I had lunch Monday with one of my mentors at our usual spot (Chili’s). He’s in public accounting at a national firm and is on the frontlines of The Great Resignation. He was also on the battlefield during The Great Recession. Now, instead of having to let people go, he’s having to watch them leave.

He bought my fajitas (thank you), so I figured I’d do him a solid and make a list, as long as I could in a few hours, of thoughts to help create a better experience for his firm and people. He’s probably one of the smartest men I know, so I didn’t doubt he has already thought of most of them, and at a great firm that has thought of them too. I did it anyway.

The list was based on my better part of 25-ish years’ experience working in and around public accounting, being a partner, and most importantly, from coaching CPAs for more than a decade, with the past 5 years dedicated to being a Professional Certified Coach for CPAs. I spend a good portion of my workday coaching public accountants on performance and career, and the rest studying, reading, and researching ways to support them.

I’m sharing this list, in the hopes that it will make a difference for you, your firm, or your own experience. I’m sure you, or your firm, have thought of most of these too.

This isn’t advice (which is dangerous), just ideas, sometimes opinions, of ways to help improve the public accounting experience.

I believe The Great Resignation isn’t about retention. You can’t control turnover. If someone has experienced a transformative period in their life (which the Pandemic may have catalyzed) you may need to let them go and on to new beginnings.

It’s about reflection… “The Great Reflection”. A period of ownership, in which we acknowledge opportunities for excellence in our firms, and act on them. This list is about making your firm, through your leadership, a public accounting experience to stay for.

Here we go…

• Ask “What” five times when coaching your people.
• Conduct Stay Interviews.
• Use Job Crafting to act on what you’ve heard.
• Create a sustainable experience rather than swinging from one extreme to the next.
• Hire project managers and other non-CPA professionals to support engagements and teams.
• Encourage partners to share personal stories and be vulnerable.
• Provide meals during busier times.
• Create awareness of Parkinson’s Law.
• Be quick with acknowledgement and victories.
• Recognize your biases and look for the blind spots they create.
• Stop trying to solve every problem and listen. HEAR your people.
• Get your arms wrapped tightly around scope creep.
• Make the experience fun enough that people want to choose their only life at your firm.
• Be quick to identify lateral moves within your firm.
• Teach people to ask for help.
• Create opportunities for exercise, races, events, and activities.
• Lean on the culture. Culture is values in action.
• Be the leader they can follow.
• Pay overtime. Yep, I said it.
• Relearn or teach old skills: critical thinking, problem-solving, learning strategies, and communication.
• Identify clear hybrid working models and create certainty through clear schedules.
• Assign accountability partners.
• Create silence intentionally.
• Find mercenaries: contractors who can support your firm during busier times.
• Talk about mental health and normalize the conversation.
• Train, or retrain, active listening.
• Give better feedback. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, focus on what could go right next time. Get the next one.
• Make mental health days permanent.
• Study the hybrid models that continue to evolve.
• Train staff on negotiation.
• Don’t just have career counseling. Have future counseling.
• Promote real time-management training.
• Treat departing team members amazingly well.
• Look at how technology is hurting and helping.
• Pick days or times to outlaw meetings.
• Revisit workflow. Don’t fall into plan continuation bias.
• Invest more in learning beyond the technical.
• Get rid of interruptions.
• Consider what even more flexibility might look like.
• Find more ways to collaborate.
• Be more assertive. Fight for your people.
• Set an example of starting your day with something other than email.
• Take a deeper dive into current compensation studies.
• Encourage giving.
• Drop clients, and slow down the client acceptance process too.
• Focus on partner performance as leaders.
• Create Zoom/Teams-free days.
• Sleep. Promote sleep. Read a book on sleep.
• Set minimums: behaviors or activities you will not give up no matter how busy it gets.
• Give the news you would want to hear.
• Promote less formal coaching and mentoring.
• Hire mental health professionals to provide confidential office hours.
• Let people know that feeling overwhelmed is not a weakness.
• Calculate your CPA Years.
• Be more proactive. The key word is ACTIVE.
• Lock in busy-season contractors early.
• Hire an internal recruiter.
• Seek talent nationally.
• Performance = Potential – Interference.
• Communicate what you are doing.
• Call out the elephant in the room and create a process for the Career Decision.
• Define better expectations.
• Stop with so much structure. Be spontaneous.
• Rethink what time management means now.
• Do more activities around learning.
• Find ways to reduce decision fatigue.
• Focus on the coaches. Mentors advise. Coaches ask. You need to be capable in both skillsets.

That’s all I came up with for my friend and mentor. I have more, and you do too. What will you do now? It’s one thing to reflect, and another to act. My hope and intention is that some of the items on this list spark an idea or thought to help you create an experience your teams would stay for.

My name is Doug Slaybaugh. I coach CPAs on performance and career, and train CPAs to be better coaches for their people, the profession and the succession of their firms.

Now you owe me a fajita lunch at Chili’s.

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