Building Accountability and Engagement in Professional Services Firms

We talk a lot about accountability and engagement on this blog because too often technology is boiled down to features – but who really cares about features at the end of the day? HR cares about what the technology can do for them aside from just simply automating things, especially in a climate where businesses need to do more with less and carefully watch the bottom line.

This is especially true in the professional services field – accounting, marketing/PR, engineering, legal – where employees are both highly skilled, and highly billable. Proper levels of employee engagement and accountability ensure firms are able to meet business goals and deliver top notch service to clients. A great example of how one professional services organization did just this is San Francisco-based engineering firm, Kennedy/Jenks.

The firm was faced with an increasing disconnect between its employee performance appraisal process and the need for employee accountability. The annual employee survey showed that employees didn’t clearly understand how they were contributing to the firm’s success. Kennedy/Jenks’ HR team decided to move to a web-based performance management system to help manage employee performance on a day-to-day basis.

The new system made it possible for the firm to create a culture where the value of each individual’s performance is clearly defined and understood – and convenient to track for employees and management. This has proven particularly important as an increasing number of Gen Y workers join the firm. Employee, manager and departmental goals are all linked to and contribute to corporate objectives. 

As Ruth Robinson, Director of HR explains “Everyone is accountable and people are much more attentive to their utilization levels, which ensures we perform well as a firm.”

Do you have a good example of how an organization has built accountability and employee engagement? You can read more about Kennedy/Jenks here.