Keeping Accountants
The success of your PA accounting firm depends on excellent accounting staff. Your office will run more smoothly and your business will grow consistently with high-quality CPAs and accountants who are committed for the long term. Your clients, too, want to know that the accountants they’ve been working with will be with them year after year. So how do you ensure long-term retention of quality staff? In short, keep them happy. This takes a multi-pronged approach.
This seems obvious. Pay your accountants and CPAs a competitive rate and provide benefits that they want and need. This doesn’t mean just health insurance and a 401k; it means offering benefits that could help build their careers.
Show your staff that you think enough of them to invest in their future. Provide them with a membership to a professional accounting association, such as PSTAP. Offer career development opportunities and help them keep on track to maintain their CPE credits. (PSTAP is enormously helpful in that regard.) Regularly discuss one-on-one with your staff members what areas of the work they’d like to emphasize more or what niche they think they could build within your firm.
As you get to know your team members’ interests and strengths, offer them “stretch assignments” to allow them to grow their knowledge and their responsibilities. Accountants and CPAs often leave firms because they feel bored. Continuity of service for clients is important, but you don’t want to assign your promising accountants to non-challenging work, or worse, unpleasant clients who make your accountant feel unvalued. Give your accountants a clear career path and a reason to stay, because they envision both professional growth and upward mobility within the firm.
Everyone appreciates a shout-out for their excellent work every now and then. Make it a part of corporate culture to offer positive feedback in the presence of others (and constructive feedback in private). Besides the regular, informal pats on the back, offer an incentive program or award program that provides more concrete, company-wide performance recognition.
Office culture should provide the human support that we all need. Besides simple things, like remembering a person’s birthday and having occasional fun lunches, provide an atmosphere of flexibility and autonomy. Show that you trust your staff. If they have to adjust their work schedule to take care of a sick child, encourage them (and ask how the child is doing when they get back). If they feel they work better at different hours than the standard 9-to-5, try to work something out. Certainly, the office needs to have some consistency and interaction between team members, but if your staff members know they are trusted and respected, they will want to maintain that cohesiveness and will work to maintain it, even when they need to exercise some of that flexibility.
Follow these basic principles. Adjust them as necessary and apply them to the particular needs of your firm, and you’ll find you will be retaining your most talented team members longer.