Defining the office in 2025: Shifting models of where work gets done

Jennifer Wilson, the CEO of ConvergenceCoaching LLC, co-presented a session at Digital CPA in Denver that addressed talent and leadership differences in remote and hybrid work environments.

In this podcast episode, Wilson, who also served as the independent facilitator for the National Pipeline Advisory Group’s (NPAG’s) work in addressing the accounting talent shortage, discussed some of the differing points of view that managers and employees have about remote work.

She also emphasized the importance of telling a better story about accounting — one of NPAG’s recommended strategies for rebuilding the pipeline.

Also in this episode is a mention of two recent news articles that affect CPAs. First is the news of beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting requirements being in effect again after a court order. Second, the JofA reported on cuts in the IRS workforce.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The “consternation and angst” in discussions about in-office vs. hybrid or remote work.
• Why Wilson said that managers shouldn’t use the word “back” when talking about where work gets done.
• Who bears responsibility for an individual employee’s learning and skill development.
• The key to unifying teams in an era of dispersed workforces.
• Wilson’s hope for the profession in the coming year.
• A recap of recent JofA news articles about BOI reporting and the IRS.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: This is Neil Amato. You’re listening to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. Joining me for this episode is Jen Wilson, the CEO of ConvergenceCoaching LLC. Jen, you’re a repeat guest, and we are glad to have you back on the show. Thanks for being here.

Jen Wilson: Neil, thank you so much for having me.

Amato: We are recording at Digital CPA in Denver. You and ConvergenceCoaching senior consultant Samantha Mansfield have talked — in fact, just about 90 minutes ago — on a topic that I’m going to ask about because I think it’ll resonate with our listeners. The title of that session, different POVs, or different points of view, addressing talent and leadership differences in today’s remote and hybrid environments. I think there’s just a few things to say about that, I guess. Anything in intro, as a recap to that session.

Wilson: Well, I was going to say first, holy mouthful. A lot of words there for sure. The reality is flexible and remote work has had all sorts of evolution, and now it’s evolving again. I can’t tell if it’s a permanent evolution or a backsliding. But there are different points of view today than there were a year ago, two years ago, during the pandemic, certainly, and even pre-pandemic. There is this shifting, and almost like a formation of those that really believe in it and are really making it a competitive differentiator, and those who say, “Gosh, it’s hard. Let’s go back to the way it was.” That’s the different points of view, and, of course, there are points of view in between. But that’s what we’re seeing, and it’s creating some real consternation and angst and opportunity, and that’s what Samantha and I were talking with a group of people about.

Amato: Autonomy versus discretion. It was a slide title that showed up. What do you think is the key to the interplay between those two things when it comes to managing today’s workforce?

Wilson: Well, I guess I’m going to start autonomy as the ability to make my own decisions and call my shots and feel independent and supported in that. That’s what most of us want in our work. In fact, I would argue everybody wants it, regardless of age, regardless of title, and what we’re seeing is organizations starting to pull back a little bit on autonomy by saying, “Hey, we’d like to tell you where you’re going to work sometimes now. We’re moving away from you working wherever it makes sense for you. Instead, we’re going to start to keep track of where you’re working and when.” Or even seeing to the radical, which I’m going to confess scares me, some firms are implementing trackers to begin to track people’s physical movements on their phone. You might use Life360 or something like that with your kids. They’re using trackers of that nature during the work hours to figure out where their people are. They’re also using keystroke trackers, login trackers, minutes on production, minutes on applications, and starting to report on that and think that’s what drives productivity. That’s a real move away from trust and independence and autonomy.

Amato: Talking about being back in the office, I used the word you told me not to use, you told the attendees not to use. I’m going to say it, why is it important about having plans for people working in the office to not say, “We’re going back to the office?”

Wilson: Well, several things. One is, we don’t want to say back because back is falling back. It’s falling back to the past, it’s falling back like we’re losing or we’re behind or something, fallback position, not usually good. It’s the wrong language to use with people. Also, some people will accidentally say, we’re going back to work when they’re talking about return to office, and that’s offensive to all the people who’ve been working super hard, remote or hybrid. They feel like they were always at work, and so it’s a language thing. It matters. Words matter. But also, one of the things we’re seeing with RTO, or return to office, is the desire to go back to the way it used to be. Most next-gen talent don’t like nostalgia, and they don’t honor the way it used to be. [They] don’t pine for it, and they question whether it was as good as we thought it was. They want to see us leap forward. We are always worried that this sounds like we’re retrenching and also maybe falling back to something that wasn’t that awesome to begin with.

Amato: Good point, and when talking about next-gen talent, that reminds me we’re going to talk about NPAG, the National Pipeline Advisory Group, in just a bit. How about this that came out of the session, this concept, the responsibility for bringing people up, growing their knowledge? Who does it reside with?

Wilson: We would say it resides with both sides. The learner. We should have learner-led learning. I should want to develop my career. I should want to get better. But I don’t know what it would take to get ahead here maybe unless we have clear competency mapping and really clear pathways and super great direction and feedback. We can’t really let it rest with the learner alone. We have to recognize we as leaders and managers, we are responsible for developing our talent. We are responsible for finding ways to develop them inside new paradigms with technology, with remote, with hybrid. We are responsible for bringing them along.

Amato: How does someone know the best way to teach someone? Meaning, different people learn different ways. How do you even discover that?

Wilson: Well, first you just ask, things that you’ve caught onto, technical concepts that really made sense or resonated. How did you learn them? What is your learning style? How do you learn best? You ask people, and you offer a range of learning opportunities. One of the return-to-office things is, well, our people will learn better if they sit in a cubicle and hear through the walls, they’ll learn through osmosis. I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s so inefficient and unintentional. What if they don’t hear through the walls? What if they’re on the phone or doing video themselves or wearing earbuds? What if that’s invalid and that isn’t the way they would learn anyway? They’re going to learn a different way.

Neil, there are different learning styles, and we have to offer a range of them that include video. We need to roll our chair up beside the person figuratively or in real life. I tell people all the time, I can share a screen with you remotely, and we can feel like we’re working elbow to elbow if you want to see it done. Hearing about how it’s done doesn’t work for you, video or recordings wouldn’t work. You want to ask questions right there, or maybe you want to put your hands on the keyboard, and I’m going to walk you through it verbally. We could do that in person or remote.

Some people might learn better in a classroom. We just have to find out, and we have to offer a range. Some people would say to you and I right now, “Holy cow, guys, that’s not scalable. We’ve got this team. It’s way bigger than one person.” We would say, “That’s why you offer a range of options.” But learning and leading and managing people has to be both scalable and one-size-fits-one.

Amato: How is it that a manager or an organization, a firm leader can unify a team that is a dispersed workforce?

Wilson: We have multioffice firms in this country that are already disbursed because of their physical geography and the footprint that they have. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We think that this remote-hybrid trend or work from home or hire people in other geographies without an office is new, but we’ve been doing it in a multioffice environment. The way that you unify people, develop a unified strategy, a vision, top three priorities for the year, define your culture and your cultural pillars, your must-haves, then start organizing your resources around those things. Talk about them regularly, start each meeting saying, “Remember, these are our top three priorities. This year, this meeting is related to this priority, and here’s what we’re going to work on.” That’s how you unify people. You have agreed-upon strategies, agreed-upon approaches, and you communicate the holy heck out of them.

Amato: That last part I think is really important, is that it’s, one, not too many goals and strategies, and two, it’s really well communicated.

Wilson: Yes, and communication’s one-size-fits-one. I’m going to communicate in various ways. It’s not enough to announce it in a firmwide meeting. I have to have videos and frequently asked questions. I have to send emails. I have to talk about it in department meetings, small meetings, engagement meetings. It’s the law of seven — people have to hear something seven times before they assimilate it, can articulate it back with accuracy, and they only hear it every other time you try, so it’s really the law of 14.

Amato: That’s a good one. Good one to remember. On the subject of the National Pipeline Advisory Group and the work you facilitated with that group, I’d like to focus on one of the six themes that you pointed out in your session with Samantha — enhancing the employee experience. First, what does that mean to you as it relates to the profession?

Wilson: Well, that project, the National Pipeline Advisory Group strategic planning process, a lot of people hear pipeline and they think high school, college, maybe to graduation, maybe to licensure. They don’t think employment. When we did the project together, this group of stakeholders, when we studied the pipeline and really dug in on the data and studied the influences on why people choose a career in accounting, we discovered that one of the crucial focal points was employment one to five years. The first five years of employment and why was it important?

Because if people do not experience a positive first five years, they go home and talk about it regularly at the kitchen table. They tell their cousins and their brothers and sisters and their besties, and they write about it on Reddit and Glassdoor and Fishbowl and other social media sites, and it becomes conventional wisdom that you don’t want to work in that profession. It influences the beginning of the pipeline, and middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are suddenly not choosing accounting. We have recommended in the NPAG report that we have to have a better story to tell future talent, and part of the better story to tell is we have to enhance that employment experience, and we found a number of areas in which to do that.

Amato: I could ask you about a lot of other things today, and feel free to interject if you have any topics you’d want to bring up, but what do you think the future holds for the profession or what do you want it to become in 2025 and beyond?

Wilson: Neil, we have a great profession. It’s incredible. We make such a difference in global markets by really being a guardian of the U.S. economy and support for small business and support for individual financial well-being and support for the public markets. We make a great living. Whether we’re finance professionals or academics teaching accounting or firm professionals, we make a huge difference in the lives of others. Most of us have fun doing it. We don’t talk enough about how great it is. I hope for our profession in 2025, that we tell a better story and that we look at the things that we could improve in the work, and there are things that we could do to make the work experience so much better. I want us to do those things to drive that change and be open to it. But also, we need to share our story better.

We need to share our joy and share our passion and do less complaining. I think we feel like there’s something noble or tough or something about talking about the negatives, the hard work and the difficult technical aspects and the fast pace of technical standard changes and how hard it is to keep up. We have this list of complaints. That’s the story we’ve told, and it’s not the right story. In 2025, my prayer for our profession is we start focusing with gratitude on the positive and sharing with every single person we meet what a cool profession we’re in.

Amato: Thanks again to Jen Wilson of ConvergenceCoaching for her time.

We have news to share on two fronts. First, [the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] has set a March 21 deadline for most small businesses to file beneficial ownership information, or BOI, reports. The Corporate Transparency Act reporting requirements are back in effect after a court order lifted the last remaining nationwide injunction that had halted the filings. Also, the IRS is notifying thousands of employees that they’re losing their jobs this week.

Martha Waggoner has written those JofA news items, and we’ll include the links to the articles in the show notes for this episode. Visit journalofaccountancy.com for more news. I’m Neil Amato. Thanks for listening to the JofA podcast.