Track 2: Managing a remote workforce

Fully half of firms have at least some staff in a hybrid work environment, but while the technology is in place, the management techniques often aren't. This session will cover how to make sure you're getting the most from your remote workers, while also making sure they feel fully engaged with your firm and its culture.

Transcription:

Danielle Lee (00:11):

All right. Welcome everyone to today's session, managing a Remote Workforce. Obviously a very timely topic.

Seth Fineberg (00:20):

Come on in.

Danielle Lee (00:21):

Come on in and join us. It's been timely for a while, but especially timely now. My name is Danielle Lee. I'm the Managing Editor at Accounting Today and we have two great panelists for you today. I will let them introduce themselves. Before we get started, Seth.

Seth Fineberg (00:41):

Me first. Okay. Those who don't know me. I'm Seth Fineberg. I've been around this wonderful profession now for well over 20 years. I got my start with accounting today, covering the profession as the Technology Editor. I worked with them for over 13 years. I was also the Editor of Accounting Web, which fortunately closed last year, but the whole time I really got to know a lot of the struggles, the pain points, the highs and lows of what being an accountant and an accounting professional in public practice is. And these days I am more of a consultant, mostly to really kind of see the profession move forward. So I'm working a lot with vendors and service providers in the profession to kind of help bridge the gap a bit more. A lot of things that seem to be breaking down in communication and a lot of distrust there of late and things could just be better. Overall, technology is something that has at the center of everything that you do these days and I'm just there to help try to make it better. So great, Jeff. Glad to be here.

Jeff Phillips (02:01):

Thanks Seth. Hey everyone. Jeff Phillips. My role as I'm CEO of Paget. Paget is a US and Canada based tax, payroll and accounting firm. We focused on very small businesses. We operate as a franchise, so we have 300 independently owned offices. Think like if Edward Jones was a small business accounting firm that's Paget, we're based in Athens, Georgia. I've been the CEO there for three years. Prior to that I started 12 years ago, a boutique staffing agency that I still own. It's called Accounting Fly. And Accounting Fly is unique to this conversation because we got into business to try to solve the talent crisis in the accounting profession and we haven't solved it. But one of the things that we landed on in 14 and 15 was that we wanted to be the first company to specialize in filling remote accounting jobs, US-based CPAs and enrolled agents to work in CPA firms. So that's our specialty. We only do that. We have been just focused purely on remote now for six or seven years and that really took off during the pandemic, but we've learned through so much trial and error of placing hundreds and hundreds of remote accountants into firms, what works and what doesn't work.

Danielle Lee (03:26):

Great. So you can see we have some very highly qualified panelists to answer my questions and I hope we'll have some questions from the audience at the end too. But before we start, I do want to ask the audience, I kind of want to pull gauge where everyone is in the kind of remote work arena. I'm going to ask what your work model is, whether it's remote, hybrid, or all on site. So by a show of hands, who is remote

Jeff Phillips (03:56):

Full? Everyone is remote, fully.

Danielle Lee (03:58):

Fully remote. Fully remote. And then who is hybrid? Hybrid market. Okay. A good amount. Makes sense. And then anyone all on site?

Seth Fineberg (04:10):

A hundred percent back to the office, yeah. Okay.

Danielle Lee (04:12):

Okay, few here.

Jeff Phillips (04:13):

Nice little bell curve.

Danielle Lee (04:14):

Yeah, definitely this will be a good audience. So to start, it's always the question of why is a popular one? Amy Vetter mentioned it in her keynote. So why should firms be embracing the remote work model? Jeff, I'll start with you.

Jeff Phillips (04:31):

I think a better title for the session just after seeing the audience is managing a hybrid workforce where you happen to have some remote employees and you have some people that are in your office. How do we balance all of that looking at why remote? Well, this is what we discovered is you really can't win your talent battle without opening the firm up to allowing remote. And let me, my definition is not, oh, our firm is in Manhattan. We let people work from home in Manhattan. You don't care what city in America your next hire happens to live in. That to me is what I mean by a remote hire. And so why do that? Because you can find the best player for every open position, your firm, you're expanding your search from your local city to America. So you've opened a casted a much wider net. You will fill the job.

(05:32)

How many of you had a job that was open for over a year that was in your office? You can fill those in a month to six weeks now and I will skip all the nerdy economic labor market data and just tell you that that is such a profound preference of the majority of the workforce in our profession that not allowing it to be an option, you can't fill your jobs predictably and reliably. So it's like it's a threat to us, but I see it as a huge opportunity to build a firm with really great talent and stop suffering and not being able to fill open jobs.

Seth Fineberg (06:11):

I mean I think the a hundred percent agree, but on the why issue, and this isn't to point fingers or chastises any firms that are like, no, we need everyone back at the office a hundred percent a percent of the time. But the why to me is why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you working what you're doing? You're not working to overwork yourself, you're working to have a life, you're working to have a better life. And a lot of that involves guess what actually living. And so I'm not saying oh, well being remote or hybrid or whatever, not physically being in an office just means that you're going to slack off all the time. I think we've found that work is going to get done If you find the right talent that is going to do the work, it's going to get done no matter where they are. And so for the future of your practice, for the future of your firm, I would say not allowing that to happen is really going to be something that you're going to have to tangle with.

Jeff Phillips (07:22):

I totally agree and I think you're describing a vision of a workplace that people, people get aligned with and want to work at. Yeah, I mean our goal in having this, and it's not easy, it's not easy to have remote staff and office-based staff. It, there's a million different frustrating stories in your heads that you probably want to tell us and I'd want to hear them, but focus on the goal in this conversation. Our goal is to keep our best people a little bit longer than they're going to stay then to beat the national averages of turnover, which is 15 to 25% depending on how big your firm is. So we're going to lose every year 15% of our accounting talent and we're going to have to replace them and the new staff to grow. So what's the game plan and how does remote fit into that so that we can accomplish that objective beat, that national average. That's what I'm here to make sure that you you're able to do.

Danielle Lee (08:15):

So speaking of that game plan, what are some of the policies that firms should have in place? And I liked your definition of remote because I don't know if everyone considers that to be fully remote. So it's interesting, I know a lot of the audience members said they are a lot said they're hybrid. How should firms manage a remote work practice in terms of onboarding day-to-day management, client service? Seth, I'll start with you.

Seth Fineberg (08:39):

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of factors. First and foremost, you know, want them to stay connected. So maybe you're like, okay, look, you're physically coming in here. We need that for very specific purposes. But other than that, in terms of managing the day to day, I mean look, you log into workflow software, you're logging into your own sort of internal systems and I'm not saying you know, need to get a keyboard, a keystroke tracker or anything like that, that's going to just drive people away. No way. But you can still track how work is getting done. I mean, slack I think is pretty decent for everyone to get on Microsoft Teams. There's dozen other products and technology out there that will show you, okay, work is getting done, it's flowing through. We can ask you a question whether you're down the hall or in another location physically.

(09:39)

I think that's kind of where it really starts first and first and foremost. And that's kind of how you manage the day to day. Again, you might have other practices and policies in place and we kind of want to hear them at some point before we leave, I would love to get your feedback on what you have tried, what worked, what didn't. Because it's a process. It's not perfect. I heard stories of mid-size firms who were struggling in 2020 with the whole idea of going, we tried going remote for our tax practice, it just couldn't work, we couldn't make it work. Guess what? It had to work because you were in the middle of tax season 2020 when everything was, you know, couldn't physically go into an office or they didn't want you physically going into an office, so you had to figure it out. Mistakes I'm sure were made problems, new problems already came up, but by and large, talking to each other, talking to other firms about how they're doing it, sharing your own stories, that's only going to help help each other. Sorry to get off a little bit of a tangent, but.

Danielle Lee (10:48):

No, that's good.

Jeff Phillips (10:48):

I think what you're saying is, and I just heard Jody from Summit CPAs talk about who's, he runs a fully remote firm, but team bonding is critical. So why do professionals quit their jobs within the first six months of starting? Has that ever happened at your firm? I know it has. Also, we have the horror stories of we give people offers and then they don't. You ever had this happen where they don't show up on their first day of work, you've already shipped them a laptop? That's a nightmare story.

Seth Fineberg (11:19):

It happened at my old.

Seth Fineberg (11:22):

We hired somebody, it's exact same thing happened, we're like.

Jeff Phillips (11:25):

It's weird having.

Seth Fineberg (11:26):

Where is this guy.

Jeff Phillips (11:27):

Come up through a staffing agency now running an accounting firm, but I can apply some of the things that we've learned of both. And so why professionals quit within the first six months is narrowed down to three things. They are not clear on what their job is. They do not have the tools or the training to do the job that you're expecting them to do. And the third one really sucks. The third one is they are lonely. By the way, this is not of remote staff. This is human beings that work inside professional services firms. And so I would like to reverse engineer from those three problems so that we can have a remote and hybrid workforce that approaches those issues. So what we need to, are we clear on the job? Can I talk about onboarding for a second? You mentioned that. Yeah, definitely. So

Seth Fineberg (12:15):

I want hear the productivity checklist too.

Jeff Phillips (12:17):

Well, I've got an onboarding checklist and that's kind of where it starts with because this is where addressing those three needs has to start. So our onboarding checklist, and I'm happy to email it to anybody, just shoot me an email, I'll give it to at the end, give you my email at the end. But we want the new hire to sit down, and this is a long meeting, but on their first day with a leader, a visionary type person in the firm, maybe it's a partner, it's an owner or it's the hiring authority of whatever team they're on and sit down and have a long conversation about the vision of the business, the values of the business, the vision of the person who is talking to the hire, where are we going and what is your role in this? Yeah, a lot of people start somebody, if they do, they give them a big folder full of paperwork to start welcome to our company.

(13:04)

So let's get them aligned with where we're going. Very first thing, there's some other things on our checklist for onboarding. I think this is so critical is talking about bonding and the social elements. People quit because lonely, and this can be a checklist, but have the existing team reach out to them, not over a text, pick up the phone and call the new hire and enthusiastically welcome them to the team, join them on LinkedIn or follow them on social media. But begin to build those social ties. The first time you see them in a meeting, there's a social connection with the team so it's not so cold. Don't start your hires on Monday, that's the worst day of the week. Start them on Friday. I know there's some payroll issues around that, but let's start them on a fun day of the week. That's part of ours.

(13:51)

Say Friday, have a buddy system. Most firms are already doing this. But have someone who can be their Sherpa for the first six months if they're there. Let them know where the coffee maker is or if they're, they're remote to just give them a lay of the land of where they're going on a daily basis. So some of these ways address what is my job, how am I going to do my job and do I have a bond with these team members? If you start strong, I've seen a correlation of I, my children eat on my ability to make higher stick inside accounting firms. So we've definitely seen a correlation between strong onboarding programs and following this and people staying for the long haul. It makes a huge difference. I've got more, but that to me like hybrid firms especially, we've got to pay attention to this at the beginning of the hire.

Seth Fineberg (14:44):

What about technology though that that'd be, was that on your checklist? I mean obviously there's sometimes a learning curve. You're like, okay, this is what we work on. Somebody might not have worked in this practice management system or in this workflow application or in Slack or whatever it is that you're using. Do you have that as part of the.

Jeff Phillips (15:02):

Got it, got it. Absolutely. So I look at onboarding as about a week long process and if you're hiring a remote person, fly them into your office for that onboarding piece. And Seth, thank you for bringing that up because chances are they might know your ultra tax, but they don't understand how one of your other systems works like your project management system. So we need to have go through a detailed checklist of training them on that so they leave that training solid and ready to go. Yeah,

Danielle Lee (15:29):

Great. Very helpful resource then.

Seth Fineberg (15:31):

This is day one, week one, just planning, have that checklist. That's great.

Danielle Lee (15:38):

And I just want to take a pause and just kind of ask the audience what the biggest challenges you face through remote employees. If anyone wants to share. And we can maybe try to problem solve a little bit.

Seth Fineberg (15:48):

We can talk all we want up here, but you're all dealing with it.

Jeff Phillips (15:52):

So only easy questions. Go ahead. Yeah, and in your case, you are visiting clients in person?

Audience Member 1 (16:29):

Both.

Jeff Phillips (16:37):

I get it. Probably the only option you have then is to, I feel the concern that the only option I see is that either you move all your client meetings to Zoom, which you probably don't want to do. Or the ones that are zoom you, they double up on those because yeah, how else are they going to learn to ask the key questions that you're asking and manage the client without that? One of our firms is making the big move from full compliance and advisory very successfully at our company, but he leads their firm's completely remote. He sits in Chicago, but they have a weekly, about a 90 minute training with his people. He's training to do the advisory role. So it's essential, but I think you're right, you lose a step if you're not in front of the clients. It's one of the downsides for sure. Can you bail me out of this one?

Seth Fineberg (17:34):

I bail out more interested. Yeah, I definitely agree. And even if some people are also getting more and more sick of Zoom, definitely heard this too where you know, were on it for so many of just your own personal conversations with family, with friends. You're like, oh now I got to go to work on this. So sometimes it's might even be a simple matter of changing a platform. I, I've recently come around to Microsoft teams. I tend to enjoy it a bit more on just some of the more things that you can do with it and it also kind of integrates with maybe some of the things that you're working with. But yeah, I mean outside of the technology solution, I definitely agree, you know, have to have kind of a regular process in place for it. Some clients might prefer it.

Jeff Phillips (18:28):

Our clients are telling us they prefer the move to Zoom even if they're in the same city as our accountants, our firm owners. Because it saves the commute time and it's really good for the advisor themselves because they could do more meetings in a day. Screen share is actually extremely helpful in presenting.

Seth Fineberg (18:49):

as much as you can share, for sure.

Danielle Lee (18:53):

Great.

Jeff Phillips (18:58):

I, well I guess my opinion on this, your case is the more your client meetings move to virtual, then it opens up more opportunities for your staff to sit in and learn. But yeah, the hard part for you is you have clients in your city and remote staff and the only way to get them in front of them is either to fly them into your city or to move these meetings into Zoom, kind of rewrite your firm's process, acknowledging the fact that the best way to hire people is probably going to be remote for you going forward. And then have them train them by having them participate in your advisory meetings, which is probably not the answer that you want to hear, but it probably is a better long-term solution.

Seth Fineberg (19:41):

It might not be a bit painful at first, but yeah, for sure.

Danielle Lee (19:50):

You have oh, over there.

Jeff Phillips (19:50):

Thank you.

Seth Fineberg (20:03):

Yeah.

Jeff Phillips (20:37):

I think the question was if you have some staff that are going to shift to work from home and there's issues like commute and their home office

Seth Fineberg (20:50):

For supplies.

Jeff Phillips (20:51):

Who's paying for things?

Seth Fineberg (20:52):

Is that?

Jeff Phillips (20:54):

Yeah, so who's responsible? I think it is every firm leadership team is going to come up with the best policy on something like this that works for them. So my opinion is just my opinion, but I know firms that are fully providing their work from home staff a sort of second setup and we write the check for it. I know firms that are paying for your home internet to be at the max speed because talking to someone over Zoom and their internet sucks is not very productive for work. But on the flip side, I think you have to ask yourself, if we're letting the staff work from home and they're asking for that and we're giving them this, is that enough of a benefit to not have to address? Maybe you shouldn't have to pay for this. I mean if this is something that you negotiated with them that they got, maybe the win here is they get to work from home some of the time they can pay, they can buy a printer. I'm kind of processing your case on the fly here, but I think it kind of boils down to what you want.

Seth Fineberg (22:17):

Yeah, it's just got to work. It's got to work for you. It's going to be different if it's going to be a pain to make that investment, maybe like Jeff said, maybe it's something that, okay, well if they've negotiated work from home a couple days a week, few days a week, whatever it is, maybe that expense is on them and they can write it off because their company's not paying for it or it has to matter.

Jeff Phillips (22:45):

My recommendation is once, you have a policy on how remote works looks at your business and my personal opinion, if I ever having to make a decision would be to add in a stipend to just help offset some of the costs.

Seth Fineberg (23:01):

It seems worth it in the end, but.

Jeff Phillips (23:05):

Right. What's the goal? The goal is to keep your best people longer than we're keeping them today and to beat the national turnover averages. Exactly. And help that guide the decisions. And this is the other tough thing about remote and hybrid y'all, is that everyone has 75 different situations to have to navigate and they're all different. I mean every placement we make into an accounting firm has a complete different set of issues that everybody has to get around and think about.

Danielle Lee (23:31):

That's why we like hearing from you because we know they're so specific.

Seth Fineberg (23:36):

Yeah. And what works for one firm isn't going to work for another.

Danielle Lee (23:39):

Great. Did you have another somebody else question? Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Phillips (24:13):

My take on this is that, it is to me security is becoming less and less of a concern because Kristen Keats gave a great, great presentation yesterday who she, I don't know if she's in the room, but she has a ton of employees that are out of the country completely that are doing tax work for their firm. So what about security and the point that she made that a lot of the cloud tools that she's using, whether it's the project management or the way she accesses her tax information is it is secure. And so we think that because someone's in their house that somehow that has become a less secure environment than in their office, but they're accessing the same information the exact same way on the exact same computer. So I don't see it as the issue that it probably was 10 years ago.

Seth Fineberg (25:08):

Then people still use VPNs because if you're still like, okay, well everything is on our server fine given a VPN key and everything kind of has to go through, so just be like they're working down the hall. But that's there is a technology or technological solution to the security question is everything's still a hundred percent secure? Absolutely not. But there are systems, the tools that are out there today, cloud tools, VPNs, your own sort of remote servers, that's definitely probably a better way to go.

Danielle Lee (25:45):

Great. And I want to survey some more questions from the audience, but I have a question of my own. Speaking of security, that's a common question with working from home. Another common one is the productivity issue beyond keystroke tracking, which hopefully is not the case. So what do you both recommend employers do to make sure their employees stay productive in these remote or hybrid work situations? Jeff, start with you.

Jeff Phillips (26:13):

So you've got to define what productive is to begin with and I think that the first, let's start with our mindset. I think the mindset has to be a shift from, I know that it's productive because I see you working to, I trust that you're the type of person, if I hired you to get the job done and I'm going to look for the results, how do we find the results? I can tell you in our project management software at the a hundred pageants across the US that our owners that we're all independently owned, our offices are that they could tell you within about 15 days if somebody is not productive. So the defensive play is to use a great project manager software. There's two or three of them outside in that room. Talk to them. I ask them how they help with distributed workforces. Oh yeah. We use a product called Carbon that is built custom for accounting firms, but there are some excellent products at the low price point, the high price point just for accounting firms.

Seth Fineberg (27:17):

Yep. Yeah, Lisio Carbon can be, there's a bunch that are out there on the market and I know some folks even use Slack, but it's outside of the technology. There's definitely tools clearly available out there. But again, you brought up a good point about what you define as productivity. What's the end goal? It's like, okay, well I need these certain returns done or I need this report in, or I need whatever it is, you know, can still track that that's getting done or not. And if you find over that two week period that the stuff is kind of coming in late or it's not complete, it hasn't been passed off to the right person, then that's a conversation that you have to have with that employee because you were very clear upfront about what productivity is in this firm, what does it mean to complete and be doing the work.

Jeff Phillips (28:12):

I like daily standups, especially during busy season or when you're having a project mode daily standups are, and this is over Zoom, some of your team are on the Zoom, you're in gallery mode in Zoom, your remote staff are in the same mode and it's a meeting to start the day. That's essentially what are you working on today, what are you hung up on, what do you need from anyone on this call? Anyone else on this call? So as a manager you see what's the pace of work throughput going on and who's concerned And as a leader leading the meeting, it needs to be short, it needs to be 15 minutes, but I've seen a lot of businesses, a lot of firms implement this especially during intense periods of time just to get a sense of making sure everyone is aligned and that the balls aren't getting dropped.

(28:59)

So I'm a big fan of that and one of the thing that I think is that I have found this sort of lives in the retention, but I think it lives in productivity too, is a huge hack of just reducing your turnover is surveying your people often, not once a year, not, I mean I'm talking as frequently as once a week and asking them the survey that I helped a firm build is they send it out weekly to their staff. Now they have about 60 people on staff. It was like, do you have what you need to do your job right now?

(29:36)

How satisfied are you with your work-life balance that was important to this firm? Do you feel engaged with your team? And then are you clear what your job is right now? Do you notice that those questions align with those big three reasons why people quit their jobs? So a friend of mine, Adam runs a remote book bookkeeping company and was experiencing 50 to 60% annual turnover of his staff all remote and it's a great place to work. They felt like they were doing the right things. So we implemented a survey like this, they sent it out weekly. They used Slack as a remote office, remote staff chat program and they sent it out over Slack. And not everybody, you don't, you're not required to answer it, but when an employee has a problem that's blocking their productivity or they've started to maybe be dissatisfied working there, they raise their hand and so they, it's like a one to scale five. How satisfied are you if a manager sees a one or a two on those weekly reports? They pick up the phone and call the team member and find out what's going on.

Seth Fineberg (30:44):

Conversation.

Jeff Phillips (30:45):

Right. One of the really interesting analogies or stories he told me as a result of this was that somebody raised their hand and said, I'm not, I think there work life balance was a one manager calls, there was a woman, she said, I have a sick parent and I know that I'm going to have to change my work schedule to take care of my sick parent in the coming months and I don't think your firm is flexible enough to help me navigate this problem. And I've already started looking for another job. Well, so Adam and his team responded and created a custom new working arrangement, temporary working arrangement for her so she could take care of what was going at home. I mean they did not want to leave this person, but had they not asked the question, she would've never given the feedback and she would've talked to a recruiter and she would've applied to a job on whatever monster.com and then been gone a week later. And so I think we can't be afraid of asking feedback, especially with staff or clients. We need the negative feedback, we need the issues and we care enough, we all want to solve the issues. So I think just one of my biggest productivity hacks for remote and hybrid is just constantly be asking people in writing, automate this, look at the data and start to find what the problems are on your side of your firm.

Seth Fineberg (32:02):

And the simple fact that you're, and those are great points Jeff. I think the simple fact that you are asking, actually asking the human on the other end that is maybe having a problem, maybe not turning in their work or maybe you kind of sense something might be up. The simple fact that you're asking is going to go a very, very long way. And again, I know it's about your staff and keeping staff and all that, you don't want to lose them, but you're allowed to have your needs expressed as well. It's street. So you're expressing what your expectations are as well and you're keeping though them aligned with these regular conversations with the surveys or what have you.

Jeff Phillips (32:42):

That's a great point.

Danielle Lee (32:44):

And so this has tinged a lot of our conversation already, but firm culture. How do you recommend firms build and instill a unique firm culture in this remote working environment?

Seth Fineberg (32:55):

I think culture is, it's one of these big sort of buzzwords that's out there. It's like what does that mean to you? At one point it meant like, oh well our firm culture is every Friday we do this, we kind of gather in this room or we go out into the community and we help out. Or it seemed to revolve a lot around these physical activities. I don't know that that's culture. I think culture to me is what you need it to be. What do you stand for as a firm? You're helping clients day in and day out, you know, have to show that you care and it depends really what it is. It's so individualized and I think you can still have a culture with a completely remote staff because you set the tone as a firm leader, you're setting the tone for what your expectations are, what it means to work here.

(34:00)

And it doesn't necessarily involve one particular thing but you know make it what it needs to be. And the reality that a gentleman here said, okay, I'm actually going to finally have to have some folks who aren't working here, you want them to still feel connected to you. So what does it mean to have a culture? I wouldn't get too bogged down by it though. I think sometimes it's the simple act of going, yeah, part of our culture is we're reaching out to you, we're making sure that you're happy here and also that work is getting done. That's part of the culture here, but it can be other things as well that don't necessarily involve parties or non-work related things, right?

Jeff Phillips (34:48):

Well let's have the kind of place at work that is designed to keep people here longer, especially the good ones.

Seth Fineberg (34:56):

What's it going to be? And that's the culture.

Jeff Phillips (34:59):

But I look at culture as what is our team's health and are we productive and are we firing on all cylinders and do they like to be at be here? I do think when you add remote that team bonding is so important. I mean you lose in person, you lose in person client interactions, which I don't like and you lose the ability to just drop in and I'm, hey, I'm struggling with this question Seth, let's talk this through. That being said, I've owned a fully remote company for 12 years and it's the same team that started with me and we have a culture and we have clear expectations and we have accountability and we have amazing growth and we enjoy working together and we see each other about once a year. So it is possible, but some of the best practices that I would recommend are scheduled all team team retreats or fly-ins into your office for however works best for you.

(36:03)

But I would suggest at least one week a year or two weeks out of the year. And that involves meetings, that involves some team health activities. Go to a baseball game or do something fun. Hey, guess what, you can do this virtually too. We do an annual summer meeting. We have too many offices to get together so we have a virtual meeting. Don't roll your eyes. But we've had virtual DJs, we've had virtual magicians who have a niche in just doing zoom based really fun activities. We had a comedian one time, we had this guy that did this hilarious trivia dance and slash dance contest on Zoom with a 200 people on it. They made fun of all the executive team like that. That's just team health and fun. So we lose water cooler though. We lose, Hey eth, I'm having trouble with this. A good solution for hybrid firms is to implement office hours publishing your company calendar at Jeff's office hours.

(37:02)

Me, my office hours are Tuesday from one to two 30 and Friday from 9 to 10:30 and that means that I'm sitting on Zoom, I'm sitting on teams Now we've changed and if anybody wants to get in touch with me, I am fully prepared mentally to have conversations. I'm not looking to do email during that time. I'm talking to people. So what I try to coach people in our organization is batch your questions. If they can wait and then let's talk, then it's okay if it's a social visit, but it's okay if it's a business question, what my office hours is drop in during that time. Here's a legal pad, write down the things we need to talk about and then let's walk through them one by one. Check in with your people. Seth mentioned it earlier. Sometimes we overcomplicate this stuff. Call your, call the people in your team and ask how they're doing. I don't like how remote work leads to loneliness that that's a real issue. That is something that we're going to have to get ahead of. So as leaders, how do you deal with that? Well, you build relationships with human beings on a human level and get in touch with them.

Seth Fineberg (38:04):

You check in, you ask how actually ask how they're doing. And I love that you brought up the hours issue. I think those who are maybe just starting to or are more recently have hybrid staff, that's probably one of the top questions that comes up. What are my hours if you don't set them, it could be anything. They could just think, oh well shoot, I just need to get this done and here it is seven, eight o'clock at night and maybe they should be with their family having a meal or whatever, but they're feeling like, no, I got to get this done. But if you say as part of it your culture, it's like no, we clock out, we're done at this time. I remember, so when I was with accounting web, we were a hundred percent remote. Everyone was somewhere else. We managed by a UK company and one problem that I saw as the team manager, the team leader that was coming up was we were in way too many meetings all week and I said, you know what?

(39:09)

No meetings Friday just you can't schedule one unless it's like some emergency or something has to happen that day. You don't schedule a meeting with my team on that day. And that just made everyone feel the weight come off because they knew there was one day a week you could just focus on what you needed to do and no one could kind of schedule you in. It was blocked off on the calendar, they couldn't do it. Awesome. And so you have to just be respectful of the time and make it very clear when you hire or when someone's moving to out of the office for a time that you set what those work hours are.

Danielle Lee (39:51):

Meeting fatigue is real and I love the office hours that you set. We're kind of treating this as Seth and Jeff's office hours, so I want to just go back to the audience and see if anyone has any other challenges they want to bring up. Maybe we can troubleshoot some of these concerns.

Seth Fineberg (40:06):

Probably went remote and some staff just stayed there so.

Danielle Lee (40:10):

I'm not seeing somebody. Does someone have their hand up? Yes. Oh thank you. Okay. The lights are a little bright up here.

Jeff Phillips (40:30):

Right, right.

Audience Member 2 (40:40):

Sit down. So it's also been a really by, see as the future of our firm. Just an observation.

Seth Fineberg (41:15):

I heard him but maybe some.

Jeff Phillips (41:18):

I love the office hours concept and I didn't make it up. I got it from an author named Cal Newport who wrote a book called A World Without Email. He also wrote a book called Deep Work and so he spends his time thinking through this topic. All of the use cases and all the challenges we're all getting bombarded by too much email and too many meetings. And so it's like when do I do the stuff that I'm paid to do? And so the office hours has been one of my solutions for that and I coach my team to batch emails. If I send you an email, I don't expect an immediate response, but I do expect a response to the client within the same day that it's sent. So I check email at daily, like eight 30. It's a good point about an hour.

Seth Fineberg (42:07):

Managing expectations, as we said, you got to really be very clear and upfront. Is somebody back there? Microphone's coming. Okay, sure, sure,

Audience Member 2 (42:23):

Sure. I'm so sorry. Thank you.

Seth Fineberg (42:30):

It's okay, you don't,

Jeff Phillips (42:32):

I'll come back. I I know. No, it

Seth Fineberg (42:33):

Looks like we have another one back there. You're in the back.

Audience Member 3 (42:39):

Hi. We run a full remote team and then the part that I find the most difficult is to keep my team engaged and curious because we build process, we build checklists, milestones, we have the standup check-ins and more and more it just become a motion of checking things off. We have the daily check-in and people started to not listening to each other just simply report how do I keep my team fully engaged and still being really curious about what they do because without that the quality of work do decrease after a while so.

Jeff Phillips (43:21):

Do you get together in person ever as a team?

Seth Fineberg (43:27):

Or are you able to?

Audience Member 3 (43:28):

We use a lot of Zoom. We use slacks but we try to get together once a year, but then during the covid time it become more and more difficult so we kind of stopped after that. We try to resume it. But yeah, it's been kind of lacking that for the last couple years.

Jeff Phillips (43:50):

This may be not the direct answer, but I think one of the things that engages teams is really good meetings if we have to have them. So they should be effective. If you ever heard the book Traction by Gino Wickman, it is an awesome operations manual for running a small business and he spends a lot of time talking about great meetings inside teams, the five dysfunctions of a team. It also covers that. But I'll tell you one of the groundbreaking things that we did that helped our team build engagement and we were all virtual was asking the team members to just give feedback on the meeting. At the end of the meeting, you got to give it a score one to 10 and if it's a 10, great, we did our job. If it's anything less than a 10, what would you have done differently? It turns out we would end up meeting for another 45 minutes. Everybody complaining about how lousy I wasn't running our meetings. It was was me and that hurt. But then eventually I started responding to the feedback and fixing the problems of the meetings and I know that made a tremendous difference, but I got that from that book and maybe that helps.

Audience Member 4 (45:07):

Your employees to give more feedback, do that and they just like, oh, it's great, it's fine.

Danielle Lee (45:14):

Okay.

Seth Fineberg (45:17):

The survey idea.

Jeff Phillips (45:19):

Yeah, maybe Seth says the survey idea, you could send it in a written format. If there's culturally not a comfort of being direct and anonymity, maybe speaking the anonymity helps and you have to model it as the leader. Do you give direct feedback to your team when they are not meeting their your standards? So if you are willing to have the uncomfortable conversations, maybe they're more willing to have them

Danielle Lee (45:51):

Before we get to the end of that. It looks like you remembered your question, right? Yes.

Jeff Phillips (46:09):

Not in a meeting, just kind of existing together.

Seth Fineberg (46:13):

Just there on.

Jeff Phillips (46:15):

We have a firm in Paget that does that for once a week for a few hours and he loves it. What it ultimately became was kind of a version of office hours where people could have quick sidebar conversations. I don't know. I think it would be an interesting, unfortunately with a lot of the stuff, it's ready, fire, aim. You just have to try to see if it sounds like a good idea and then if you find out it was a lousy idea, then you kill it.

Seth Fineberg (46:44):

I don't know that's going to work for everybody, but So it's like once a week you just turn it on for a few hours or there? Yeah, you'd have to see if everyone is cool with that. I wouldn't go and do something like that without everyone feeling like, Hey, everyone okay with that? My team came to me about the whole meeting thing. Some folks pushed back on it, particularly in our UK team, they were like, well, I don't know what if we have a question or a problem. I said, there are four days of the week that we can meet. I know that with the time difference and everything, some of us would get in a little bit earlier and start, but it's like there's still four full days of the week that you can do that. Again, there are always exceptions to the rules and policies, you know, got to, will be willing to be a little flexible with some things. It can't just be like, well this is the rule and we stick to it sometimes, you know, got to be willing to move a little

Danielle Lee (47:43):

Bit and maybe you test those things and then you survey them after to the other question to see how that works and what the feedback is. Yeah, just we're getting to the end of the hour unfortunately. I know there's so much more we could two minute warning discuss. So I want to ask you both to just kind of concisely give some best advice to firms to make sure they get the most out of their remote practice.

Seth Fineberg (48:07):

I think one of the running themes from Jeff and I has really been communication. Talk to your team no matter where they are, get feedback from them. Let them know that you care and that you're there. But also that when you have a policy or you have a change or you're looking to make a change, that you communicate it very clearly and just say, look, this is part of how this is going to work for both of us. It's not just we're trying to make things work for you. Of course you are, but it also has to work for us as the practice, as the business that you're trying to build.

Jeff Phillips (48:49):

Well said, unemployment and accounting and auditing is 1.8% and that means that everyone has a job. It means that basically might as well be a zero. And a lot of the people who want jobs want flexibility in where they work and when they work. Alright? So our options are to prevent that from happening or to allow it to happen and to evolve with that change. And that's my recommendation. So your goal is to think about what keeps my best people here longer and work backwards from there. And everything that you decide should be going in that direction and you cannot communicate enough, get into the weeds and get uncomfortable with people because they are buying into you and you can make this work. There's not always easy answers and there's never like a right answer, but you've got to take the next step, right? That ready, fire, aim mentality. And I see it as a world of awesome opportunity. I really do. And jeff@accountingflight.com is my email address.

Danielle Lee (49:54):

I'm going to remind you to share that with me.

Jeff Phillips (49:56):

I've got my onboarding checklist, that survey. I have one sheeter on that too, and shoot me an email.

Danielle Lee (50:04):

Great. Well thank you both for all your insight and experience and thank you for being a great audience for bringing some, yeah, that was awesome.

Jeff Phillips (50:10):

Thank you.

Danielle Lee (50:11):

I just want to make a note. There are two lunch briefing sessions directly after this. There's the safe send. Let's see, we've got Safe Send Tax Workflow, make your tech investment count. We have Paro how to overcome the capacity, challenge and drive Efficient Firm Growth. And those are in Harbor A and Harbor B directly after this. The right now. Thank you all again.