Ask yourself:

• Are individual team members keeping pace with their workload while maintaining consistency in productivity?

• Are they adhering to the processes your firm has established and delivering quality work that meets or exceeds client expectations?

Better yet, involve your team and ask them how they’re dealing with their workloads.

Proactively working with them to find ways to improve productivity also supports a healthier work-life balance.

Are they working well together as a team, and is your structure agile?

If a key team member is out unexpectedly, will others be able to step in to keep all work and tasks on track? Does your team work well together or are there interpersonal conflicts?

To answer these questions confidently (and implement any strategic changes), you need visibility into how your staff work as a team day-to-day.

How to gain visibility without micromanaging

You don’t want to be known as a micromanager. Instead, you’d rather be considered a coach and champion for your team. But how do you get the visibility you need without stepping on your employees’ toes?

There is no silver bullet to this—you will need a combination of tactics and tools. Here are two main ones to consider.

1. Create a coaching culture that encourages feedback

Ask your team what works well and what doesn’t—let them lift the veil so you can truly see the inner workings of your firm through their eyes.

Place value on the power of giving and receiving feedback. This will create a safe space for you and your team to consistently share insights, tips, suggestions and constructive criticism.

This way, you not only have the opportunity to gain visibility over your firm’s issues, but you’ll have the chance to address and solve them in real time with your team.

Recommended reading: How a coaching culture can transform your accounting firm

2. Use a practice management tool

Sometimes, waiting for your team to raise an issue is too late—the deadline gets missed, the team member burns out, the client churns.

To avoid this happening, you need to proactively analyze your team’s performance. And this visibility is only achieved by using an accounting practice management software with email integration, like Karbon.

You’ll gain insight into:

• Work and project activity timelines

• How well your team is collaborating, when and how

• Task and subtask completion

• Client communication

• Internal communication

• Workloads

• Work forecasting

• Potential bottlenecks

If you use Karbon, you can easily find this information through the Global Search function, allowing you to search across contacts, emails, notes and work.

Plus, Karbon’s Email Insights does all the heavy lifting for you, with reports on work and email, including:

• Number of open work items for each team member, and for each client

• Number of completed work items for each team member, and for each client

• Number of overdue work items for each team member, and for each client

• Average email response time for each team member, and overall for your firm

• Average email client response time

• Popular email send and receive times per day for your firm

It’s important to harness the right tools that will enable you to truly visualize and analyze your firm’s operations. That way, you have an objective overview of what’s working and what isn't.

What you don’t know can hurt you

If your firm had a suggestion box, what would be in it? While you may uncover an interesting idea or two from your staff, you likely won’t be able to gather insights that allow you to diagnose the health of your business operations.

That’s why you need a multi-directional approach to gaining visibility across how your firm runs—starting with direct feedback from your team, and finding the right workflow management tool for your accounting firm.

It’s time to uncover areas where you’re missing the opportunities that can propel your firm’s growth.