For CFOs, a new role: attracting and retaining staff

As if keeping tabs on revenue and earnings goals in an uncertain economic environment wasn’t challenging enough, the CFO’s role has been made even tougher by a new responsibility: hiring and retaining top talent.

In fact, according to a recent Gartner survey, CFOs say that hiring and retaining staff is their single most difficult task over the next 12 months. That rather surprising finding reveals a fascinating C-suite trend: namely, that the CFO’s role has evolved beyond traditional “hard skills” of finance activities, to the “soft skills” of people management.

The events of the last few years, primarily the COVID-19 pandemic, have prompted workers to reevaluate what matters to them. In the resulting tight labour market, today’s CFO must focus as much on earners as on earnings. This is certainly a new realm for many finance executives, who’ve historically left the employee experience — recruitment, engagement, retention — to the HR department.

Those activities are certainly not traditional business school fare, leading to the obvious question: How do today’s CFOs learn the basics of keeping top talent engaged and satisfied? A good first step is to observe industry best practices. To that end, here are four fundamentals that every successful senior executive — finance execs among them — should follow:

1. Instill an ownership mindset

It’s all about empowerment. Finance leaders should create and nurture career paths for their staff, and empower team members to take on a more central role. First identify each employee’s deepest motivations and highest aspirations. Then implement a coaching/training component to address them. Set a learning vision for teams and individual employees alike, and link learning priorities to business outcomes. 

That vision should include an understanding of the business and its goals, with opportunities for teams to enrich their understanding of the company and contribute to achieving its vision. When it’s done right, it drives higher employee satisfaction — and job performance

2. Align talent with tasks

It’s difficult to meet strategic objectives without the right talent and skills. Consider: Many a sports coach has failed to develop a winning team because they tried to make their players adapt to a rigid system, instead of adapting the system to maximise each player’s unique skillset.

The skills of employees are what drive value for organisations. But if visibility into those skills is lacking, key opportunities will be missed. This can lead to poor business outcomes and low employee satisfaction. To prevent that misstep, match the right people with the right skills to the right work. Enterprises need the best talent in the most value-contributing roles. So take care to identify each person’s capabilities that create value for the business, and craft their job responsibilities accordingly.

Businesses must also consider supporting their employees when it comes to career development. This can range from ongoing development and opportunities for career progression, to having the opportunity to work in different areas of the business and on new activities. From this, members of staff will be able to deliver on their aspirations, making them far more likely to stay and grow with the company as they feel as though they are supported.

One way to help identify employees’ core skillsets? In a word, data. Rely as much on resource and staffing analytics as you do on intuition. When you’re data-driven about objectives related to your teams, you can see both the forest and the trees, and make smarter business decisions.

3. Engender a sense of purpose

Yesterday’s thinking dictates that the way to attract and retain talented finance professionals is with raises and promotions. Think again. Salaries and benefits are important, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle. 

For today’s workforce, CFOs must give teams a sense of purpose, and help them understand where they fit in and what role they play toward reaching business goals. Your actions in this regard can shape not only the team’s attitude, but their entire workflow — from the systems to perform their daily tasks to the way they comply with work-from-home policies. These actions directly influence employee satisfaction and retention rates.

Also, look for opportunities to collaborate more closely with HR on this issue, especially as the company invests more in technology. As automation accelerates, people’s jobs may change and an HR/CFO partnership will play a key role in quantifying the ROI of talent, training and upskilling initiatives. 

4. Supercharge teams with the right tools 

It’s no secret that automation is extremely important for today’s finance teams. Don’t make the mistake of clinging to old, “tried and true” ways of doing things. That won’t cut it with a younger generation of employees.

Consider, for example, the humble spreadsheet. For decades, it’s worked well as a personal productivity tool that enables users to manipulate clean data and examine specific tactical questions. But in the modern digital world of hyper-data, spreadsheets can become problematic. They’re simply not equipped to handle the tsunami of users, data sources, formulas, products, services, regions and currencies that today’s corporation must manage. Add different financial close schedules to the mix, and the reality is that traditional legacy systems solutions simply won’t cut it. And employees (and prospective employees) who know there’s a better way, won’t stand for it. 

For that reason, it’s critical to equip the finance team with modern tools that are simple and easy to use, enabling them to do their jobs. For example, a unified technology platform that provides a single source of truth can automate everyday accounting tasks. With such a tool, finance teams can quickly produce high-quality insights that lead to better, faster business decisions. This kind of tool can also increase cross-functional collaboration and minimise the time that finance teams spend collecting information and checking data for accuracy. They can spend this time focusing instead on more value-added activities, such as managing cashflow, business forecasting, and ensuring compliance with revenue recognition regulations. This will result in both higher employee satisfaction and better business outcomes.

Investing in most valuable assets

People are the most valuable assets in any business. And nearly every company is finding it more difficult than ever to attract top talent, keep employees satisfied, and prevent them from bolting for better opportunities. 

As such, today’s finance executives must play an important role in building and retaining game-changing talent. It’s crucial for CFOs to lead the company charge to invest in people — just as they would in any other valuable asset.