How working from home has boosted team support
Richard Brewin • May 22, 2020
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been conducting surveys of accounting teams to gauge how they are experiencing working from home and what lessons can be learned.
An interesting fact to come out is that a very high proportion of the teams, over 85%, are finding that the support and training they are getting from line managers and colleagues is at least as good as, and, in many cases, better than they get when they’re all together in the office.
If you think about it, when you’re in the office, a lot of the interactions for support, guidance and help are unplanned. Someone wanders into the room and says “Have you got a minute?”, “What are you working on right now?” “Can you help me”?
Neither party is ready for the conversation that is required. Often they end up rushed, ill thought through, short of data, even rebuffed.
Compare that to a similar situation when both parties are working remotely. An email comes in: “Can you help me with xyz problem?”.
“Sure. Let’s book a video call in 30 mins and we’ll go through it. Summarise what you’ve done so far, ready for the call”.
30 minutes later and the call takes place with both parties focussed on the problem, uninterrupted, prepared and with time allocated. By sharing their screen the ‘teacher’ can better demonstrate what they are talking about, take the ‘pupil’ properly through the steps.
Okay, so the help wasn’t immediate as it would have been, possibly, within the office, but it is of a far higher quality and much more effective and efficient as a result.
Through the forced nature of lockdown we are learning what we already knew…that a bit of planning and preparation goes a long way. Working from home means that we can’t take the short cut habits that we’ve all got into. We have to plan and prepare for things better, communicate arrangements more effectively, think about what our next step is rather than just react.
Lockdown has made us focus on how we communicate with each other, how we share information, how we track progress.
Of course, you don’t need to be working from home to work like this. You just need to take the discipline you apply when working at home and apply it wherever you work.
Look at any accounting firm website and there is a fair chance that the word ‘proactive’ will be prominent. Ask some business owners and taxpayers whether they consider their accountant to be proactive. There is commonly a gap between the two, between the intent of the accountant and the expectations of the client.
The tag ‘Trusted Advisor’ gets bandied around a lot. Without trying to be deliberately contentious, I often challenge its use. Undoubtedly, accountants were once the trusted advisor to their clients. When I came into the profession 44 years ago now, the older partners, especially, were seen by their clients as their trusted advisor, their ‘go to’ person on any issues, business, family or personal, that were troubling them. Without the filing deadlines of today, these clients were with their accountant primarily because they valued the relationship rather than the products.
All accountants are the same! We’ve all heard it said. It’s nonsense, of course, but, when you are asked what it is that your firm does that differentiates it from other accounting firms, it can be a challenge to come up with something tangible. Accounting firms tend to offer similar services, that’s what makes them accounting firms. Differentiating from competitors based upon services provided is therefore an issue.