Taking PTO in Public Accounting
Taking your time off is essential to maintaining your sanity in the demanding world of public accounting. However, it’s important to understand that while you may be taking time off, your coworkers and clients may not be. Because of the client service and team dynamics that public accounting firms utilize, it can be hard to take PTO without incurring or imparting additional stress. Today, I’m going to share some ways to improve your PTO experience for you, your coworkers, and your clients.
Accelerate (or Delay) Your Work Streams
Are you planning on taking PTO near a typical deadline? You should go out of your way to request and complete as much as possible before your departure to reduce the stress of completing something quickly upon your return. Alternatively, if you have a work stream with multiple components, you can request that your coworkers help accumulate the requests so you will have everything together and ready to go when you return. In either circumstance, consciously reviewing work streams and moving priorities around your time off schedule will help keep everything moving at an appropriate pace.
Communicate with Coworkers Regarding Your Absence
Many firms have a system for inputting PTO requests, and it can be handled by a number of different people such as HR, a Partner, a Manager, or a scheduler. Regardless of who is responsible for approving and processing your PTO, I will bet that there is someone in your firm that would be interested in the fact that you won’t be available who is also not being systematically notified of your time off. For this reason, it’s important to communicate proactively to your team and anyone who may ask for your help on a regular basis. The best practices for this are to bring up your PTO during regular team meetings and making your teams/slack status message into a reminder of your PTO days at least a week in advance.
Communicate with Your Clients Too!
Clients can be a bit trickier when it comes to PTO. Ultimately, you are responsible (at some level) for serving your clients, and depending on the size of your team, your absence could be a speed bump or a total roadblock. When it comes to client communications, here are my best practices for when I am out of office:
Make sure your OOO message has someone that can be contacted in your absence. This is especially important for those clients that don’t have a recurring project with you that may contact you out of the blue.
For recurring clients, make sure that they have 2-3 people they can contact. While this isn’t always possible when there is specialized expertise involved, I like to make sure that my clients have the emails of other engagement team members to contact in my absence. Everyone can get busy, especially when a team member (you) is out of office. So having two people looking out for a client while you are away is just good client service in my opinion.
For larger clients, having a pre-PTO meeting and email. This may only apply to a specific set of engagements, but if the show must go on without you while you are away, having a meeting with the client and the people filling in is a great way to instill trust and set yourself up for success upon your return.
Your PTO is important, so make the most of it by preparing appropriately! While there may be a bit of extra work on the front end of things, not having to worry about work while you are on PTO and not having a huge pile of things to do when you get back is certainly worth it!