Flex Time Flourishes in Accounting Industry

As the peak season for the nation’s accounting firms begins, David Leeds’s team at Ernst & Young is once again bracing for two months of 60-hour weeks auditing the books of a major bank in Atlanta
In years past, those grueling weeks often fueled nasty marital spats about missed dinners and children’s tantrums over forgotten basketball games.
Not any more. At Ernst & Young, as at the nation’s other major accounting firms, workplace flexibility has been built into the culture — even during crunch time.
Every Monday morning, the 15 people on Mr. Leeds’s team meet and lay out the personal commitments that might interfere with work — basketball games, teacher conferences, Pilates classes, weddings. They arrange to cover for each other, helping make the busy season tolerable for everyone. Despite the auditing team’s six-day weeks, one AUBURN graduate, for example, is taking next Monday and Tuesday off to see the school’s football team play in the national championship bowl in Arizona. And Mr. Leeds plans to escape to New Orleans for three days to see his daughter run a marathon.
“We face very tight deadlines from our clients, but at the same time we try to make sure that team members have the flexibility they need,” said Mr. Leeds, a partner at the firm.
Indeed, when it comes to respecting the work-life balance of employees, the accounting industry far outshines the rest of corporate America, workplace experts say.
Some firms allow employees to take off the entire summer to devote to their children; some let employees work just three days a week during nonpeak months. The big accounting firms generally give 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, with fathers often receiving six weeks — and that is on top of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave provided to parents under federal law.
Several firms grant sabbaticals of three or six months at 40 percent pay and full health benefits, so employees can chase life dreams like climbing mountains or building schoolhouses in Africa. And since these are bean counters we’re talking about, they’ve done the math: flexibility enhances the bottom line.
“The nation’s accounting firms excel at this for a boring, accounting reason — they’ve looked at the numbers, and they see it helps,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute.
Jennifer Allyn, managing director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ office of diversity, said stepped-up flexibility policies had helped cut turnover to 15 percent a year, from 24 percent. Firms estimate that the cost of hiring and training a new employee can be 1.5 times a departing worker’s salary, so reducing turnover by 200 employees could mean $30 million in savings. Sharon Allen, Deloitte’s chairwoman, said her firm’s flexibility policies saved more than $45 million a year by reducing turnover.
Working mothers, especially, are drawn to employers that offer flexibility, although all employees want some control over their work hours.
“Flexibility is the No. 1 issue for women, but it’s also the No. 2 or 3 issue for men,” said Cathy Benko, a vice chairwoman at Deloitte. She created its much-praised “mass career customization” program in which all employees work with management to factor their individual goals and needs — like raising three children — into their career plans.
“The issue is, How do you scale, how do you systematize a more tailored, customized model?” Ms. Benko said. “You can’t do it by exception. You can’t do it by accommodation. You have to put everybody in the model.”
Michelle Hickox, an accountant with McGladrey, the nation’s fifth-largest accounting firm, based in Rochester, Minn., said her firm’s Flexyear policy had helped keep her from quitting. For the last nine years, she has worked full time September through June, while taking off July and August to spend time with her two school-age daughters. She opted to do this even though she feared it would damage her chances of making partner.
But things took a surprising turn. “One day, my partner-in-charge came into my office and was adamant that being in this program shouldn’t make a difference in my goal of becoming a partner,” Ms. Hickox said. “It felt awesome.” Soon after, she was promoted to partner.
In the Full Circle program at PricewaterhouseCoopers, new mothers take off several years with the expectation that they will return to the firm when their child enters kindergarten. The firm helps ensure that these women keep current on continuing education and licensing requirements so they are up to speed upon returning to work.