Accountants planning to start a family often time such decisions around the demands of the profession and its busy seasons, Accounting Today reported.
Logan Graf is a CPA and firm owner based in Texas. He and his wife were trying for their third child, which they planned to have in the summer following tax season. After his wife had a miscarriage, he posted on social media: "This is how toxic public accounting is: We feel the need to time the birth of our children around busy seasons. I'm guilty of this. It's messed up. I'm not letting busy season dictate when I can have another child anymore."
His post received more than 100 responses from other accounting professionals sharing similar stories of how they, too, had planned pregnancies around busy season deadlines, how they had gone back to work earlier than they wanted to, how their employers fired or punished them for taking time off for their children's births, and how difficult it is to achieve work-life balance in the accounting profession.
Erica Goode, who worked at a Big Four firm before starting her own practice, was one of the respondents. She said she wasn't surprised to see how many had experienced similar pressures and done the same as her. "It's something that everybody feels and few people talk about," she said.
Tailoring personal decisions to a seasonal work schedule is often the most practical and logical approach, and it is not unique to the accounting profession. But some accountants believe that such aspects of the profession are antiquated and need to change.
Of the accountants who did plan their families around their work schedules, many told Accounting Today that they went back to the office sooner than they wanted to, or they worked remotely while on leave, because they worried about falling behind in their career progression.
After Jody Padar had her first child, she returned to work part-time during the day and went to school for her master's degree in tax at night: "I felt like if I stayed in this part-time mommy track I was going to lose out,” she told Accounting Today. “I felt like I wasn't going to be given the same opportunities."
Sharon Perry, an accountant in Canada, worked during tax season through all three of her maternity leaves. She changed firms with each pregnancy. After she had her first child, her firm put her on probation when she returned to work. After her second, she was not given an annual raise. After her third, she was denied certain work flexibilities that she previously had.
Perry left her last firm to start her own when her youngest was 15 months old. Then she got cancer and was bedridden for six months. She downsized her firm and let roughly three-quarters of her 1,000 clients go. Now, nearly a dozen surgeries later, she's working 25 hours a week and making more with her smaller client base than she did before.
She left her last firm to start her own when her youngest was 15 months old. Then she got cancer. Bedridden for six months, she was forced to downsize her firm and let go of roughly three-quarters of her 1,000 clients. Now nearly roughly 10 surgeries later, she's working 25 hours a week and making more with her smaller client base than she did before.
"Firms need to start recognizing that their people come first," she told Accounting Today. "The times have changed. "Quality is more productive than quantity."
The pressure to avoid having children during busy season is not limited to CPAs at accounting firms, said Rachel Anevski, founder of a human resources consulting agency in New Jersey. When she worked at an accounting firm as a human resources director, she planned to bear her two children in May and August, before the start of the second wave of tax returns. She acknowledged that she was never told not to have babies during busy seasons, but said that “your performance was based upon how many hours you put in. Everything is hour-driven." She blamed the hours-based model for high performance, in part, for the problem.
The profession's staffing model also needs reworking, she added. “There's a lack of succession planning, cross-training and development of people. It's like having a baseball team and you only have one pitcher and no backup. That's how a lot of these firms manage their clientele."
Heather Chappelle, director of human resources at BMSS, a firm in Alabama, told Accounting Today that the leadership of accounting firms does not always practice what they preach.
"It's one thing to say you can take off early and go to every basketball game that your son has, but when none of the partners do it, it makes you feel like you can't actually do it," Chappelle said. "The younger staff are definitely looking and watching, and when they see all the senior managers and partners sitting in their office for 60 hours a week and missing their kids' stuff, it makes it hard to feel like you can take advantage of whatever the firm is doing."
There is "an unwritten rule to not take time off," Aaron Krafft from Indiana told Accounting Today. While working at a Big Four firm as a newlywed, he left work to have Valentine's Day dinner with his wife, then returned to the office to make up the hours—and was reproached for having left at all.
The consequence of this trend is that firms lose out on innovative talent during an ongoing labor shortage, Accounting Today reported. Many accountants cited the need for more flexibility to start a family as a reason they founded their own firms.
Making resources accessible is the first part of a multistep solution, the publication stated. Wiss, based in New Jersey, is taking the initiative to accomplish this goal: It uses LeaveLogic, software that helps employees confidentially plan their leaves by pulling together federal and state laws along with the company's supplemental programming.
Another solution may be to move away from the number of hours an accountant can clock as a measure of success. Wiss has no minimum-hour requirements, and it redesigned its annual performance reviews around alternative measures of success. These include collaboration, conscientiousness, attitude, professionalism, communication, IT and computer skills, and problem-solving. When looking to promote workers, the firm's leaders consider, in addition to reviews, factors such as client relationships, business development, financial performance, strategic alignment and leadership potential.
Firm leaders should also play an active role in setting the tone, according to Accounting Today. Wendy Edgar, Americas human resources director at Ernst & Young, cited as an example the firm's new global chief executive, Janet Truncale: "When you have leaders at the very top that also did this—Janet has had her children and done the work—it builds inside the culture. I don't think it's as hard for people to say, 'I'm taking time off. I'm going to be with my family. I'm going to take my full parental leave,' because they're working for people that did that too and that was important to them."
A large challenge to a solution is to ease the crunch of busy season by managing client load and client expectations, and establishing processes to distribute the work of the busy periods throughout the entire year.
But some firms simply lack the resources to install sweeping change, and it is unknown how quickly the ones that do have the resources are doing it.
"I don't think they're the Big Four yet," said Goode. "I don't think they're middle market. I think they're smaller firms that are doing it right and they will slowly change the path."