Navigating Productivity in a Staffing Crisis: What’s a Partner to Do?

The staffing crisis was the number one strategic issue this year for my clients. Many partners echoed similar comments:

• “Our staff have no work ethic.”
• “When they work remotely, the productivity goes down.”
• “Staff just don’t want to work the hours we need – even during busy season.”
• “I feel like I’m walking on egg shells. I’m afraid to give staff critical feedback because they might quit, and we can’t afford to lose another person.”

What’s a partner to do?

Here’s the problem:

We know that baby boomers are retiring and fewer people are entering the profession than we need. On top of that, work preferences are shifting. After the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported that in a survey of more than 3,000 workers and managers, 36% said their overall career ambitions had waned (only 22% said their ambition had increased). Forty percent said work had become less important (only 25% said it had grown more important).¹

On the whole, workplace ambition is declining. Workers are more likely to prioritize flexibility (including hybrid and remote work) and to prioritize their personal life more highly than in the past.

As a result, many partners are struggling with how to manage staff who are putting in fewer hours, who may not be as productive remotely, and who tend to prioritize their personal lives over work.

To help solve this problem at the individual staff level:

To get the best performance from your staff, I recommend this approach (based on research conducted by Google on what creates the best teams).²

• Are the goals, roles and path of execution clear to all team members?
Many problems that seem like low dependability are really problems of the staff being unclear about expectations. What is their role at their level? On this project? During busy season? Are the number of charge hours expected per year or per week clear? Is the work process understood by all?

Maybe “they should know” all those things – but if they don’t, it’s worth getting crystal clear with them.

• Do they have the tools, knowledge and time to perform? If so, are they able to execute?
Once you’ve gotten very clear with your staff about your expectations, then we can see if they are really dependable (e.g. able to execute on those expectations). To deliver, they will also need the right tools, training, and adequate time. If that’s done and they still are stumbling, it’s time to move on to a very honest performance conversation.

• Do they feel safe telling you the truth? Are you asking them for their perspective?
If a team member is still not executing after the above, it’s time for an honest conversation with them to unearth what the core problem is. Start with open-ended questions. Ask them for their thoughts, with the goal of genuinely learning what their perspective is. You were expecting this, and you are not observing them meeting that expectation consistently. What is their perspective on what’s going on? What are the challenges from their point of view? How realistic do they think the expectations are? How motivated are they to do that kind of work? What would be needed for them to be able to meet the goal (if it’s possible)?

Be ready for possible disappointment. Be ready to hear them say they don’t want to work a lot of hours. Be ready for them to say they need to leave early for personal appointments. Be ready for them to say they want to work remotely two (or more) days a week. Be ready for them to say that due to the staffing shortage at your firm, they haven’t had enough training to know everything you want them to know.

If you can identify a fixable problem at this point – good! If you have a person who is working well, just not as hard as you’d hoped, that may just be life. If you have an unfixable situation that doesn’t work for you, it’s time for the next question.

• Do we need a performance improvement plan?
If you have a staff that you have been clear with and have heard them and are willing to work with whatever level of time they can give you and still they are not dependable, it may be time to roll out a performance improvement plan. This is a short-term plan, often 90 days, where you give them one more chance to improve their performance or they will need to exit the firm. Tolerating people who are consistently way outside of firm standards is a no-go.

In multiple surveys of staff I’ve done this year, a similar comment has come up. The top performers do not want partners to keep the lowest-performing staff on the team. They drag everyone down. The bad news is that staff may never want to work as hard as you did. The good news is that you don’t have to sacrifice quality, even if the quantity of work is lower for the foreseeable future.

The new, expanded second edition of our book, CPA Firm Staff: Managing Your #1 Asset, addresses ► talent management ► retention ► flexibility ►importance of the boss ►mentoring ► leadership development ► advancement ► performance feedback ►recruiting, and other issues.

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To help solve this problem at the firm level:

• Do workforce budgeting
How many hours do you need to get the work out? Plan for that. If your staff will give you only a percentage of the time you want, you may need to hire more people to fill the void instead of trying to flog the existing group.

• Cull clients
One way to manage your capacity is to expand the workforce (which is hard). Another way to manage capacity is to reduce the hours you need to work by culling your worst clients to fit the size of your team. If you are serving only your best clients at great pricing and profitability, firms are finding they can make more money and work less.

There are no easy solutions to productivity issues, but firms that are applying these steps are finding it easier to navigate what may likely be a new normal in our accounting workforce.

What are your thoughts?

¹ Ellis Follow, L., & Smith, R. A. (31 Dec 2022). Your coworkers are less ambitious; Bosses adjust to the new order. Wall Street Journal.

² https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/googles-5-step-formula-for-team-success-is-a-master-class-in-emotional-intelligence.html