Jennifer Justice is an Accountant with Kendall Sinclair Cowper & Daigle LLP in North Bay (Ontario) and a recent graduate from Nipissing University’s School of Business
Candice Henderson, C.P.A., was a Staff Accountant with Kendall Sinclair Cowper & Daigle LLP and is now an in-house Project Accountant with a multi-national company in the resources sector.
Thomas Carey is co-Principal Catalyst for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, Executive-in-Residence with the Monash University Faculty of Arts and a former Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo.
Anahita Baregheh is an Associate Professor at Nipissing University’s School of Business and Research Director for the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada.
In a previous post , we used the work of Accountants to illustrate our emerging Ladder of Opportunities in professional development for Workplace Innovation. Job Crafting is the initial step on this Ladder, including the “classical” typology of Task, Relationship and Cognitive Crafting as well as the recent inclusion of Upskilling as an instance of Job Crafting.
Since Accountancy is a highly-regulated profession many people – including some accountants and higher education students in accountancy – have the impression that Job Crafting is a limited option within the profession. Our crafting examples here, from Jennifer and Candice, demonstrate some of the many ways that Job Crafting is commonly utilized by accountants… and how it will be needed even more as some of the changes in the profession outlined in our previous post come to fruition.
An Example of “Every Employee” Workplace Innovation during the COVID pandemic
[Jennifer, a recent graduate from Nipissing University’s School of Business, began a job at a local accounting firm during the pandemic. The provincial stay-at-home order caused a lot of changes to the work process involved on each client file. Most of the examples are of Task Crafting, but there are elements of Relationship Crafting in the way the firm worked to maintain collegiality and elements of Upskilling in the new digital skills required under the pandemic constraints.]
When Ontario went into its strictest COVID lockdown in April 2021, I was still in training – which had to shift to working from home. Whenever I hit any type of roadblock with my client file, my training managers were able to help by adopting the Microsoft Teams Chat function to grant access to her screen so they could walk me through each problem, using the chat feature to message me or calling me over the phone for advice. This gave me more independence through the training process to work through my client files and allowed me to develop more confidence in myself and my work.
My co-workers with families were struggling to work their hours due to frequent interruptions by their young kids. This forced the partners to rethink the working schedule for everyone at home. Upon reflection, they had to make the decision of a flexible work schedule during the stay-at-home order maintaining the minimum hour requirement every day.
Another change occurred in the work practices for those of us who had to travel to the office for essential tasks that could not be done at home (e.g., to access secure documents which could not leave the office or to print special-format documents). This required every employee to plan each workday precisely to minimize any travel time. Instead of only accountancy tasks, my co-workers and I felt that we became project managers. We had to plan our days (hour by hour), anticipate how long each task would take, what travel time would be needed and how to balance each file and every minute of the workday.
Throughout the stay-at-home order, the office was able to develop processes to provide communication, workflow and continuous support for everyone. Once the stay-at-home order was lifted, these processes were then incorporated into the day-to-day at the office as well. More emails were sent for communication, weekly memes were enjoyed for morale, and parents were allowed remote access when they were needed at home. Training continued to be available from a distance and many aspects of the training have come to light that need to be updated moving forward.
Job Crafting by an experienced CPA
[Candice shared this story with us from her experience as a Chartered Professional Accountant with several years of accountancy experience. Several of the job crafting examples from Candice illustrate Task Crafting. The satisfaction she reports from helping other employees in the firm illustrates both Relationship and Cognitive Crafting – and might have elements of Upskilling in areas what are new to her, such as training newcomers to the firm.]
Candice is a Chartered Professional Accountant, with experience in both public and corporate sector accounting. Over the last 5 years, she crafted her role considerably while finding herself improving the firm’s processes of work along the way. She is well-respected and valued at her firm by clients, coworkers, and the partners themselves.
Candice has heard others in the accounting profession state accounting is too rigid and systematic to allow space for workplace innovation, including job crafting. For example, there is a general impression that work on organizational financial audits has little variation from year to year. However, in Candice’s view “you do what you need to do to get the job done while confirming that the financials are reasonable and fairly stated and abide by the regulations”. For her, this means that there can be some room for different processes, templates, and methods but with a similar purpose and end result.
Candice has taken her strengths and applied them to this concept. She has crafted tasks and opportunities outside the requirements of her job to satisfy her needs and play to her strengths. For example, she found that by adjusting firm-standard spreadsheets to include more detail, the status of the work items on her projected job schedule can be better monitored within each project. This also helps to better allocate resources within each project for future years, which is not a requirement of her job but is something she has crafted to incorporate her own strengths.
Candice also created a template for electronic notes that help her coordinate through the client files she is working on. She colour-coordinates the notes by section, importance, communication, and completion. This reminds her, or the next person who works on that client file, of tasks or issues that can be avoided or need to be dealt with in the future, with solutions and time allocation. This streamlined work process has improved productivity within the workplace.
One of her other strengths is her relationships and connections with others. Candice took it upon herself to manage the productivity of client files and provide updated templates, notes, spreadsheets, and material to help her coworkers as well as training new staff. This gave her the satisfaction that she was making a difference by helping others around her with what she found to be a better practice of work. With time, people looked to her for advice and followed in her footsteps of crafting their positions to fill their needs while still completing the requirements of their job as well.
By integrating aspects of the strengths, she enjoys, Candice has made her job more enjoyable. What she has implemented has been a model for others to follow and she continues to be greatly respected in her office. With increasing productivity and more precise projections for allocation of resources to files, the firm can better understand and achieve goals and increase profits for the future.
This project was supported in part by a grant from eCampus Ontario’s Virtual Learning System program.