Prevent The Great Resignation from affecting your firm…

Have you heard of The Great Resignation? The post-pandemic phenomenon where approximately 55% of Americans are expected to seek a new opportunity? According to a recent Forbes article, ‘a record 4 million people decided to leave their jobs in April of this year alone.”

In a profession that is already challenged with a talent shortage, public accounting and tax firms cannot afford to lose good people to The Great Resignation. It’s hard enough to find them in the first place.

And, as we near the end of August, college graduates who started work with firms this summer are settling in to begin their professional careers. When people around them resign, the message becomes, ‘it’s ok to leave if I am bored or feel like my talents aren’t being utilized.’ 

Case in point…

This morning, I was talking with a friend whose son started work with a firm in June. He is looking for another job already. Why? In his words, “I’m so bored. All they give me is menial work. I want to do something that matters.”

That is Gen Z, and that is the new work population. Millennials, too, want to do meaningful work. They also want work/life balance. Since Millennials and Gen Z make up the large majority of today’s labor population, firms must proactively adapt their cultures to recruit and keep them.

So, what can you do to keep your best people? 

Allow them the space to grow and develop in your firm. 

Start with what their vision is for their career and their work with your firm. During recruiting, while it may seem obvious, dig into what each person really wants to do in their career short term and long term. As part of onboarding, have them create a vision statement that you review together initially and annually. Be sure you have a development plan in place to empower them to reach the milestones that are important to them.

Change your mindset. In years past, and in some firms still today, there is a perception that new accountants must put in years of time prior to being client-facing. By accelerating your newer accountants’ development, you not only get them in front of clients faster and keep them engaged, but they are making your firm more money! And, they are giving partners and managers the bandwidth to expand advisory services clients and offerings.

Give them flexibility to work from home.

Since the pandemic forced everyone home for a time, there was ample time for all of us to realize the benefits of not having a commute. We also learned that most people are equally, if not more, productive when working from home.. As we move into the post-pandemic ‘era,’ firms have re-opened. While there are obvious benefits to having the team physically together, technology has enabled easy collaboration electronically. Why not allow for a flexible or hybrid schedule? If you don’t, your ‘A players’ will be courted and recruited by those who promote and advertise their flexible policies. 

Give them meaningful work.

Everyone makes mistakes. In the tax world, mistakes can be very expensive. Not only to clients, but think about the time managers and partners invest in reviewing returns and explaining errors. That investment of time by those who have high billing rates can cut into realization and drive up the cost of a return. There is an easy way to provide new accountants the opportunity to do meaningful work – and to save partners and managers the time of finding, correcting, and teaching about errors. 

Think about your end goals for preparing a 1040:

1. To provide a CORRECT return to your client.
2. To have a proactive (billable) advisory conversation with clients for whom you’ve identified an opportunity within the return.

Adjust how you prepare your returns. Have preparers be the reviewers. If you are hand keying in data from source documents, use scan and OCR technology or outsource the actual data entry. Allow your preparers who are learning the tax code to create a TaxExact™ project to review the return. They will immediately isolate errors and be challenged to address and fix them. The independent verification between tax software and TaxExact™ helps preparers learn the tax code and understand why certain calculations are right OR wrong and how to fix them. 

Imagine getting a return to do the final review that is already verified for accuracy. It’s a WIN/WIN.

WIN: You don’t waste your expensive time catching and correcting errors.

WIN: Your newer accountants are learning the tax code faster and find meaning in this work. They also can become client facing and command a higher biller rate faster.

Don’t let your team erode as The Great Resignation picks up steam. Just like client needs have dramatically evolved and changed, so have those of our team members. Too many people are leaving the public accounting profession. Let’s make it fun again. Accounting and tax ARE fun. 

As stated by John Maxwell, “Your career is what you’re paid for. Your calling is what you’re made for.” Why can’t the roles in your firm be both?