Flat works best for accountants

In the latest in a series of features on the companies to achieve success in this year's Westpac Taranaki Chamber of Commerce Business Awards, Rob Maetzig profiles New Plymouth chartered accountants BDO, winner of the Implement and Associates Employer of Choice Award.

In business there can be two types of management structure.

One is the vertical structure, which is an often unwieldy hierarchical structure featuring numerous layers of management, each with various levels of responsibility.

The other is the flat management structure, in which there can be little or no chain of command, and where employees are expected to be responsible for their own productivity rather than be constantly managed.

Both structures have their advantages and disadvantages - but don't ever get into a debate on the subject with Taranaki chartered accountant Steve Waite.

He is firmly of the opinion that flat management is the way to go, and he and his partners put their money, in the form of their own business, where their mouths are. The business is BDO - up until a couple of weeks ago known as BDO Spicers - of which Steve Waite is the managing partner.

Recently, BDO gained success at the Taranaki Business Awards where it won the employer of choice award, and that honour has now been followed up with a major national Equal Employment Opportunities Trust workplace work and life award for the workplace flexibility it offers its staff.

These are powerful plaudits for a management structure that is so flat it could be said to simply not exist.

"We have no hierarchy here," BDO practice manager Margaret Doyle says.

"We have no supervisors, no team leaders. Instead, all staff are responsible for management of their own workloads and responsibilities. There are no adult-child relationships here.

"As long as the clients of, or individual staff are not disadvantaged in any way, our employees can work whatever hours they like. So basically we have only one rule - and that is that if an employee is not going to be here, then the rest of us need to be aware of that."

All this is resulting in extremely varied hours being worked by BDO's 80 staff, many of whom are job-sharing part- timers.

If it's a wet Saturday or Sunday, the staff car park is often full because employees have decided to use the rainy day to work, and take a sunny mid-week day off instead. Many others often start work well before daybreak because that's the best time to telephone dairy farmer clients. Many others again work evenings when their children are at sports practice.

Many staff indulge in "leisure banking", where they work longer hours some weeks, and save up that time to either take a few days off at a later date or get paid more at a time when extra cash is needed.

Formal approval from a partner or practice manager for such time off is required only when the intended leave is going to be more than three days - and even then that is only to ensure a plan is in place to manage workloads when the employee is absent.

It's a refreshingly flexible and free-thinking environment that cocks a snook at the strict command-and-control culture that is often an unfortunate feature of workplaces where vertical management structures are in place.

But all this raises an obvious question: Are there any staff members who take unfair advantage of this?

"They can't," says Margaret Doyle.

"A major reason is because we're an accountancy firm, which means staff are required to keep six-minute timesheets anyway. So if an employee isn't working to capacity, it soon becomes known.

"There's actually no place to hide. And because the workplace environment is so open and non- competitive, if an employee is not performing, it's very difficult to blame someone else."

Ms Doyle does add, however, that the core value behind this workplace environment is complete trust. But so far that has never been an issue - quite the opposite has occurred, she says.

The flexibility has helped BDO build a close and committed team.

These workplace policies had their beginnings in the mid-1980s when Taranaki born-and-bred Steve Waite joined an accountancy firm in Wellington and quickly noticed serious inefficiencies within its hierarchical management system. "I saw a lot of waste. There were a lot of good accountants spending large portions of each day doing a lot of nose-wiping," he says.

"It just didn't make sense. The company was hiring graduates and treating them like kids. There was this big disconnect, and as a result the practice wasn't getting the best out of its people."

All this meant that in 1989 when he became managing partner of what is now BDO Taranaki, he immediately set about introducing a much flatter management structure that could maximise the potential of every staff member. .

That's now firmly in place, and it has been a resounding success.

Not only has it resulted in a happy and motivated workforce, but it has also contributed towards business growth to the extent BDO is now the largest accountancy practice in New Plymouth.

That growth create some interesting challenges that required innovative thinking.

Ms Doyle recalls one year when the business grew by 23 per cent, which left the firm's top people frantically juggling their own work requirements with the need to induct and train the new staff.

So they hired an accountant who also wanted to be a teacher, and she set about developing a training facility known as the Hatchery. She has since left the firm to attend teachers' college, but the Hatchery is still there complete with its own dedicated tutor, and it is proving an invaluable asset.

A generous training budget also allows staff to attend two- hour internal training sessions every fortnight, and there are optional lunchtime training sessions which feature internal and external speakers on everything from personal investments to health care.

Health assumes a high priority at BDO Taranaki. Occupational safety and health nurses visit frequently, the firm pays employee's gym subs in advance, with staff then paying the firm back during the year, and the company also provides interest- free loans towards Weight Watchers meetings, many of which have been run in-house.

A large proportion of staff are women, many of whom job-share and work part-time as they have their families, so an important facility at the firm's Young St office is a breastfeeding room.

It all adds up to a workplace that is diverse, flexible, productive, and happy - which is exactly how Steve Waite envisioned it should be.

"We've got a philosophy around here that we employ for attitude, train for skills, and reward for performance," he says.

"In that regard, we find that it is usually better to employ good people who suck at accounting, rather than hire good accountants who suck at being people.

"If the right attitude is there in in the first place, staff quickly improve with good on-the-job training.

"We think the theory is quite simple really . . . Good people are a scarce resource, so once you've got them you should be doing everything possible to not only get the best out of them - but to keep them."

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