Getting staff to assist you before you go on sweet leaves of absence
An example of "what's it like to be a senior staff" writing seems in order, after all the drama of the nasty early fall combined recruiting, layoff and UFE exam analysis season.
The thought of explaining what it's like to run jobs with eager young staff ready to assist you came about, ironically, after noticing that Stuff Accountants Like, an unashamed homage to the inventor of the online genre, Stuff White People Like, announced their site is going on an LOA, an extended vacation - I found it amusing that my search for the SWPL link led me to their article about taking a year off - so "unashamed homage" is not too subtle a term here.
SAL explained that the work involved in writing new posts has taken its toll and a busy season is no doubt about to smack the author in the face.
My own busy season is in unabashed full swing - now that I've been working in as a CA firm for a few years I have the joy of being trusted to Get Things Done, while at the same time being granted more staff who assist me with these tasks which Must Get Done.
This means that this year's busy season has been more intense than ever.
You may rightly ask, "Why are you busy so soon, don't most financial statements come out after the December year ends, causing a busy season for CAs in January and February?"
The answer is that you must remember that yes, I'm a CA, but I'm also an IT auditor, so our busy season starts earlier in the fall, as we need to test our clients' information technology before the end of the year rather than after..
And fortunately, despite the crunches we face, the workload still is not as bad as the hours in financial audit - I've experienced those too.
This month I did start to charge hours that resembled theirs, however, hence another instance of my habitual unannounced pauses in posting here. It really didn't feel like my last post was about 20 ago, and yet that's been the gap - that's just a sign of how much work had to get done.
Now you think, "but at least you have staff to help you - that'll help you get things done, right?"
Well, yes.
It's wonderful to have a team with whom you can share the workload. But it doesn't make the workload magically disappear.
The moment you start delegating work, you're creating a new type of work: audit supervision!
There's a metaphor here, somewhere.
Supervising audit staff.
It's its own kind of fun - depending on who you work with, varying levels of supervision are needed. If you're good at explaining complex tasks the time spent on supervision is minimized, but you still have to check in on your helpers to make sure things are getting done properly, otherwise someone will have to end up re-doing some or all of the work, which is never good for your engagement's budget.
The other exciting element of quasi-stress comes from having competent staff. And given how incredibly difficult it is to get hired in my group, we're blessed with unusually competent staff.
Wait, what's this, now?
Competent staff can give you stress?
Certainly - the only thing that can cause you as much trouble as staff who can't get the job done, are staff who get the job done so fast you have nothing else for them to do for you!
While it's not a problem that they did a good job, it will be a problem if you don't anticipate that this will happen. If work gets done faster than you expected, you're still responsible for keeping them busy for the rest of the week. You did prepare and set aside more work assignments for them to handle when they finished early, right?
Thankfully this isn't usually a huge problem - even if you really did run out of things for them to do. More work inevitably creeps up, or you can earn brownie points with other senior colleagues by sharing out your now "free" staff on their projects instead, giving them their own moment of relief.
Or, if all else fails and you're entering slow season - lucky you - no one has work to share, but any decent sized firm will have a large volume of self-study materials your staff can turn to.
Those self-study materials are both a blessing and a course. If you have new staff you need to check up on them and make sure that they know you'll have more assignments ready to share with them, rather than quietly sit around going through the self-study modules. There's nothing wrong with gaining more "book knowledge", unless there's "real life knowledge" to be gained by working on actual audit files!
If you do things well by the time your blissful vacation or LOA rolls around work is under control, your review notes are cleared and your managers and partners are not liable to get you to stay late the day before you take off because the job got done.
With that in mind, when would be the best time to take time off from work? The answer varies, but it's been discussed in depth in this myCAsite forum discussion, so go read that instead of making me write about it now. I still have more work to do, and this is my one day off all week long!