Keeping Your Balance: Is Your Team Engaged?

Are your accountants passionate about their jobs? Do they come into the office every day eager, enthusiastic, and motivated to jump in and conquer those financials? Or do they frequently call in sick?

If you’ve heard every excuse for why your accountants can’t make it into work, you might be facing an employee engagement gap, with team members who don’t feel motivated or connected to their roles.

A disengaged team can have a significantly negative effect on productivity, customer service levels, and retention. Ultimately, this can be a serious issue, setting your team’s momentum off balance and risking errors in your accounting results.

In today’s modern accounting environment, employee engagement is always an interesting topic to discuss—especially for a highly technical and skilled team like Finance and Accounting.

Engagement is a key concept in change management, as organizations transition from a manual environment to more automated processes. This begins with feedback and open communication between management and their team.

The success of each team is a direct reflection of their manager. Building the most effective team means understanding how to lead each of your accountants, and putting their needs and development ahead of your own.

This is not an easy task. However, if successful, it can generate high results and a high-performing team. Here’s the good news: there are plenty of ways to make your team feel more inspired by their work, and many of these tactics can be incorporated into your day-to-day operations.

I challenge you to take your accountants to the next level. Many accountants view Accounting as a task, not an opportunity.

So, how do we change this perception in Accounting? How do we get our accountants to really look at the numbers and get engaged? The most effective way is to show our teams how their work makes a difference and how their contributions impact the bottom line.

There are several key areas to help us engage our teams and bring balance to our finance and accounting functions. The most important is communication. Your accountants need to know the ‘why’ behind transactions, journals, and analysis—not just the procedures.

As a team leader, you want to make the goals and priorities for the broader business visible to your teams. They need to understand the goal and the importance of the priorities, and all goals should be aligned with Accounting’s KPIs.

Goals should be realistic and achievable. Make sure you are continually focused on automating any manual, tedious tasks that are slowing down production and motivation.

Also, be sure to add motivating incentives and rewards for your teams. Always reward exceptional performance as you strive to develop employees that are highly skilled, engaged, and operating at their full potential.

Read this white paper to learn more about how you can retain and retrain finance talent that can thrive in our ever-changing business landscape.