Professional Service Firm (Micro)managing Tactics
Starting your career at a professional services firm (like a public accounting firm) is a great way to jump start your career. While every firm is different in terms of their internal policies and procedures, they tend to have quite a few things in common with regards to the way they operate. Today, we are going to discuss the tools and methods that professional services firms use to manage you and how they can be abused to micromanage you. Let's jump in!
Management Tool #1 - Time Sheets
These firms bill clients for the time that you and other employees spend working on jobs. In order to keep track of this time, they will require you to fill out a timesheet to account for every hour you work at the firm. While this might seem like a foreign concept, at first, it is a core component of the professional services industry. A typical professional will fill out their timesheet daily for the work that they performed. That information is sent in real time to the firm's operations team so they can understand where time is being spent. Different firms will have different policies regarding what personnel can see the amount and detail of other people's timesheets. Because time spent ultimately drives billing for some customers and drives realization for fixed fee engagements, timesheets are used as a tool to help manage people and expectations on how long things should take and when jobs should be completed.
Management Tool #2 - Communications Applications
Most professional services firms utilize the Microsoft Office suite for handling business. Within this suite of programs, firms tend to use Outlook for email and calendar coordination and Teams for quick internal communications. While these tools aren't directly tracking your time, they are used every single day to help coordinate and prioritize your efforts. Being active on teams and having an up-to-date outlook calendar will help your team achieve success!
Management Tool #3 - Sign Offs and Approvals
This one is most closely linked to public accounting firms. As both an internal and external requirement, firms are usually required to evidence the date of preparation and review of the work papers of their engagements. This is most commonly facilitated by the use of software such as Caseware and Engagement. Typically, you can have up to five sign offs in one of these engagement files for each work paper and the database. For those unfamiliar with the concept of signing off on work, here's a quick breakdown:
When a given work paper is completed in one of these files, The person who prepared it will sign off in the software. This signoff will put their name (usually just their initials) and the date.
Next, the person in charge of reviewing the work will go into the file, Review the work, and leave any comments for corrections that need to be made. When the review is complete, the reviewer will sign off using their name and the date.
Depending on the firm's internal policy and the risk of the engagement, more sign offs maybe suggested or required. Typically, the engagement partner will add the third sign off on the most important work papers at the very least.
Those responsible for reviewing and completing engagements use sign offs as a measure of progress. It's very easy for a manager or partner to open a file and look at the sign offs to see if enough work papers are ready for them to review.
This all sounds normal, how can anyone micromanage with these tools?
Any system that is used in the ordinary course of business has the potential to be abused in the wrong circumstances. It's important to understand that these tools can be good indicators of productivity when they are utilized and interpreted correctly, but information and communication can be misinterpreted. Let's break down a few ways that that my network has seen these tools abused:
Over-monitoring Timesheets - as I mentioned above, time sheets can be a great indicator of how far along and engagement is progressing. With the right level of detail and access, they are also a micromanager's dream. If staff are required to put a description of their time along with their timesheet entry, and the wrong person is able to pull that time sheet data immediately after it's entered, there is potential for some of the unhealthiest behavior I've ever heard of. When an associate puts in their time and said, “I spent 90 minutes doing the cash section” and their manager pulls their time the next day and goes out of their way to tell them that they should have only spent 60 minutes doing the cash section, it's not going to make for the best working environment. Time entry is a necessary evil to the professional services world, but pulling time sheets to judge someone instead of asking them what they did that day in a stand-up meeting takes things too far in my opinion. This type of management produces unintended results because if an employee doesn't want to deal with their micromanager, they will manipulate their timesheet in a way that omits information that could be put to good use. In other words, if I'm being micromanaged about how much time I'm spending on something, I'm going to eat my time.
Teams Status and Calendar Availability - these two items can be a reflection of how busy you are, and whether or not you are working. When your Teams (or equivalent application) shows that you are available (green), it means that you are on your computer and have clicked into the application recently. If you haven't clicked in the team's application for a certain amount of time, your status may change from available to idle (yellow). You will most commonly see this status during lunch and overnight when people leave their computers on. While this is not the best measure of whether or not someone is working on a client, it is the simplest way to see if someone has started working for the day or hasn't “worked” in awhile. Some managers interpret these statuses like this:
Green - this person is working and maybe available for me to give them something to do.
Yellow - this person isn't working right now, why aren't they working? I demand productivity!
Personally, I've heard stories of managers asking someone to join a call or answer a detailed question outside of working hours because their team status showed up as green. I've also heard stories of people being judged negatively for having a yellow team status for too long even though they were in a conference room talking to the client. Teams might be the easiest indicator, but it is by no means the whole story. Make sure you are talking to your managers so they don't have the opportunity to misinterpret your Teams status!
Sign-off Stalking - similar to pulling timesheets, stalking a file to see how many sign offs have occurred is a way for managers to check in on their engagements without complete information. In the eyes of many managers, if a file isn't signed off on, it hasn't been worked on at all. Those who have worked in public accounting firms no. And understand that this isn't always the case, and that not all work papers are created equal. There have been many times in my past where I had to choose between dedicating my time to a complex and necessary work paper (1 signoff)that will take days to complete and dedicating that same time to a bunch of required checklists (4 signoffs) that could be done at any time. Because some managers like to see progress in the file they have their team prioritize the wrong things just so they can feel more comfortable.
The common theme among these micromanagement scenarios is an improper reliance on incomplete information coupled with a lack of communication. Because everyone at these firms is so busy working, it is inevitable that these tools will be used as a proxy for when managers and partners aren't able to manage staff directly. It's important to understand that those gaps in information need to be filled with proper, proactive communication regarding timelines and expectations so that a toxic work environment can be avoided.