new standard is people can dress for their day. You give them the control over what they should be wearing. They should know you be able to set some clear expectations of if you're meeting with a client, you should wear a business suit. That's fine, but in other cases, you know want to say you should be able to, you're a professional, you're an adult, you should be able to determine what you want. It's annoying to be told what to wear as long as you've committed sort of our general expectation as a firm, people should be able to make that decision on their own.

(36:51)

This is the big one. The big issue where firms are being not just just accounting firms, but businesses of all kinds are being annoying now is trying to dictate return to the office. There may be good reasons to want people to come back to the office, but as much control as you can give people over where they work and when they work, the less annoying you'll be. People got used to working remotely. People got used to determining their own schedule and it's obvious. I mean, you can see it's going to be obviously annoying to be forced to reconfirm, recon, conform to a schedule that's not the free one they had, so you want to be careful. You look at the things you're doing and say, what's this? What's the impact? How are people going to feel about this? I use those two examples. I think they're the best ones.

(37:30)

There aren't that many other ways that are where firms are being annoying, but that the dress code one has been a problem for a long time. A lot of firms have been moving to dress for your day, but they can continue that move and then again, giving people or trying to take back control of people's schedules that they've gotten used to having control. You got to be very careful about that and be very careful about how you present it and why you present it and to make sure that you're not just saying, come into the office and people are going to sit there doing the exact same thing they do at home. The worst thing you can do is have people come in and then do zoom meetings from the office. That's the worst possible thing you could do, but if you can find ways to make sure that when they come into the office they're doing stuff that's useful, they're getting in-person training, which is a great one of those things.

(38:09)

You're doing team building exercises, you're doing blue skying and whiteboarding and planning, big sort of strategic planning things for clients or for particular engagements. Have those things be the things you do when you have them come into the office, if you have them come into the office, so make sure that you're not just having them come in so that you can see them sitting at a desk working. That's annoying. Alright, moving on to the second thing. Hybrid workplaces. I've sort of talked about this a little bit, but people got used to it. People got used to being able to work where and when they wanted. This is the thing that I think more firms need to adjust to and need to accept because it's going to limit who you can hire and not just because it limits literally, you know, can hire from anywhere in the country and in some ways cases anywhere in the world, so refusing to do that will limit your pool that way, but it's also going to limit your pool.

(38:59)

Even if people who live in your town or live in your region and could come into your office on a regular basis, but they're like, well, if I don't have to, I don't want it. Some people will and that's great, but you want to be careful in making sure that you give them the option. Help with the CPA exam. This is one I'm always surprised at the number of firms that don't offer or offer very limited help with CPA exam. This again is a money thing in many cases, right? Paying for the exam itself or paying for CPA exam prep opportunities, I understand that costs money and there's limits to that, but things like making sure they have the time to take the test, the time to study this is huge. I making sure they're encouraged to do it.

(39:36)

A lot of firms just sort of say, well, they know they're supposed to become a CPA or we say they should become a CPA once a year. Make it clear as part of their reviews, it is clear. You should need to make it clear. Even if you're not paying for a lot of it or only are limited in the ability to support, you can give them monetarily, make clear that it's an expectation, a strong desire that it will have value for them in terms of what they'll get out of the firm. You'll pay more for it. It'll make them more valuable in their career and more valuable to you, but also support them in terms of giving them time to study and time and freedom to study and in supporting them and pursuing them and holding them accountable and helping them in every way you can, even if it's not money.

(40:13)

I'm always surprised by the number of firms that don't have strong CPA exam support even. Again, not in terms of money. That's important if that's important to you as a firm, if you want to make sure that you have CPAs on your staff that you're getting your young accountants moving on to licensure, those are the things you need to do. You can't rely on their understanding of their own careers. You can't rely on the profession or the residue of their education that said, yeah, you should become a CPA. You need to actively encourage them in whatever way you can, and if that's limited by money, that's fine. There are other ways you can do it. Wellness programs, we see a lot of this, just paying attention to the health and wellbeing of staff. A lot of things around stuff like in-office gyms or access to gyms, making sure people have access to that.

(40:58)

Having a lot of firm activities that are physical, even if they're not all hands kind of things, right? Encouraging running groups or walking groups or whatever the case may be. We see a lot of things like step challenges and things like that, but also making sure that people have access to support around those sorts of things. Your insurance provider probably offers a tremendous number of resources in terms of wellness. They've been picking that up a lot as even as firms have. Make sure that people are aware of that. Communicate those sort of benefits wherever you're offering them. If you're changing your snacks out to healthy food, that's annoying on one level, but it's also shows us you, that is an area where you can be annoying, let's put it that way, because that's showing that you care about your staff and you want to make sure that they're well and that they're function on top.

(41:42)

As part of that wellness. We're seeing a tremendous focus on mental health. A lot of this came out of the pandemic when people are isolated with a lot of people reporting depression or mental health issues that were exacerbated by isolation, anxiety, all the things that went along with the pandemic and one of the things, again, I go back to this that people discovered was that a lot of insurance companies had or added a ton of resources in this area. There's helplines you can call specifically for mental health issues. A lot of them are making people available, experts available to help staff with that. Clearly communicating that make sure everybody knows about that is important. The other things that are important there though, are taking an interest yourself. When you ask how you're doing, check, make sure, pay attention to people. You can often read the signs.

(42:28)

I don't want to say you can read the signs of mental illness, not really true, but you can get a sense of are people, do they look sad? Do they look depressed? Are they disengaged? Do they seem not to care? Some of that may be they don't care, but some of it may be signs of stress, they're burned out, they've done too much. What's going on with their family? Are they home alone? They don't ever talking to anybody. These are the kind of things you kind of need to find out as part of those sort of regular check-ins that I mentioned earlier and paying attention to that. Anything you can do, and this is not often a comfortable thing for people, but it's a great thing if you as managers and leaders can share any issues you're having, and I don't mean that you need to give out the details of your latest therapy session, but it's great to say, listen, we all go through this.

(43:09)

I had some dark periods in the part of the pandemic where I was like, ah, I don't know what I'm doing. This is weird. I'm isolated, I'm anxious. All those sorts of things. Anything you can do to normalize comfort with those issues and making people understand, listen, everybody goes through these things. Everybody goes through burnout. Everybody feels disaffected at some point. Everybody feels anxious and that even if it's more serious in that, that's fine and there's help for them. These are important things to sort of model that vulnerability and that understanding that these are serious issues that people should deal with and that there's resources for them to do. This is all great community involvement. Accounting firms have been great about this for a long time, so I don't really need to take too much time out of it, but giving back to the community is something that accounting firms seem to do naturally, which is to the great credit of the profession.

(43:50)

One of the things we're seeing though is that firms are doing two things, getting more strategic about it in some cases, saying, listen, can we be give back to the community in ways that speak directly to the work we do, speak directly to the niches we work on. Speak directly to the clients we work with and they're also doing things where they're allowing staff to have more involvement in the choice of how the firm is involved with the community. That goes back to the empowerment issue. What are the issues that staff care about? It's often, which local charity spoke to a partner recently and that's how community involvement has often in the past been determined. More and more firms are, like I said, allowing staff to have some input on where the firm gets involved and that's a great, again, an empowerment issue, but also a great way of making sure that the firm is giving back in areas that mean something to everybody.

(44:37)

Time, anytime you can give time back to people is huge. We're seeing a ton of firms do things like close the week between Christmas and new, becoming almost a hundred percent of the top one. The best firms to work for do that. A lot of firms are closing early on Fridays during the summer or just closing for Fridays entirely. That's a common thing, wherever possible to give people time back. They're doing that and a key element of that we're discovering is that it's not enough to say, Hey, we're closed. Don't have to work the week between Christmas e and Easter or our Christmas and Easter. That would be great. We're we're closed because going out of business, if you're not here between Christmas, between Christmas and New Year's, obviously my two favorite holidays are Christmas and Easter. I'm skipping across New Year's, but point is it's not just enough.

(45:22)

Say you don't have to work, it's important or that you don't have to work on Summer Fridays or summer Friday afternoons. Don't say you don't have to work. Say we're closing the office. Because if there are lots and lots of people out there, both on both sides of the equation, there are employees who feel like, well, they say, I don't have to work, but I should work because my boss expects me to work or because I'm a workaholic because I love what I do and I want to be there. And then there's the flip side of there are partners and managers who say, oh yeah, yeah, no, you don't have to be here if you care about your job. I mean, there's those sorts of clear expectations. It's very easy for that sort of benefit to be subverted by either management expectations or staff expectations or desires.

(46:04)

And this is not always a bad thing. Like I said, you may have staff who are like, I just like working and I want to solve the clients, I want to do this work. But it's important that they take the time off. It's important that they get the chance to avoid burnout, that they have that ability to just do all the things you're supposed to do in time off, which is recruit, recoup yourself, recoup your energy, all those sorts of things. So closing your office is a great way around that sort of problem with, yeah, we gave you time but you didn't get to take it because you had the expectation one way or another that you needed to be here. So closing your office is a common thing. We're seeing particularly among the best firms to work for regular communication, and this is the last of this sort of thing.

(46:39)

There are lots of other tactics that we can go into to get a little more nitty gritty, but this is the last of the big one. Regular communication of a fairly transparent sort. Now we're not expecting to give up partner salaries or anything like that, but as much as you can tell people about the direction of the firm and the strategic plans of the firm, one of my favorite ones is this. If you've got, you're making big plans for your tax department or your wealth management department, you want to make sure that the other departments understand that this doesn't mean that they're not important. You want to make them understand that this is part of the whole growth of the firm and just because we're focusing on whatever area over here that we're focusing on doesn't mean you're not an important part of the direction of the firm.

(47:14)

You want them to understand where you're going, what your strategy are, where you're headed, as much as you can tell them about the inner workings of the firm. We were talking earlier about how most people don't know how firms run. They don't know how they're profitable, they don't understand how they make money or how they distribute money or how partnership works. The more you explain about that, the better. Again, obviously you're not, don't need to hand them the keys to your financial statements, but the more information you can give them, the better. The more you can explain to them about how your firm works, the better also, and this is really important, the more you can tell them about what their career looks like at your firm, we see a lot of the best firms to work for and a lot of the top a hundred firms create very explicit, this is what the pathway looks like.

(47:50)

These are the skills you need to grow to go from level to level. These are the things we expect you to be able to do as you move from level to level within the firm. As you move up though, and it's not just to become a partner, to move from each rank to each rank, there's an actual firm that has sort of laminated cards for saying, oh, you want to be a manager? Here's what it takes. Here's the skills you need, here's the responsibilities you'll face. So that kind of communication is hugely important, but also just regular communication about what's going on in the firm. I talked about the importance of recognition and all that. That's a great opportunity as part of that regular communication that helps keep everybody on board. They know what's going on. Like I said, there's a bunch of other smaller tactics, but these are, I think are some of the big ones.

(48:30)

These are the ones we're seeing large numbers of the best firms to work for get involved in. These are a bunch of these smaller tactics and I'm not going to go into these, they seem to change every year, but five years ago, standing desks were all the rage. Everybody had to get standing desks for two years. Every firm was handing out standing desks. Two years before that, it was Fitbits. Every firm in the country was handing out Fitbits to staff and they were all having walking challenges, et cetera. Puppies and kittens. This is eternal. This was one that started, they bring them in tax season or busy periods, bringing a bunch of puppies and kittens. You partner with a local animal shelter or something like that. Some of the other ones you'll see allowing staff to use your firm's services is whether it's wealth management, tax prep, that kind of thing, food trucks, a lot of firms bringing food trucks for special events as food trucks became a thing.

(49:18)

Axe throwing, I don't know how axe throwing became a thing, but it is apparently. And escape rooms, similar sort of things. The two I really want to point out here, inviting the family, making sure people's families are involved, not in every event necessarily, but the more you can involve with people's families in the more they feel like you value them, the easier it is for them to go home and say, oh, I got to work late. Because they know that the family members know that you value them and that you understand that the employee isn't just the employee, it's their family as well. The other one is reading time. This is a relatively new one, but I think it's really interesting. It ties into the business development and career development sort of thing, but it's literally there are firms out there and there's not that many, it was probably 10 of this year's best firms to work for where they literally give everybody the same book and say, spend the first 15 minutes of your day reading.

(50:07)

We're all going to be reading this book. We're all going to be thinking about it. Obviously they're business books in general and they don't always need to be books. It can be articles, things like that. But you want everybody in the firm to know it, and it's a step towards one building, a shared set of knowledge that everybody in the firm has and you can make sure that you're picking things that speak to your strategy, your goals, where you're taking the firm, but then you have everybody on that thing and it normalizes that aspect of building your career, which is keeping abreast of advances throughout the profession or throughout just the way firms and businesses are managed, all that sort of thing. So I think that's an interesting one and one that we've seen fairly recently and we're going to expect to see a lot more of that in the next year or two as it becomes sort of normalized.

(50:47)

So that's that week ago and talk about a lot more strategies and tactics, but we're a little over time and I know this is the last session today, so I appreciate all so many of you sticking around with you. Now I can actually see some of you are still here, so this is great because I'm going to turn now to just talking about wrapping up the conference very, very quickly. First off, Thank you all for coming to our inaugural firm growth form. We appreciate You are a huge part of, I think it was success, but you're a huge part of that. Your engagement has been spectacular. Every vendor we've spoke to, every sponsor, all of our staff have been like, wow, they're really engaged and it's spectacular. And it goes to show where you're going to be taking your firm's. Take that engagement, take that enthusiasm, and turn it around and hopefully take the lessons you've learned here back to your firms.

(51:27)

And again, don't be too annoying with them, but make sure they move forward with them. I should say we're going to have this again next May. We're not sure of the exact venue, but it's going to be in San Diego. We'll be reaching out to you to talk about that. Again, I want to thank you all for attending. I should thank all of our sponsors. They were a big part of this, making sure we are able to do it, but I think a lot of them are packed up and left, so we'll just take it for granted that we thank them, they were a big part of it, but particularly all of you. Thank you so much for coming and safe travels, get home safe and we look forward to hopefully seeing you next year. Cheers.