In the accounting industry’s current labor market, investing in employee experience is crucial to sustaining your firm’s success. To retain top performers, attract up-and-coming talent, and motivate everyone in your firm, it’s vital to foster a positive culture.
There are all kinds of steps firms can take to boost morale among their employees. Some are fairly simple: pay them more money. Others are much more nuanced: outlining a hybrid work policy that keeps everyone happy. But often, firms overlook some of the more intangible elements of working at your firm – elements that contribute significantly to employee experience.
What exactly are these intangible elements that have such an important effect on your firm’s culture, why are they so important, and how can your firm improve on them? In this overview, we unpack those questions and more, helping firms to build a winning talent retention, attraction, and win-back strategy that lays the foundation for long-term success.
To the vast majority of the accounting profession, the job is more than just a paycheck. Accountants help individuals and businesses prosper by serving as trusted advisors on all kinds of important financial issues. Along the way, accountants get to experience all kinds of different industries, meet a variety of interesting people, and work on a wide range of projects. This alone makes the employee experience an interesting one.
But employee experience is about more than just the work your team performs. According to Gartner, employee experience is defined as what your employees feel and think about working at your firm. It’s central to whether employees choose to stay with your firm, leave for a competitor, or even drop out of the industry entirely.
There are countless components to employee experience including compensation, workload, culture, career growth, and so on. Investing in each of these areas to create an experience your people love elevates your firm, helping distinguish you as a top employer in the industry.
Fundamentally, all professionals want to work at a firm where they feel valued. The firms that deliver the best employee experience will attract the most accomplished professionals. And over time, the firm with the most talented professionals will invariably be successful.
This, in a nutshell, is the value of investing in employee experience. If you want to attract A-Players to your firm, you need to provide them with a first-class environment in which they have the tools to excel.
In the accounting industry, your people are your product. When you foster a better employee experience, you’re not just making your employees happier: you’re investing in client satisfaction too. Motivated, engaged employees produce better results for your clients, which directly translates into better results for your firm.
No matter how great an employee experience you provide, some employees will leave. They may want to try out a new industry, move closer to family, or just be ready for a new challenge. Often, though, they’ll discover that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. If you provided a great employee experience, you stand to benefit from boomerang opportunities: high-performing employees returning to your firm after leaving.
It’s clear investing in employee experience is a meaningful way to drive differentiation in this tight talent market. But perhaps what’s less clear is the exact steps firm leaders should be taking to create a higher standard of employee experience.
Here are several steps accounting firms can take to invest in employee experience:
As a cultural issue, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a winning employee experience. Every firm is different and it’s important to liaise closely with your employees to determine the strategies that represent the best fit for your firm. Listening is vital: if you don’t listen to your firm’s professionals, you won’t understand what’s important to them or be able to make meaningful change.
Many firms find it useful to form committees composed of employees from multiple levels of the firm to work together on employee experience initiatives. This ensures a diversity of voices is represented and enables firms to work toward a culture and employee experience that works well for everyone.
An investment in employee experience at your firm pays dividends in multiple ways. Not only will you decrease employee turnover, but you’ll also attract a higher caliber of new employees. In addition to that, your firm will also be able to capture boomerang opportunities and rehire former employees who realized after leaving that your firm was the best fit for them. Your firm’s ability to do that is only strengthened if you invest in basic boomerang marketing follow-up techniques such as an alumni newsletter.
Employee experience, while important, is just one component of a wider strategic vision for your firm. At Winding River Consulting, we help firms imagine, design, and achieve that vision through a range of advisory services and professional education programs tailored to the needs of modern accounting firms.
To learn more about how we can support your firm in achieving its strategic goals, contact us today.