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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.
Accountants selling to their clients is a topic as old as the profession itself. I regularly hear criticism from those looking to monetise the accountants’ relationships with their clients that “accountants can’t sell”. I also come across an attitude within the profession that “accountants shouldn’t sell to their clients…it’s unprofessional…it’s not what my clients expect”. Let’s tackle the issue.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s, when I was a lad, doing the family laundry was a time consuming chore. Mum would disappear into the kitchen and close the door so that the noise around the rest of the house was at least manageable. She would be in there for hours, swapping between washing, rinsing and squeezing out. Every so often the noise level would resemble a fighter jet taking off on an aircraft carrier as the tumbler element kicked in and then she’d reappear, wooden tongs in hand, to ask for help to reposition the twin tub that had danced across the kitchen floor.
Do I deal with the client who is shouting the loudest, the most pressing deadline, the thing that is most stressing me out, the best thing for my cash position, the team member who is stuck without my help, the thing that I had set out to do today or any one of all those other issues that are lined up at my door? I would love to give you a definitive or simple answer but, of course, there isn’t one. Welcome to every day decision-making, not just in an accounting firm but in life!
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