Process over perfection: Why listening to staff is key to productivity
While productivity is often discussed in complex terms, Pitcher Partners has noted that the biggest gains for mid-tier firms are often found in common-sense, practical reforms.
Nick Bull, partner at Pitcher Partners Melbourne, said that the greatest productivity gains could often be found by listening to staff, investing in continuous learning opportunities and making practical improvements to day-to-day processes.
“I think people aren't lowering their eyes, they're thinking they've got to do something quite transformational. But most productivity and efficiency opportunities are way more granular than that,” Bull told Accounting Times.
Productivity has been a hot topic in recent months, after a Productivity Commission review found that Australia’s productivity had not meaningfully improved in a decade, with stark implications for living standards. In May, the Treasurer declared fixing Australia’s productivity crisis a top economic priority.
Nick Bull said that mid-tier accounting firms were often overwhelmed with the idea of productivity, and equated it with transformational changes rather than practical, systemic tweaks.
“They read about the things that the big four does, or Qantas does, but that doesn't make sense to them because they don't have the resources to do that, nor do they need to do that. The solutions that are available to them are way more obvious,” he said.
“That's probably been hyper accelerated at the moment by all this chatter about AI and this expectation that you should be completely overhauling and transforming your business overnight.”
While Bull acknowledged that AI was likely to bring transformational change over the long term, he said it was leading firms to overlook the small, incremental changes that could deliver practical productivity wins.
“One of the most overlooked productivity tools is also the simplest: listening. Not to industry gurus, but to the people who actually do the work,” Bull wrote in a recent insight for Pitcher Partners.
“Staff know where time is lost. They see the bottlenecks, the duplicated processes and the systems that don’t connect. They experience the frustration of manual workarounds and unnecessary approvals. But they rarely get asked.”
Bull added that many accounting firms suffered from the ‘experts’ curse,’ which could hamper leadership’s ability to actively listen to staff and clients.
“The experts' curse or egocentric behaviour from leadership in accounting firms can be something that is quite damaging,” he said.
He also underscored the importance of investing in continuous staff learning and development to build productivity gains over the longer term.
“Our investment in learning has been huge. The program we've set up for our graduate talent coming in is unique in the way that we've done that to give them as much breadth as possible.”
“There's such an investment that's required, and that's not a burden, that's actually a staple. You need to make sure that your people are getting the best environment to develop themselves both professionally and personally.
“Firms that are under-investing in learning and the experiences they provide their people, that's going to start to erode productivity over time.”
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