Practices for Developing a Supportive Team – Bill.com

Imagine this – a business whose leaders all have one common focus – sustainable growth!   Sounds great right?  But how?  What needs to be done to achieve this growth?

While there are many factors that can help a business achieve sustainable growth, one of the most important factors to consider is your team:

• Do you have the proper team in place?
• Do you consider your staff your most important asset?
• Do you know how to support and grow your team?
• What changes do you need to implement in order to address your staff needs and hiring processes? 

“Proper staff development is critical to support firm growth because it’s the strength of your staff that will make or break you.” – Jeff Phillips

In this age of the “Great Resignation”, finding the right candidates and retaining your best people is one of the keys to running a successful business, especially in this modern, tech-forward world.  The truth is that employees have more options than ever, so why should they work for you?

What are their major pain points?  How can you help alleviate some of those stressors for your staff to create a sustainable work environment that promotes growth and employee satisfaction?

When dealing with the accounting profession, it’s important to consider some major pain points such as manual data entry, real-time proactive advisory relationships, providing a trusting environment, higher margins, better value, and flexibility, to name a few.. 

It’s also important to consider who makes up your applicant pool, and to do the work to successfully attract and retain these top performers.

With that in mind, here are 8 best practices you may want to consider to develop your team:

1. Craft clear vision, and repeat it (communicating your vision to your staff is vital for building a supporting culture around it)
2. Improve communication and workflow (work to optimize communication and workflow processes)
3. Hire top talent (improve hiring practices to ensure top talent gets hired)
4. Have a structured onboarding process (just as attention is given to client onboarding, employee onboarding is just as important – it’s the first impression of the firm for new talent, and can set the tone for the work relationship)
5. Delegate thoughtfully (hiring talent means not having to take the entire workload on yourself, but it also needs to be effective – make sure you are informing and communicating to the team, without the need for micromanaging)
6. Have continual training (this empowers employees and allows for them to be better equipped for their role – as they grow, so does the firm)
7. Support accountability (accountability leads to higher productivity and helps hires follow through, setting the stage for advancement in the process)
8. Streamline processes (record and reinforce processes, always considering areas of improvement and innovation)

Building the right team doesn’t have to be so challenging when you take the time to implement some best practices.  It’s well worth the effort when you can help lay the foundation for a business to achieve sustainable growth.  With the right team, anything is possible!

Source: https://www.bill.com/blog/8-best-practices-developing-team-support-your-growing-firm