|
Greetings!
Welcome
to TrainingTips, Point of Action's quarterly
online newsletter for accounting and financial consulting professionals. In
this issue, we discuss Point of Action's recent article in the AICPA's
Journal of Accountancy focused on linking competency-building to
compensation.
|
Tips for Paying for Performance
|
|
|
|
1. Align rewards and performance. Identify key performance
competencies that the firm expects staff at each level to master, and
link compensation to these expectations.
2. Get employees involved early. By soliciting employee input on how to
construct a pay-for- performance system, employees will buy-in to the
process earlier on and will better understand its goals and results.
3. Keep it simple. Avoid the urge to use calculators and complex
numerical formulas to determine bonus eligibility. Use your firm's
performance evaluation forms, which should include both quantitative and
qualitative assessments of performance, as well as discussions with
supervisors to determine compensation increases.
4. Provide resources. Help employees to achieve high performance
standards by providing technical and non- technical training programs
that reflect performance competencies.
5. Maintain open communication. Host monthly meetings with employees and
send frequent e-mails and voice-mails to solicit feedback on Firm
initiatives and to reinforce Firm goals and outcomes. Ensure that
partners meet regularly to discuss staff performance benchmarks and to
evaluate, compensate, and promote employees consistently and fairly.
6. Be willing to change. Periodically reassess pay-for- performance
initiatives and organizational enhancements to determine strengths and
weaknesses. Develop, implement, and communicate necessary changes
firm-wide.
»
|
|
Keep Staff Communication Channels Open
|
|
|
|
 Some of the most
successful CPA firms are those that continuously communicate with their
staff. As revealed in the Meyners + Company pay-for-performance
experiment, listening to staff early and often is the key to successful
and sustainable implementation of new processes and ideas. So how do we
build open and ongoing communication into a firm's DNA?
The
answer is: meetings. As much as we dislike lengthy meetings that take us
away from chargeable work and the technical challenges that led many into
the accounting profession, meetings provide a vital communication channel
to reveal staff concerns and involve employees in devising practical
solutions.
Consider
sponsoring quarterly meetings with groups of staff led by the Managing
Partner. Perhaps Associates meet with the Managing Partner (and/or other
firm leaders where appropriate) on the first Friday of each quarter.
Senior Associates/Supervisors meet with the Managing Partner on the fifth
Friday of each quarter; Managers meet with him/her on the 10th Friday.
These periodic meetings can be an open forum or focused on a targeted
topic each time (e.g., scheduling, CPE, performance feedback). Both
concerns and possible solutions should be shared and followed-up on by
the Managing Partner and others that he/she involves in the process.
In
addition to pre-scheduled meetings, consider surveying your staff at
least once per year to solicit anonymous feedback in a variety of areas,
from employee satisfaction, to workload manageability, to amount and type
of CPE. Then use the regular staff meetings to probe deeper into the
survey results. Try establishing a staff advisory board that is
responsible for gathering information from colleagues and for helping the
firm's leaders to implement changes.
By communicating consistently with staff you will be better-positioned to
introduce new ideas into your firm's culture and ensure their long-term
viability.
»
|
|
N.E. Practice Management Conference Materials
|
|
|
|
 ***
Point
of Action spoke at the annual New England Practice Management Conference
on "Linking Learning & Development to Performance
Improvement."
If you
would like copies of our presentation and break- out materials, please
feel free to contact us.
Contact Us... »
|
|
|
Meyners Does A Reality Check
|
|
|
|
The February 2006 issue of the Journal of Accountancy
features a spotlight article by Point of Action on Meyners + Company
(www.meyners.com), an 80- person CPA firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico that
has undergone enormous organizational change over the past four years and
has allowed other CPA firms to benefit from its successes and learn from
its mistakes.
The
Meyners chronicle began in 2002 after the firm lost one of its top
rainmaker-partners and realized that its future prosperity depended on
developing and retaining talented staff people. That year, the firm
launched an initiative to redefine its identity and establish specific
behavioral benchmarks that staff at each professional level would be
expected to master. Next, the firm decided to align its performance
evaluation and compensation structure with its core values and core
competencies, and internalize its training offerings to help its
professionals develop new skills. Like many CPA firms in today's
competitive marketplace, Meyners encountered some drawbacks to its new
pay-for- performance structure and has recently decided to eliminate its
bonus system.
The
goal of Meyners pay-for-performance system was simple: establish core
competencies and core values that all employees are expected to
demonstrate at each level and in every department firm-wide, and
compensate them accordingly. The difficulty was in the execution. Using
elaborate calculations that were overly complex and confusing, the firm
tried to provide bonuses linked to 360-degree feedback (from supervisors,
staff, and peers), as well as to the firm's overall performance. What
Meyners discovered was that this extensive calculation process detracted
from the overall purpose of the core competencies and core values that
the firm believed in, and led to much staff frustration.
Fortunately,
Meyners was open to listening to its staff and to overhauling a
compensation structure that didn't work, despite the many hours and funds
they invested in creating it. The lesson we can all learn from the
Meyners experiment is that it pays to keep it simple!
Click here to read the JofA
article...
|
|
