How to Fix Your Employee Retention Struggles

The finance and accounting market is an employee’s market. There is a high demand for qualified and knowledgeable professionals, while a shrinking supply exists to fill those roles. For this reason, every firm should be focused on how to retain the talent you already have and how you can best attract young professionals to your firm. 

Find out what you can do to fix your staffing struggles and how IRIS Firm Management can help.

Winning Employee Retention Strategies for Accounting Firms

Your employees are experienced and knowledgeable, which makes them invaluable to your firm. Here are three strategies you can use to help you retain the talent you have and reduce employee turnover.

1. Fight Against Burnout with Engagement

Feeling overworked and stretched too thin isn’t determined by how many hours an employee works but by how employees experience their workload. An employee who is disengaged, bored, and uninvested in their work will feel burdened and overworked by the same amount of work they find engaging and meaningful. This means you can retain your employees by working with them to find projects that speak to them and their strengths.

2. Streamline Your Workflow

Paperwork and bureaucracy are unenjoyable for everyone involved. Repetitive data entry paired with convoluted processes makes employees feel like they are wasting their time and mismanaged. By switching to a better firm management solution, you can help remove those workflow silos and improve employee satisfaction.

3. Champion for Better Worklife Balance

It’s an overused phrase many leaders and managers use that their coworkers are like their families, but that’s a dangerous way to think about work. Your work is work, and your family is family. A clear delineation between the two needs to be established, starting at work. When your firm crosses that boundary and requires employees to work longer hours or do work at home, you are damaging your employees' work-life balance. A better way to retain talent is by establishing strict boundaries around work and life for yourself and your team.

How to Attract and Retain Young Professionals In Your Accounting Firm

Not only should you look for solutions to keep your existing talent, you should also look to how you can attract the best talent possible. Young professionals want different benefits and have different expectations from their employers than ever before. Here are some things you can do to help draw in the most qualified individuals to your firm.

1. Flexible Workplace Options

The Covid pandemic of 2020 forever changed the workforce. Before the pandemic, remote and hybrid work options were on the rise, but due to the pandemic, everyone realized the benefits of having alternative work options. An overwhelming majority of workers want remote or hybrid work options. If your firm lacks the technology to offer remote and hybrid work options, you are passing up most young professionals.

2. Promote Long-Term Stability

Young professionals don’t want seasonal work. CPAs and accountants are swamped with tax season at the start of the calendar year. It is the busiest time of the year, and it’s not uncommon for firms to hire a few additional members to help survive the rush. However, once taxes are submitted, the rest of the year can be very lowkey, and those excess employees are let go until they’re needed again. That strategy may work in the short term, but it does not attract long-term qualified and experienced professionals. Young professionals are looking for a career that they can reliably trust will provide them with a stable income throughout the year, no matter the season.

Attract and Retain Employees with IRIS Firm Management

IRIS Firm Management helps you get the most from your firm by serving as its central pillar, giving you the structure and technology you need to attract and retain employees. Our solutions help you better manage billing, budgeting, scheduling, client management, and so much more. 

See how IRIS Firm Management can help you transform your firm into a more organized and productive firm today.