4 Ways to Keep Your Team Engaged During Tax Season

By Adam Walters | 11/21/2024 | 4 min read

Tax season is the busiest time of the year. For some firms, tax season is when they earn the majority of their annual revenue, and there is always a massive push to work longer hours, and to take on just one more client. But that is an aggressive, and overwhelming way to approach tax season and leads to burnout and employees feeling disconnected from their work.

How you manage tax season plays a major role in how stressful it will be for you and your team. Here are four ways to help your team stay engaged throughout tax season.

1. Sponsor Break Times with Healthy Food

Tax season is notorious for long work days. It’s not uncommon for your team members to come in before they’ve had breakfast, stay through lunch, and work until dinner. But working non-stop for that long is neither healthy nor productive. Rather than letting your team burn the candle at both ends, forcing them to feel burnt out and overwhelmed, sponsor healthy and meaningful breaks.

This is more than just bringing in a few cheap cheese pizzas or a box of basic glazed doughnuts, but bringing in the food that will fuel your team for success. Fast food and pizza may be fast, quick, and cheap options, but when you fuel your team with garbage food, they will feel like garbage when they’re working. Instead of only bringing in the cheapest option, invest in your team by providing them with healthy, well-rounded, filling meals.

2. Establish Clear Goals

Personal trainers and fitness leaders know they can get people to exercise just a little bit more by telling them, “Just three more reps.” Rather than telling people to exercise until they say stop, they set clear standards and expectations about what people need to do. This same tactic can work for your firm.

Entering into tax season and facing a seemingly endless number of clients and projects, will destroy productivity because no matter how hard they work, your team will feel like nothing they do can make a meaningful impact on the amount of work that needs to be done.

A better way to keep your team engaged is to focus on meaningful short-term goals and expectations. Rather than focusing on weekly or even daily goals that can feel larger than life, help your team focus on what they need to do before and after lunch. This will help them feel like there is a temporary end to their workload, and give them more buy-in throughout the entire tax season.

WARNING - If you do choose to use this, remember to not punish your team for reaching their goals. If you say that they need to work with three clients by lunch and they are done in record time, allow them to celebrate their win. Do not punish them by giving them more tasks because they are productive.

3. Support Dark Hours

Your team is not on call 24/7, and they do not need to work 16-hour work days. Even though tax season is your busy season, it does not mean you should be running at all hours daily. Sometimes it should be dark when your team is resting, relaxing, sleeping, and spending time with their family and friends. Tax season does not mean that they no longer have personal lives.

When your office closes, turn off the lights, lock the doors, and close the office. Don’t require employees to work longer hours or weekends. Establish a strict schedule of when work is done, and stick to it.

4. Leverage Technology

Some of the most annoying parts of tax season are the repetitive, manual tasks. They feel like busy work, take away time from working with clients, and are monotonous. But what if you could completely automate them? How much time could you get back into your schedule if you never had to worry about manual data entry ever again?

When you leverage professional technology, like IRIS’s document management solution, you can save time and money by allowing automation to do the work for you faster and with fewer errors. This gives your team time back to be engaged with their clients, rather than worrying about repetitive manual tasks.

Get Started with IRIS Today

With over 40 years of industry experience, IRIS is here to help your firm reach its goals. We provide support year-round to help you before, during, and after tax season. Talk to one of our experts today to learn how IRIS can help you reach your goals.