Bakker may be the lead partner of business advisory for Crowe Horwath, running a team of 12 partners and 80 staff, but he felt quite comfortable taking the morning off. “We were driven by the concept of the time sheet and six-minute intervals. Now it’s more about outcomes,” he says.
We’ve entered the world of work-time choice, where flexible hours are a weapon in the battle for talent.
The flexibility culture
While Crowe Horwath does have formal maternity and paternity schemes in place, there’s a broader cultural aspect required for true family friendliness, according to Bakker.
“The CEO’s not looking for 7.5 billable hours, but wants to know my clients are happy and that we are delivering value in a commercial way,” he says. If that can be demonstrated, there is no problem structuring the working week to deliver some level of work-life balance.
Nathan Percy, a tax accountant at small Tasmanian accounting firm SMARTAX, agrees. Percy not only typically works a 7am–4pm workday, he also works a nine-day fortnight, which allows him to spend every second Tuesday with his daughter. “It’s really important to me,” he says, “and it saves us having our daughter an extra day in childcare.”
Bakker acknowledges that negotiating this flexibility can be easier for senior accountants than juniors. And he notes that women may benefit more than men – but that, he says, is because flexible work practices help primary carers most, and most primary carers tend to be women.
Keeping the talent
Even in these slightly less skillsconstrained times, flexibility is important in attracting and keeping top talent.
Brett Rose, commerce director for recruitment firm Robert Walters, points to a recent survey of exit interviews that found one of the main reasons people cited for leaving roles was they wanted more flexibility. “The big firms are generally better at this, because they have the infrastructure that allows it,” he says. “If you have a two-partner firm, it may be harder to convince them of the merits of a family-friendly workplace.”
Many larger firms can also afford to offer paid parental leave schemes that encourage women to return to the workforce after the birth of a child. But even the two-partner practice should expect to be asked about its family-friendly policies these days.
“Twelve years ago, you almost winced when you had to ask about flexible practices,” says Rose. “It’s not a dirty question any more.”
Bakker agrees that most candidates, particularly those making a sideways career move, canvas a fi rm’s family friendliness before making a decision.
The culture block
Workplace lawyer Kerryn Tredwell, a partner with Hall & Wilcox, has a different assessment. She says that while professional services fi rms increasingly have family-friendly policies, the company culture can stop professionals from making use of them. It’s more often staff in support and administration roles who use these family-friendly policies, she believes.
Culture remains a stumbling block, no matter how glittering the promises about family friendliness a fi rm might make. Emma Walsh is founder and CEO of Parents@work, a fi rm that designs family-friendly policies for organisations. She estimates that the average return-towork time for new mums is seven months after a birth. That means corporate cultures somehow have to deal with returning professionals who are expected to bring in business and keep clients happy but who, in her words, “may be operating on just four hours’ sleep a night”.
Dealing with that can’t be handled by a line in the fl exibility policy. It requires attitudinal shift.
Walsh says initiatives such as the Male Champions of Change program pioneered by sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick are helping advance not just familyfriendly policies but fl exible cultures in the major fi rms. The program has brought together 21 male CEOs, including Deloitte Australia CEO Giam Swiegers and KPMG Australia CEO Gary Wingrove. Walsh notes, though, that smaller fi rms are “struggling” to make similar changes.
From at-work to online
One major ally in the search for flexibility is technology, which provides accountants with anytime, anywhere access to work data and systems.
There is, however, a fine line to be negotiated between the flexibility that technology allows and the expectation that employees will be always available.
In France, this has been addressed directly in workplace agreements that require employees to disconnect from devices during rest periods, so that they cannot be cajoled into responding to work-related issues.
Some Australian accountants are managing to prevent flexibility from destroying downtime. For example, Gary Veale, a director in KPMG’s R&D incentives practice, leaves his phone in the car when he gets home, so that it does not interrupt his time with his two young daughters. He also works four days a week to allow him to juggle both childcare and PhD studies.
Veale says accounting firms have no choice but to be flexible if they want to “attract high-performing individuals who have options”. But he also says that accountants and other professionals have to make the flexibility work both for the firm and the family – it can’t be a one-way street. Percy says that’s certainly the case at SMARTAX; staff are willing to put in the hours required to get the work done, especially during the busy tax season.
“We’re pretty efficient in the workplace and we work well under pressure,” Percy says. “We also communicate with our clients, giving them realistic timelines and progress updates, and 99 per cent of the time our clients are very happy.”
Workplace of the future
Susan Ferrier, national head of people, performance and culture for KPMG, also understands the need for flexibility, demonstrated to great effect with this interview – on a Saturday afternoon, fresh off a plane from Asia, juggling questions from a child at the same time.
Flexible and agile work practices, along with a sprinkling of technology, underpin what Ferrier describes as “the emerging workplace of the future”.
In return for the changed practices, she says, “we think we get people who are more creative and productive. Their work quality is higher and there are wellbeing benefits.” And that, she says, translates to a competitive edge.
Ferrier counters the suggestion that big firms can offer flexibility more easily than small firms, saying that too often smaller accounting firms pigeonhole flexibility as being all about three-day weeks. “If you think about this as being how to get people working more flexibly,” she says, “you move away from thinking about it as a cost issue and towards recognising it as a productivity issue.”
Ferrier acknowledges that there are still pockets of resistance to the notion, both internally and among clients. But she argues that as senior practitioners model flexible behaviour, the culture will become more ingrained.
Ferrier’s conclusion: “We are on a journey and there is no turning back.”
