Do accountants need to be in office to be productive?

Do they? There have been countless articles, blogs, and thought pieces on this topic already. And the war about return to office continues to wage on. The pendulum has swung dramatically back to in-office for most employees, or at a minimum 3 days a week. Considering that 6 years ago, I went into an office 5 days a week, 3 days should be a welcome thing to go back to.

Here’s my take. Unfortunately (fortunately), I’ve had a taste of the good life. As a mom of 2 kids under 5, I don’t understand how any one had kids, or dogs, or even plants before remote work! Ha! Jokes aside, the entire time I’ve had kids, my job has been remote.

I really don’t know how to juggle driving 2 kids to two different schools. One is in elementary school and the other is in daycare. And they have different pick up and drop off times as well. Even though both my husband and I work from home, we still need to coordinate weekly on who is doing what depending on our calendars and workload.

Additionally, we save about an hour each way by not having to commute to and fro from the city each day. Which is all time that can go back to spending with our children. Doesn’t that sound lovely? I imagine if we didn’t have kids, I’d spend more time developing hobbies outside of work, meeting girlfriends up for a happy hour, or maybe spending an additional hour watching Love is Blind. (This is at least the life that I dreamed for alternate me.)

Sounds like I am on team remote right? Well…not so fast. Because I am greedy and I want to have my cake and eat it too.

There’s a lot of benefits to being office as well. The biggest caveat of this is, it requires that most of the immediate people that you work frequently with, they should also be in the office for you to really maximize the time spent in office.
Another factor is, I think anyone in the early stages of their career should definitely try to spend as much time in the office as possible. Again, it’s more helpful if the people that you work closely with are at the office. For a lot of my staff and senior accountants, I think it’s disservice to them that we’ve gone remote. As leaders, we’re not able to provide the same level of support.

Think about the last time you did a training over Zoom. You had to wait until the aforementioned set meeting time, you then needed to figure out how to screen share effectively, and most of the time, it was difficult to see how people navigated their screens. For accountants in particular, we learn to use Excel keyboard shortcuts pretty quickly, and the more you see other people do it, the more comfortable you will get trying it out for yourself. That’s all lost behind a screen now, and I’m seeing people early in their careers lag behind their more senior coworkers who have already had that intensive training earlier in their careers.

The other people that it benefits, are people like me! To do my job effectively, a lot of my role is just making connections with other teams and building those bonds. I think of accountants as the glue that keeps the whole company together. We know everything that goes on. Not because we’re nosy but because it’s part of our job to know. We record, categorize, and analyze every financial transaction that goes in and out of the business. You can’t hide anything from us 😉. To be effective, it’s important that I can talk to and persuade other leaders to support our cause and get me and my team the information we need to produce financial reports.

It’s also good to see my boss in person once in a while. Senior leadership is so inundated with messages and meetings, it is difficult to get their attention over Slack or Zoom sometimes. But if I can corner them for even 10 minutes in a room! I’m able to get their undivided attention and make some decisions quickly.
Last but not least, I miss the people! I miss being able to make friends at work. Some of my best friends that I still have today were from prior jobs. There’s nothing like being in the trenches together to bond you to one another. I miss coffee dates, walking meetings, and random conversations at the snack area with different team members. But most of all…I MISS HAPPY HOUR!!!! Happy hour was always a fun occasion to look forward to. Now that I live so far away in the suburbs, it’s been a lot harder to find the time and energy to go to HH. But any chance I get, I will make it happen.

I guess my answer to all of this is, there is no right or wrong answer. A lot of it is dependent on your personality (introvert v extrovert), your stage in life (young children or maybe a new puppy or an aging parent in your life), the stage of your career (early, mid, late), and maybe how far away you live from your office. Everyone’s circumstances vary so much that to force everyone to follow the same model, it’s bound to be that some people will be unhappy.

I think that we should set the right expectations before someone is hired, and then whatever the role is at that time (in person, hybrid, or remote), is what you should allow them to do. Every person would have evaluated the job and the offering and considered whether those salaries/benefits and expectations were going to work for them, it hardly seems fair to go to them and say, “Hey! We changed our mind. So now you need to change your whole life to accommodate this decision that we made with no consideration to your specific circumstance.” If you do decide to change your policies, then offer a buyout package (aka severance), for 6 months if they choose to leave, otherwise, they need to adhere to the new company policy and keep their job!

I’m very lucky to be able to continue to work from home through this time while my kids are young. Perhaps when they are a bit older, I will choose to go into an office 2-3 days a week to gain the benefits of being in office with some of my team. Thank goodness that day is still far away.