# Workplace Surgery: Work-Life Balance in Accounting - **Episode:** [132](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/132.md) (2024-10-01) - **Type:** workplace-surgery - **Tags:** work-life-balance, accounting, burnout - **Time:** 36:04–42:43 (start 2164s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/132?t=2164](https://truthliesandwork.com/132?t=2164) --- [36:04] Al Elliott: Excellent. Okay, on to our second question, Le. This person writes, I'm a partner at a mid-sized accounting firm with about 50 employees. Our industry is known for long hours, especially during tax season, but I'm growing increasingly concerned about the work-life balance of our team. Hmm, this could go one of two ways. We've implemented some measures like flexible working hours and occasional work-from-home days, but I still see signs of burnout. Productivity is slipping, and we've had a few valuable team members leave, citing stress and overwork as reasons. I want to create a healthier work environment, but I'm worried about how this might affect our competitiveness and client service. I don't really see how those two are linked, but maybe Leanne will tell us. How can I improve work-life balance without compromising the quality and efficiencies our clients expect? I started off, I'll be honest, I started with thinking, oh, you know, well done, you think about the right things. And then, I'm so sorry, person who wrote in, but you became a little bit of an accountant halfway through that and started looking at money and weights and costs and measures and that kind of thing. So, Leigh, what, what do we need to know? [37:09] Leanne Elliott: Oh, yes, of course, you have busy, busy seasons. Lots of industries do. High workloads should be the exception, not the norm. And it sounds like they're the norm. And then you're going from high workload to a really high workload during those busy periods. It's not sustainable. It's just not sustainable. And you can think about, well, you know, if we, if we reduce the amount of effort that I want from my team or the number of clients they have on their, their caseload, that's going to impact the amount of money I'm going to make. What are, you know, the, the service we give our customers? If you're— the truth is you— it's already impacting your customers because you've got people leaving, your productivity down is down, and your morale is low. That ship sailed. Your customers are already being impacted. So now it's about damage limitation. And, and really, it sounds like it's not— what you're doing is not sustainable. And there can't be many more clearer signs than people leaving your business and citing workload and stress for the reasons they're doing that. There's two, there's two ways to, to go. First of all, I would recommend running an employee engagement and wellbeing survey like the RX-7 that we offer, or there are others out there. The HSE Management Standards is free and equally effective, um, just to really understand where the pressure points are in the, in the workplace at the moment, in the culture. It could be high workloads, it could be more around, um, a lack of autonomy and decision-making, which is slowing processes down, which is then increasing workloads [38:41] Al Elliott: Yeah [38:42] Leanne Elliott: It could be that flexible working that you've introduced is having a detrimental effect because people aren't sure how to set their own work-life boundaries. It could be people are working until midnight, getting up at 5, and that is why this stress is escalating, because they're not investing in rest and recovery time. There could be lots of different reasons, so we need to understand the data points as to— now we know what's happening, we need to understand why. And the only I'm going to understand why it's digging a bit deeper. Alternatively, if you wanted to follow a more process-driven route, you could undertake an operations audit of processes. As I said, there could be bottlenecks there between team members, things that aren't happening as quick as they could. It could be an issue with some of the software you're using. There's lots of things that could exasperate workload if processes are slow. So, that could be worth looking at as well [39:37] Al Elliott: Yeah [39:38] Leanne Elliott: I'd do the employee engagement stuff first, because if you use a good tool, it's going to suggest that operational processes might be a problem. Yeah, you're going to need to get curious and get to the why, because the issue is here. Your workload is high, your stress levels are high, it's impacting your turnover rate, and it will, whether you know about it yet or not, will be impacting the satisfaction of your customers. So, time to act, my friend [40:04] Al Elliott: Let's just talk from a slightly more macro level here on your business. If your employees are overworked, then either you are trying to be tight and get them to do more work than actually is feasible because you won't pay more money, or perhaps your margins are so slim that they don't support having more people in. Either way, from a macro point of view, your business isn't sustainable [40:27] Leanne Elliott: Yeah [40:27] Al Elliott: Because if you have to, absolutely have to squeeze the maximum out of everyone, Then they're going to leave. That will cost you much more in the long run. Leanne said, what did you say? It's two and a half times the annual salary if someone leaves you to replace them. Call you cost you more in the long run. And I mean, the other thing to consider, perhaps we've mentioned before AI. Perhaps we could have some AI agents that could take some of the more transactional work off them. But the fact is that you can do all the things that Leanne said, but if people are being squeezed, squoze, and squoze like a sponge. sponge and they're getting every single possible minute you possibly can get out of them for the work, nothing you do is going to fix this. You're going to end up always having problems [41:08] Leanne Elliott: Very good point, Al. Very good point. Oh yeah, it's worth thinking about, isn't it, whether actually just fundamentally your business model doesn't work [41:15] Al Elliott: You're either charging too little or you're wanting to take home personally too much profit. We've all known people like that, haven't we? Yes, we have. Yes, we have. Excellent, Leanne. Um, I love how I can throw anything at you and you just, you just deal with it. I love that. Let's try this last one then. As the director of a small environmental nonprofit, I've got 12 full-time staff. I'm facing a challenge with employee engagement. Our team is passionate about our mission, but I sense growing frustration due to limited resources and high workloads. Now, this isn't a copy and paste from the previous letter. The reason why I want to do this one is because it's a nonprofit and it's got some slight Nuance. Now, this person writes: "We can't compete with corporate salaries, and our budget for perks or team building activities is minimal. I've tried implementing an employee recognition program and flexible working hours, but morale still seems still seems low." Here's the bit we might be interesting. We are considering going to be a B Corp, but the investment is frankly terrifying. I'm at a loss for how to boost engagement with our already stretched. Budget. I'm a regular listener, seeing— so I know there are no silver bullets. Well done. But without much budget, I am really struggling to think of ways to keep our amazing team motivated and more importantly, stop anyone from leaving. So the key message here, I think, is it's a not-for-profit. Um, they don't have a huge budget. They did mention B Corp. Now, I suspect that you might want to talk a little bit more about Reason. But anyway, carry on, Leanne. I want to put words in your mouth