5 Strategies for Accounting & Finance to Navigate The Great Resignation

By now, you’ve probably already heard of the Great Resignation—employees everywhere are leaving their jobs in the aftermath of 2020. Whether it’s a desire for flexibility, development opportunities, better work-life balance, or a combination of multiple factors, many employees are discovering that “the way things have always been done” doesn’t work for them anymore.

The number of resignations we’re seeing today has now far surpassed where it was before the pandemic. And with 41% of employees considering leaving their roles by the end of 2021, the Great Resignation has continued to gain traction.

Given the influence of the Great Resignation on today’s work environment, how can finance and accounting leaders continue to recruit and retain talent? What steps can organizations take to ensure they aren’t reverting to pre-pandemic concepts, which may have not been ideal even before 2020? And what changes can they make to ensure they’re staying competitive to employees?

Our Digital Finance Transformation Playbook, Steering Finance Through the Great Resignation, was designed to help turn the Great Resignation into the Great Opportunity.

Check out these five strategies from the playbook on how to reimagine finance for the future of work.” And, if you’re interested in going more in-depth, get your free copy of the full version.

According to a survey from Edelman Data x Intelligence, having flexible work options is important to more than 70% of employees. This flexibility can be a major benefit for current employees and a big draw for jobseekers. Plus, embracing the hybrid workplace ensures your team stays agile and can collaborate with each other from anywhere.

With this in mind, it’s important that your team is successfully equipped for hybrid work and isn’t hindered by manual processes or clumsy systems. Many organizations are looking toward permanent hybrid work plans, exploring how to modernize any outdated processes, and ensuring their staff can seamlessly come together as a team no matter where they’re working.

Working remotely does bring its own challenges, one of which is meeting overload. As most of us know, too many virtual meetings crammed throughout the workday can get exhausting. The same goes for getting slammed with too many emails, instant messages, and spreadsheets throughout the day, as teams struggle to stay organized while working remotely.

And this feeling of overwhelm only gets worse as the month-end close approaches and your team’s workload skyrockets.

One important step to fight digital burnout is to learn how to implement tools that work for your employees, such as financial close automation software. Solutions like these can provide visibility into your team’s work, centralize tasks and documents, and make it easy for everyone to stay on the same page.

You’ll also be able to cut down on “housekeeping” meetings, and instead, reserve valuable meeting time for collaboration, brainstorming, and more.

If your team is still bogged down by manual work and outdated processes, it could be time for a change. Automating manual processes like account reconciliations and journal entries not only makes life easier for your current employees, but it allows you to offer exciting opportunities to new talent as well.

A job opportunity might be significantly more appealing to a candidate if they know the tedious tasks will be taken care of with automation, and they can instead focus on more exciting elements of the role like collaborating, innovating, and problem-solving.

Plus, the less manual, time-consuming work there is, the more you can free up your team’s resources to other possibilities. If repetitive, monotonous tasks are no longer on the to-do list thanks to automation, you can finally tap into your employees’ unique skillsets instead.

Replace spending hours on manual tasks with the chance to redirect effort into analysis, identifying new business opportunities or supporting decision-making. This can also provide an exciting chance for growth and development for your staff, as they seek to go beyond just checking off tasks and take steps to advance their careers.

Every finance and accounting professional knows the stress that comes along with the month-end close. One of the ways employers can help alleviate this stress is by embracing Continuous Accounting. This approach involves distributing close tasks across the period.

It can look like creating a workflow for the most challenging or time-consuming tasks, automating and standardizing them where possible, and monitoring results to look for ways to improve. Continuous Accounting can decrease the “crunch time” pressure and help ease a major stressor for your team, while boosting team moral in the process.

Get your copy of the playbook for an in-depth look into these five strategies and discover how you can turn the Great Resignation into the Great Opportunity.