Episode 104: The Importance of Staff Review Meetings

Never too late to scale your business and achieve freedom! 

Explore the transformative approach of the WizeGrowth program and get 1:1 hands-on help with Wize Mentors who are business owners themselves. We have helped a hundred firm owners and you can be the next one. See if you qualify: https://forms.zohopublic.com.au/wizementoring/form/WizeGrowthDiscovery/formperma/xWwns0wTLoKShmR0jlg0VMaW0FHVQ-V4UdDDecy9aYM

_________________________

Ever feel like the clock is your nemesis, snatching away precious time for those staff meetings you know are important but never urgent? You're not alone.

In this week's episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, Brenton Ward and Jamie Johns discuss the importance of conducting staff review meetings to discuss your team member's performance and development and agree on future targets and objectives.

What is"being too busy?" Learn how practice owners should take this essential journey from a time-starved business to an enterprise humming along on autopilot. Listen in as we swap stories, dispense lessons, and offer handy tips to ensure you're getting the best from your team, with insights that might just revolutionise your firm's management style!

________________
PS: Whenever you’re ready… here are the fastest 3 ways we can help you transform your accounting/bookkeeping practice:

1. Join 40,000+ subscribers to our transformation Friday tips – Every Friday, our Wize Mentor and Thought Leader of the Year, Ed Chan will send one actionable insight from his experience of building a $20 million accounting firm that still runs without him – Subscribe here

2. Download one of our famous Wize Accountants Growth Playbooks – Our FREE Playbooks on how to build and scale your firm are more valuable than most PAID business coaching programs! See for yourself – Download here

3. Join the waiting list for a free login to the world's best accounting business intelligence software for scaling your firm. Take a look at the app we use to build our own $10million firm in just 7-hours a week – Get a FREE login here

Transcript

Brenton Ward: 0:00

And typically the biggest excuse for not doing these meetings is just being too busy.

Wize Mentoring: 0:08

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Guys Podcast, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons, and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time- poor practice to a business that runs without them.

Brenton Ward: 0:23

I hope you enjoy and subscribe to a business that runs without them. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. Would you mind touching on that in a little bit more detail? I know we were speaking just before we came on here and typically the biggest excuse for not doing these meetings is just being too busy. Yeah, which we can all fall into the trap of using that excuse. But talk to us a little bit about getting out of that trap.

Jamie Johns: 0:50

Yeah, look, I think the biggest trap for accountants and bookkeeping firms and their owners and the leaders is the fact that they just get too busy and we all tend to focus on what's urgent and important. And you know, even coming back to this book and you know Dr. Stephen Covey, which is a book that Ed says changed his life and the way he worked is the fact that if we get too busy, we can forget to have these conversations, and these reviews are about conversations that you don't normally have, and so when you move from that, you know urgent and important to not urgent and important, that's what staff reviews are, or that's what team performance reviews are. While they're not urgent, they're very important and because of their nature, they can be put in. You know, they can be put on the back burner. I'll do that next month or I'll do that next year. So the biggest single trap is getting too busy to do these and is getting too busy to schedule these conversations, and I've seen it, I've experienced it myself. So that would be the first critical point to make is don't be too busy and schedule these in, and the more modern approach is to use systems like Office 5.

Jamie Johns: 2:09

Recently we've been looking at that and I know a lot of firms have looked at Office 5. Also, we use a system called Tiny Pulse. They have these modules built into them. They're called different things but one, for example, is called coach and it's important that you try and move your firm to this more modern approach of either catching up and doing your one-on-ones either monthly or quarterly.

Jamie Johns: 2:36

Because what you don't want in a broad context is you don't just want to sit down and have one meeting a year out of a whole year or even six monthly to see how someone's performed. Because you know it's easy to go off track, even in one month. And it's like Ed says you know you can have the firm, you can have the plane on autopilot, but what happens is the firm or people, they just drift off, they sort of slowly drift off, and then if you're having your one-on-ones once a month or even quarterly, right throughout the hierarchy, so from the senior client managers down, it keeps that firm, it keeps that plane on track and on target, versus having once a year.

Brenton Ward: 3:21

So I'd be interested to hear actually and get a gauge from everyone listening in as to how often you're currently doing your own staff reviews. So if you wouldn't mind finding that chat feature, it'd be great to hear whether it is something that you're doing on an annual basis at the moment or a little bit more regularly.

Jamie Johns: 3:37

But if you could let us know that, that'd be great it's a great question, and it'd be great for everyone to answer that. But you, I really think best practice and what I do at my own firm at Sky is we have, you know, I mentioned these one-on-ones and it's critical in the one-on-ones where people might ask me well, what do you do in the one-on-ones? Now, the one-on-ones you simply review their goals. So for a senior client manager, it's review what I would call the Fab Five goals. So you've got your senior client manager, you've got your different team members there, and so you need to be prepared, when you do have your one-on-ones whether it's monthly or quarterly to have what are you reviewing? What are their KPIs? And they're getting feedback on how they're going.

Jamie Johns: 4:26

So again, this comes back. I want to emphasize the point of having your monthly one-on-ones from the top down. So myself, as the CEO, I would have my monthly one-on-ones with the senior client managers. The senior client managers then, in turn, have their one-on-ones with their team members, and that's how it should work. But again, you don't want to have these meetings just once a year or even six monthly, because, as I said, the plane gets off track and rent and this is all about managing expectations as well because someone might be going, might think themselves that they're going fantastic in their job and realistically, the dashboard or the KPO are showing they really aren't going that well. We've got to manage people's expectations and help them keep on track around their performance, because otherwise sometimes team members will live in a delusionary world. I think they're going fantastic, but they're not, and so we all crave feedback. You've got to build that feedback in, and so, if I come back, Brenton to the annual performance appraisal is then a consolidation of all the one-on-ones you've had in the year.

Wize Mentoring: 5:41

Thanks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, please remember to subscribe and leave us a five-star review!