What Will It Take? Part 2

One of the absolute necessities to continue as a thriving profession is to keep the hard working and qualified people we have in the profession. I received an email the other day from a former associate that made the switch from public accounting to private industry. She is a young woman who has basically burnt out of public accounting because of the long hours (all year, not just during busy season) and the continual focus on the billable hour. She had enough and needed work/life balance. She has gone into industry and is getting the balance she is looking for, plus benefits that are not available to non-owners in public accounting practice. Public accounting has lost some real potential with her leaving. I'm sure she won't come back and she is exactly what our profession needs. We have to find ways to keep other like her from leaving. How?

We need to eliminate the focus on billable hours. Number of hours billed has become a worthless metric and is very outdated. The value that we create with our work is not measurable by how many hours we spend on a project multiplied by some arbitrary number. Sometimes we can spend a very short period of time on a project and yet create a great deal of value and other times we spend a long time on a project and create no value. We need to become more focused on creating value for our clients and billing for the value we create. Projects that don't create value (compliance) need to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, if they are done at all. This will help us keep our people because they won't be under so much pressure to bill time for the sake of billing time, but they will be focused on creating value for our clients which should lead to greater job satisfaction and higher client and employee retention.