In this episode, Tim O'Neill, CPA, Senior Tax Manager — Wipfli LLP, joins April Walker, CPA, CGMA, Lead Manager — Tax Practice & Ethics, AICPA & CIMA, live from ENGAGE 2023 to discuss the current environment for recruitment and retention of employees in tax and how to build deeper connections with staff to help them feel more invested in their organizations.

What you’ll learn in this episode

• Strategies for employee retention and engagement (1:01)
• Differences between a “manager” and a “leader” (2:48)
• What it means to prioritize outcomes vs. outputs (5:04)
• The notion of no more timesheets (7:20)
• Final thoughts (8:05)
• A page from Tim’s travel journal (9:31)

Related resources

• Practice Management & Professional Standards — The AICPA Tax Section provides the guidance and tools you need to manage a successful tax practice and maintain the highest level of ethical standards in tax.
• Reimagining your tax practice — Tackle today’s top practice management issues with insights and tips from pioneers in the tax community. The Reimagining Your Tax Practice webcast series will tackle these issues and more in a Q&A roundtable series with tax pioneers from the profession.

Transcript

April Walker: Hello everyone and welcome to the AICPA's Tax Section Odyssey podcast, where we offer thought leadership on all things tax facing the profession. I'm April Walker, Lead Manager from the Tax Section, and I'm here today with Tim O'Neill. He is a Senior Tax Manager with Wipli in St. Louis. Welcome, Tim.

Tim O’Neill: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Walker: Yeah. We're here together today recording at the ENGAGE conference.

O’Neill: That's all right live in person.

Walker: Yeah and yesterday I attended Tim's session which was titled, “Recruit, Retain, Repeat.” Welcome Tim. I thought we could share some of your insights with our listeners from your session.

O’Neill: I'd love to.

Walker: I don't think it is a new concept for people listening today that recruitment and retention are a huge problem in tax and accounting profession, that sort of thing. I thought maybe from your perspective, you could share a few strategies that you have found that worked for you for employee retention and engagement.

O’Neill: Yeah, absolutely. Like you mentioned, this is the million or $2 million question.

Walker: Yeah, for sure.

O’Neill: What can we do as leaders to try and increase our retention increase overall employee experience? Really there's no right or wrong answers — it's all very individualized.

But what I found through my experience with AICPA committees, my experience within Wipfli, prior firms or organizations that I've worked with is being an effective leader and authentic is the best way to build these deeper connections with staff and employees that really makes them feel invested in the overall organization. I'm trying to think of some of the more important things that we've done, but it's just so individualized.

It's difficult to an extent, but if you can get across the idea that we don’t need to put together these formal programs to help retention. It really doesn't come down to that. It's just about being transparent, authentic and empathetic is a big one that we've seen.

With sessions here there is a lot of talk about being an empathetic leader. We've had tons of sessions on ideas about what can we do internally and externally to help retain employees. Obviously outside of maybe the psychology of the retention, recruiting and rewarding employees, maybe look at some of the action items, some low-cost solutions, mid cost solutions, high cost solutions, I'm happy to talk more about any of those.

Walker: You mentioned some of these characteristics, but one thing you talked about yesterday that really resonated with me was talking about differences between a manager and a leader. I think we can all agree that there is a difference.

O’Neill: There is a huge difference.

Walker: Maybe talk about some of those differences and for those people who see themselves as a leader — How do they figure out like where they land on that spectrum?

O’Neill: Yeah, and it's funny, you said — “some individuals see themselves as a leader” — we like to call those the heroes of their own stories. Is that a great leadership quality? Probably not. They might think that they're fantastic leaders, but they're not necessarily connected on that personal level with a lot of their employees or direct reports.

Honestly, to me, the difference between a manager and a leader, it's mainly…we think about a manager is very work centric. They're more about how and when are we going to get the work done? They're very much more process focused than people focused.

A leader on the other hand, they're more what and why? What are we doing? What can we do? Why are we doing this? Being transparent and showing the thought process behind all of it, and being able to communicate that to the individuals within their organization. That is, by far the largest difference between the two.

As we have been talking about pipeline challenges, the leaders within organizations — and this is not just specific to accounting, but really every industry. We've had to evolve over the last, let's say, three years with COVID and everything that was fallout from that. We've had to evolve and say we need to be much more hands-on and personalized with our approach.

Walker: You mentioned this, but I really liked when you talking about prioritizing outcome versus output. As I work with firms and members trying to help them with some of these issues and we've worked with a lot of small firms.

You're from a bigger firm, but you may have experience with or some ideas and thinking about how that can work like shifting with limited resources. How or what does it mean? What does it mean to be prioritized outcome versus output?

O’Neill: Sure. Even Wipfli, we're a top 20 CPA firm, but we do a very good job of operating as a collaborative group of smaller firms. We're in quite a few markets. But we do a very good job of still having that small firm feeling.

The firm that I was with previously, we merged in with Wipfli. We're about 100 person firm in St. Louis. I have a little bit of experience at a, we'll call it a smaller firm and culturally we aligned really well. Both firms are obviously based out of the Midwest and so on a cultural level, we had the same identity. Again, it gets into the hands-on personalized leadership approach, outcome versus output.

Billable hours — that's the driving force in public accounting. Let's get our billable hours up because this is where we make our money. But is that really where we make all of our money? Or do we have value in some of these hours that individuals are working?

We like to call them impact hours. Is there value in these hours that maybe we can't charge the client for it, but we're definitely [either the staff or the client even to an extent] getting value from it. Think of CPE, performance coaching, mentoring, client relations. Those are all impact hours.

What we've tried to do in both of my previous firm and Wipfli is we don't want to emphasize the billable hour as long as we're getting the outcome that we need and we're getting the client is first and foremost, served. At what point are we punishing efficiency? There are a lot of individuals that can get done in 20 hours while somebody else can get done in 40 hours. At what point are we punishing their efficiency and it's defeating to those individuals.

Walker: You talked about and it's so true. How they're punished as they get more work, like they can do 20 hours. Thank you so much. Sir may I have some more?

O’Neill: There was one brave lady in the audience, but that's exactly what I asked. I said what happens when you're good at your job and it was silent and she said, you get more work.

Walker: It's true. Something else you've made me think about, have you gone to any sessions that we've have talked about the no time sheets thing?

O’Neill: That's the rumbling. I've got a couple of people ask me, “Have you heard this idea of no more time sheets?” I said I haven't heard this idea.

Walker: Yeah, I've known some people that have been able to do it, but it's fascinating.

O’Neill: It's funny. We all know people that have been in public accounting and they've left, and I've got close friends that have moved into a new career paths within the CPA realm, but new career paths. I said, What do you enjoy the most? No time sheets. I don't have to keep track of every six minutes of my day.

Walker: True, you never know, we're always evolving.

O’Neill: Yeah, that's right.

Walker: As we're wrapping up, do you have any other thoughts on whether there's a magic bullet to solve this problem? You've actually already answered that question. There's not a magic bullet, but do you have some closing thoughts for us as we're thinking about this important topic about recruiting and retaining good employees.

O’Neill: Yeah, there really is no magic bullet.

One of the slides that I had in my presentation talked about the employee value proposition. As an organization, we have to be competitive in some of the basic stuff. So think benefits, compensation, some of the well-being programs that we offer and flexibility.

But really what it comes down to is there's no one-size-fits-all. There is no silver bullet because everybody is their own individual person and what I feel to be the most effective is taking this idea of being a human-centered leader and having the employee experience driven by the associate themselves. I want them to come to me and tell me what they want do. I need to be, again, genuine and saying, I'm here to help you. I want to help you.

We've heard the old saying, people don't quit jobs, they quit people. Now they're not staying for jobs. They're staying for people who have evolved into that human centered leader. That's where we're going to build the strongest relationships and where we are going to see higher retention.

Walker: Awesome. Tim, thanks for joining me. In closing, I'd like to do a little fun thing where we're taking a journey together towards a better profession. I like to get a glimpse of my guests other travel journeys. Tell us about a bucket list travel location you have on the books or something fun to share.

O’Neill: Bucket lists and travel. I tell you June has been the traveling month for me. I was in Nashville for the Craft Brewers Conference, I have a lot of craft brewery clients.

Walker: We will have to talk about that later.

O’Neill: Then Vegas and then I'm shipping off with my family here in about three days to go to Key Biscane for a week or so. Then I'm in Dallas for another conference and so all over. But bucket list — I'm a big rugby fan. I'll preference this with saying huge Ireland rugby fan. That's all in the last name O'Neill.

Walker: Got it.

O’Neill: Definitely make it out to the Six Nations tournament over in Ireland for one of the home matches. That's a bucket list trip for me for sure.

Walker: Very good. I'm actually headed to London on Sunday. Fun stuff. No rugby or anything.

O’Neill: No, that's okay. From the desert to the rain.

Walker: There you go. Thank you again. So again, this is April Walker from the AICPA Tax Section. This community is your go-to source for technical guidance and resources designed especially for CPA tax practitioners like you in mind.

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