Flexible work, leadership training key to accounting firm's success

Reprinted from the Cincinnati Enquirer, Sunday, June 29, 2008

At Barnes Dennig, Greater Cincinnati’s fifth-largest accounting firm, finding new employees doesn’t require a lot of pavement pounding.

“Our recruiting program has just exploded over the last year,” says Bill Bagley, Director of Human Resources. “We hired 20+ people last summer. We have students contacting us on a daily basis about co-op and summer internship opportunities. We also have a number of experienced professionals calling because they’ve become aware of what we’re doing here.”

It’s not difficult to see why. No less than 27% of the company’s employees have some kind of flexible work arrangement. Accounting staff, who tend to work longer hours during tax season, get Fridays off between May and November and receive bonuses for passing the CPA exam, just to name a few benefits.

“As an HR professional, that’s music to my ears,” Bagley says.

People outside the company are taking notice. In June of 2007, Barnes Dennig was named a winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility, distinguishing the firm as one of the top practitioners of workplace flexibility in the U.S. Locally, the company was also a recent finalist in the Business Courier’s best 25 places to work.

“I came from a ‘Big 4’ environment,” Bagley says. “There was a lot of talk about ‘we have flexibility,’ but there were more conditions. There are no conditions here. People on flexible work arrangements are moving into significant leadership roles here. In most organizations that wouldn’t happen.”

“If someone has been on maternity leave, for instance, they may come back and say ‘I really only want to work three days a week’ or ‘I only want to work until 4:30’ or ‘I need to leave at 2 to pick up my kids’. We’ll work with that.”

The culture of flexibility that the firm has nurtured has led to a 94% employee retention rate average over the last four years. “That’s much better than the industry, which is somewhere around 80%,” Bagley says.

Bagley believes this success owes much to the “high touch” approach of Bill Cloppert, the company’s Managing Director. Among Cloppert’s innovations are a leadership training program that develops twelve categories of professional skills over a five-year period.

“Bill doesn’t want our people to be one-dimensional. He wants to make sure that we’re mentoring our junior professionals,” Bagley says. “Our people are committed to this program because they learn skills that can take them as far as they want to go.”