Motivating and Monetizing Your Workforce

Turnover is high in professional services. For example, the Big Four (KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young) lose 3 out of 10 employees in a typical year. As a result, onboarding new hires and “boomerangs”—returning former employees—is a continuous resource-intensive process. It’s important to get it right. Employees who go through a structured onboarding process are 58 percent more likely to stay with their organization for at least three years.¹⁶

Onboarding is no simple task. That new hire may have a stellar education and a can-do attitude, but she needs to learn how your firm operates and what’s expected of her on a day-to-day basis. Less tangible but critical is assimilating the company’s culture and values, some of which is written down and much of which must be transmitted verbally, conversation by conversation, over time.

Speaking of time—there isn’t any. CHROs are under intense pressure to accelerate the learning curve and get new associates to start billing hours. Emerging technologies hold promise. At Ernst & Young, new employees receive a virtual tour of their new workplace before their first day and experience a simulated talent review. An automated onboarding assistant answers routine questions for new hires via a chatbot interface—a familiar tool for recent grads. Thanks to cognitive intelligence, the virtual assistant gets smarter as time goes on, increasing the rate of successful interactions.¹⁷

Professional services used to be a man’s world, and while progress has been made, the scales are far from balanced. More than half of law school graduates are women, yet they account for just 35 percent of law firm staffs. The view from the executive suite is even bleaker—women’s share of equity partnerships has been stuck at 20 percent for years.²¹ Women fare no better in accounting. Big Four accounting firms as a whole have just 19 percent female representation among their audit partners. ²²

The root cause is attrition. Almost 46 percent of female associates leave their law firms within the first three years, and 81 percent leave in the first five years. Losing female talent not only robs the firm of knowledge and client relationships, it squeezes profits. A typical 400-person firm can lose up to US$25 million annually due to associate departures.²³

Boosting women’s membership in the partner ranks requires a two-pronged strategy. First, offer more flexible working conditions such as flextime and reduced hours. Cloud-based HR software makes it easier and safer for employees to work offsite because IT staff can quickly lock a lost laptop via a remote command, avoiding a data breach.

The second tactic is to prepare women for partner roles through both education and experience—a worthwhile practice for all associates, male or female. Training is essential to close skills gaps.For example, a female CPA may be a top performer from a services point of view yet lack the selling expertise required of partners.²⁴

When it comes to job loyalty, millennials are worlds apart from previous generations. Their definition of loyalty is staying at a job for seven months—the corresponding metric for baby boomers is five years.²⁵ Fueling a tendency to abandon ship, younger employees balk at the working conditions:

Millennials can expect their initial years in the [professional services] industry to involve ‘paying their dues’ through unengaging grunt work and brutal work hours with few opportunities for professional growth or training. The reward for surviving those monotonous early years is greater earning potential later in their careers. Said another way, the professional services industry offers the exact opposite of what we know millennials want from their careers.”²⁶

—Dan Negroni

What can CHROs do? Offering perks such as onsite massages, pool tables, and dogs in the workplace à la Google and Facebook is unlikely to pass muster in an accounting practice or consulting firm. But ideas like these might:²⁷

Provide alternative career paths. Many millennials aren’t willing to make the same sacrifices as their boomer parents or grandparents, so traditional partner tracks may not appeal to them. However, they can still bring passion and make a solid contribution—if the firm gives them a less demanding way forward.

Adopt progressive work policies. Services firms can make themselves more appealing to younger workers by offering more flexibility in working hours and locations and including them in decision-making. Digital natives can also be lured with technology by investing in mobile apps and cloud-based software, strategies that also boost productivity and improve the client experience.

And Gen Z is just around the corner: 60 million soon-to-be workers with unique skills, attitudes, and expectations, many quite different from those of millennials and Gen Xers. A few words of advice for HR professionals: Buckle up—it’s going to be a wild ride.²⁸