Why Attention to Detail is Important
If you look closely, the words "attention to detail" are very common on job postings for entry level staff as well as very experienced professionals. These words mean something different for every job, but are critically important, nonetheless. Over the course of my career, I've come to learn how much attention to detail really matters. Today, we are going to walk through three examples where my or my colleague’s lack of attention to detail had the potential to be a huge turning point or learning experience in our careers.
Emailing the Wrong Recipient or Forgetting to CC
If you are like me and started out in a client-facing role right out of college, you will experience the joy of meeting tons of people as a part of your regular job responsibilities. For me, this came in the form of having many clients and coworkers to communicate with over email. Because of all these new contacts, I had tons of addresses ready to go in my Outlook inbox whenever I started typing someone's first name. On at least one occasion, I sent an email intended for a specific person to another person with the same first name because my Outlook auto-populated their email and I did not pay close enough attention. Some were harmless as the recipients were both internal to my firm, while one other time I had to explain why someone at the client was not properly CC'd on an email. The severity of this slip up will vary depending on who the intended recipients are but rest assured that it’s never a good look to send the wrong people confidential information. One helpful tip to prevent this is to put in the email recipients only after the email is drafted, and double checking addressees before sending.
Clerical Input Errors
In any job that involves numbers, there is usually some risk of human error when typing out some numbers. This could be in a spreadsheet, an email, or an accounting software and may involve fat-fingering, transposition of digits, or adding too little or too many zeroes. For those in entry level accounting positions, this aspect of attention to detail is particularly important because a good portion of those jobs involves some kind of data entry and verification. Personally, I have spent days entering and analyzing data into 50+ column spreadsheets to audit a client's revenue and I learned the importance of keeping an eye on the details the hard way multiple times in that exercise alone. After rising through the ranks and becoming the manager that reviewed the workpapers, I have found a new appreciation for the staff that take their time to double check their work before sending it to review. Especially when you are dealing with lots of information, taking the time to do it right is worth not having to take the time to do it over again!
Working with the Wrong Information
For those working in professional services firms, it's common to be working on more than one client at a time, especially for those working at smaller firms. As someone who has worked at these smaller firms, I cannot count the number of times that an associate took instructions but then worked on the wrong client or from the wrong starting point. This aspect of attention to detail is why it is so important to take good notes and read back instructions to the person giving them. For example:
"I'll be working on updating the financial statement package for XX entity, and will use the supporting information located in the YY folder."
How Can I Be More Detail Oriented?
While everyone starts at a different level of default detail orientation, the best way to become more detail oriented is to understand why the details matter. For most people, this comes from the experience of getting review comments from a more experienced coworker. I've learned so much of my detail orientation from audit partners putting through comments on workpapers and financial statements that made me see the world through their eyes, with everything from the alignment of numbers in a word document to the language of captions on a statement of cash flows. While these may seem like minor details at first glance, I was able to learn quickly why these things mattered, mainly because the small changes in verbiage made that part of the document incorrect and no partner wanted their name on sloppy work. Other than getting these comments yourself, a great way to learn these is from the mistakes and lessons of others. You've already started by reading this article, but go ahead and ask someone in your workplace if there's any specific details you can learn from them.