Listening to our Directors and Principals

16 LISTENING TO OUR DIRECTORS AND PRINCIPALS | BDO LLP

WORKLOAD AND RESOURCE

The firm’s success and growth does come with both opportunities and challenges. All groups recognised there is a positive but very real challenge: we have a great brand with great people doing great work – but that gives us a number of resource dilemmas.

 We also need to calm and inspire the people who aren’t leaving rather than just focus on those who are. Those who stay will start to reflect on their next step whilst also managing workload concerns caused by attrition  Attendees also flagged that ‘capacity’ isn’t about just taking on new work. It’s also about having the capacity to service existing work, as we’re having to put in more effort to deliver on what we’ve currently got for either COVID or Quality reasons  One attendee said that one of our biggest challenges is knowing what we can do with the capacity we have, and that under-charging is part of the culture in the industry not just BDO  They shared examples where capacity issues were very real, for example, one team who recently used Flexi Force to buy in more time from another part of the firm that was higher than their own team costs.

SUPPLY SIDE: OUR PEOPLE, RESOURCE AND RECRUITMENT  We acknowledged there are capacity issues across the whole profession, not just at BDO  We continue to hunt out quality talent to boost our teams; we have 600 vacancies at the moment with c. 50 job offers made each week  Flexi Force is a challenge because the spare capacity has now lessened  We highlighted that the job market is very active at the moment, and that this will increase as the world opens up further. We need to be ready for this  So we need to keep considering how we make ourselves attractive – which links to the firmwide priority of our People Proposition  Some raised that there’s a perception of a significant pay gap between BDO and other competitors; our competitor benchmarking needs to be accurate and transparent

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