Toxic Accounting Culture and Worker Shortage are Colliding
There’s been warning signs for years. Is this the reckoning?
While researching another article, I ran across this old email that we all made fun of back in 2013. In it, an intern who had been consistently working 12 hour days Monday through Saturday asks if he can please, please, have some time to do a bunch of errands that have been piling up.
Silly intern! Don’t you know that you’re not allowed a life during busy season?
Reading it again nearly a decade later, all I feel is…sad.
Here, we have an entry level accountant who is probably desperately overwhelmed trying to get a few hours ON A SATURDAY to run some errands. His rambling rational and desperate assurance that he’ll make up the work gives the impression that this poor intern was terrified to ask for what should have been a reasonable request.
And the manager’s response was to…forward the email to everyone he knew. To give everyone a good laugh.
How Will You Be Toxic When There’s No One Left to Abuse?
Ever since I decided to study accounting in college way back in 2005, we were told that the accounting shortage was on the horizon. The numbers world just wasn’t sexy enough. If things didn’t change, soon there wouldn’t be enough people to fill the jobs.
The big firms responded by offering programs that nobody could take. Unlimited PTO? Absolutely, as long as people aren’t actually taking more days off (bonus if it reduces PTO payout when employees leave). Long maternity and paternity programs? Sure thing! Just as long as the new parent doesn’t hope to get a promotion ever. I mean, that time off hurt their billable hours! That’s tantamount to murder at the Big 4.
So now, in the most telegraphed punch ever, the accounting world is experiencing a worker shortage!
For sure, COVID made that all worse. But it’s not like we weren’t already on a crash course with this inevitable outcome.
Or, to quote the headline of one of the many recruiting emails I get, “Where in the ?e!! did all the tax people go?”
My short answer? See toxic response to intern above.
Of Course There’s An Alternative
Each season I work late into the night during busy season, at least one person gives that inevitable comment, “We have to get this work done. What alternative is there to working these long hours?”
When I hear that, I always think back to a conversation I had early in my career with someone who had been transferred to one of the Scandinavian countries for an extended stint. The labor laws were such that none of their employees could put in more than 40 hours a week.
“How can you possibly get it all done?” this US accountant asked the manager over there.
The manager shrugged. “We figure it out.”
The US accountant never figured out specifics, so, unfortunately, I can’t give specific advice on their magic Nordic solution.
But I can say that when incentives change, people figure it out. The accounting industry has been built on billable hours likely since the ancient Greeks. If that industry were suddenly limited on the number of hours it can bill (40 hours per week x number of employees), I can guarantee that the industry would figure out very quickly how to change its practices.
Starting, I expect, with billable hours.
Smarter people than me would figure out the specifics. And if this worker shortage continues into the foreseeable future as predicted, I’ll be interested to see which firms figure out a non-toxic way to do it.
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