Welcome to 20 Days to a Better Firm! With the accounting profession facing a major staffing shortage, finding ways to recruit and retain talented accountants of all ages is fast becoming a priority, so in this series of short daily articles, we’ll aim to show you how to make your practice a more attractive place for recruits and a place where current employees are more likely to stay.
We’ll be drawing many of the ideas from the results of our 2015 Best Firms to Work For list, in which the 100 small, midsized and large firms with the best workplaces in the country shared their strategies that got them there.
That brings us to our first tip for making your firm a better workplace: Find out what other firms are doing well, and copy them. There is a large core of best practices that most, if not all, of our Best Firms are pursuing to be a great workplace. On everything from compensation and health benefits to time off, mentoring policies, and onboarding practices, accounting firms are converging on a set of policies that are considered “industry standard,” and that you’ll need to follow if you want to recruit and retain the best.
We’ll share many of these core practices in this series, and in the our Best Firms report, which will come out in December. And besides the ideas and data available from our Best Firms list, here are two other great sources of information of what other firms are up to:
But you don’t need to restrict yourself to strictly statistical sources – your state society may have a MAP Committee that hold meetings to share best practices, or your firm network or alliance may bring together members to swap ideas. And if all else fails, just find a firm you admire and ask them what they’re doing right.
