“81% of CFOs are concerned that high turnover and labor shortages will impact their company’s revenue growth. - PwC”

Are you a Finance leader that is stress-eating chocolate pudding? On the one hand, you have to deal with the increasing pressures of your regular day job i.e., closing the books in a timely manner, negotiating spend strategy with the CEO and other execs, presenting to the board, meeting investors, and managing your auditors. On the other hand, you are staring down the barrel of the “Great Resignation” - and you may lose key members of your finance staff who are also eating chocolate pudding, but mostly due to boredom over their unfulfilling jobs. They dread the daily grind of manually entering reams of data, shuffling documents, and chasing authorizations. Luckily, this is a solvable problem. You can come out of this movement unscathed by enriching the jobs of your finance team professionals.

Job enrichment expands and elevates the tasks your finance personnel perform, adding variety, depth and presenting new challenges to their daily routine. Enriched jobs give your team more independence and responsibility.

Here are 2 steps you can take to increase enrichment and satisfaction within your finance team: 1) Invest in your team’s culture & purpose; and 2) Double down on digital transformation.

Invest in culture & purpose

As Peter Drucker once famously said - “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Zoom meetings are the new normal, which means people are having fewer in-person interactions. Hybrid work models are diluting corporate culture, robbing us of mentoring opportunities and innovation opportunities. Younger professionals do not view their jobs just as a paycheck. They want to be part of an organization whose purpose they can identify with, where they feel aligned with regards to Environmental, Social and Governance practices.

As a finance leader, you can proactively address these topics, attracting new talent to your team and more importantly retaining your existing talent. Take steps such as constantly communicating your company’s purpose to both internal and external stakeholders, roll out diversity & inclusion initiatives, and invest in employee training and mentoring programs. And yes, schedule virtual coffee chats on a frequent basis. We at Glean are a young remote-only company. We believe that a powerful and empowering culture provides a surer route to organizational success, and for this reason, we are investing in all of the above initiatives and we are already reaping the benefits.

Double down on digital transformation

Tech investments are long term investments that are essential for the success of your team. They make your workforce more agile. Take Spend Analysis, for example. Manual tasks such as organizing invoices, entering data, and chasing authorizations are never going to be interesting or enriching. Even if you are using an automated system such as Bill.com, the role is still highly clerical. However, spend analysis can be strategic and analytical - with the right tools. Intelligent spend management platforms such as Glean automate the invoice data entry, but then go way further, pulling line-item data from these invoices, analyzing it using cutting edge AI technology, then providing a detailed analysis of trends, anomalies, and benchmarking data. This information empowers your staff (and you) to ask bigger picture questions and to take proactive steps in actively managing the finance function. We are extremely proud of the fact that our product is able to enrich jobs and bring professional fulfillment to finance professionals.

We understand that we are preaching to the choir when we say that employees that are fulfilled are more hardworking, more productive, and have less turnover. There are several levers that you as a finance leader can pull in order to navigate the great resignation. Investing in your organization’s culture and doubling down on digital transformation initiatives are two  great first steps in that direction. We at Glean would love to talk with you about how we can help revolutionize your team’s spend analysis and contribute to your team’s digital transformation. We’d also love to hear about how you are working on building an empowering culture within your finance organization. It really is possible to enrich your finance team. Contact us at hello@glean.ai to schedule a free consultation.