Remote work is quickly taking over as a norm in most office-job industries. A recent Gallup poll found that 37% of respondents already work remote and that the numbers are rising every year. Indeed, remote work seems to offer increased flexibility with the added benefit of increased productivity.
The accounting and bookkeeping field has seen a dramatic transformation from the days of taking faded, crumpled receipts to a bookkeeper who would have to reconcile accounts by hand to the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and receipts being captured on phone cameras using HubDoc, Expensify, or ReceiptBank.
We’ve seen this transition and embraced it through the use of the aforementioned apps and have embraced the added capabilities technology brings us to provide better metrics of performance to our clients. That’s why we always say we’re “not your grandparent’s bookkeeper.”
With us already embracing technology in order to change our work we started thinking about changing the workplace.
One of our clients, Branded Innovation, has been doing remote for a while now and we turned to their founder, Doug Holt, to find out more about the success they’ve had with this practice.
The team at Branded Innovation has worked hard to maintain a closeness in spite of geographic distance. Doug notes that initially genuine interaction among coworkers was hard to do and it could “get a bit lonely,” but they introduced weekly and daily meetings and “the whole team has their own chatroom so they talk and there’s also what we call ‘The Watercooler’ where you can send jokes and funny gifs and [where] we poke fun at each other.”
In October of this year, a member of the Branded Innovation team had their first child and the team compiled a congratulations video that featured all of them from their various corners of the world. They also sent baby gifts. This is all part of the daily effort to be a team and to replicate the workplace environment while losing the tie to a certain geographic place. If one employee receives some in person perk, being taken out to dinner, for example, Doug “bonuses” all the other employees and pays for them to take a dinner out just so long as they send a picture into the team of them having a great time. Doug says that after some practice with working remotely the only element of office life they don’t successfully replicate is “getting each other coffee.”
So, with all this added freedom of being released from a desk, and with the carefully-facilitated community, Doug has ensured that Branded Innovation is an incredible place to work. And this is important to him because it ensures that the passion he has for his job is picked up by his employees and then passed on to his clients.
Lessons We Can Learn from Doug
- Keep engagement up with frequent conversations over messaging or video call
- Celebrate each other’s life moments and accomplishments
- Bonus employees as you would in an office
- Trust the employees to work hard and be productive
As members of the Accountix team increasingly go remote we are excited to follow that journey and keep you updated on what we learn and how to transform your workplace. It is always great to practice what we preach a little bit when we say that Accountix can bring amazing bookkeeping service anywhere, anytime, wherever there’s wifi!