The Association of Government Accountants (AGA), a professional organization for government accounts and financial mangers, recently published the results of a survey entitled: The COVID-19 Challenge: CFO Views on Organizational Resilience in Pandemic Conditions. (1)

The surveys of nearly a dozen Chief Financial Officers (CFO) and Financial Managers in small and large federal agencies, was conducted between March and April 2021. The questions focused on four major areas: Workforce, Real Estate, Information Technology (IT) and Organizational Resiliency.

This piece examines the results. It should be noted that although the focus is on federal financial managers, the issues examined are like those faced by managers in almost all government and private sector organizations.

Workforce

The report notes that while the employment number at the federal, state, and local level have remained the same throughout the pandemic, work from home has changed workplace dynamics significantly. This change highlights challenges in several areas. These are: Productivity, Onboarding and Culture, Personal and Professional Development, and Future hiring and retention.

Productivity: One area where CFOs did not see significant change was in productivity. In fact, it was found that agencies with existing telework arrangements and those developing such networks and associated policies, had little trouble transitioning to work from home.

Quality of work: While productivity did not suffer, many CFOs felt that the quality of work suffered. This was in part due to the inability of workers to informally obtain information as readily in an at home environment, as opposed to the in-office environment.  In short employees could not as easily drop by a colleague’s cubicle and chat in depth about an issue.

Onboarding: Another problem is onboarding employees into new roles and ways of working. Several CFOs noted that newer employees had a harder time adjusting. This was compounded because CFOs were having difficulty maintaining and forming interpersonal connections in a virtual environment.

Personal and Professional Development: CFOs found that employees working from home needed more flexibility particularly in balancing work and family responsibilities. Several CFOs noted the need to nurture leadership skills. Some set up weekly employee development sessions. Others encouraged employees to join professional organization such as AGA, as a way of reducing employee isolation and allowing them to tap into professional development and networking opportunities.

The changing of the work dynamic means that management must confront the fact that they may have too much office space.

Recommendations

1. In a virtual environment, leaders should focus on managing to the deliverable and consciously building in touch points to review products and make sure quality doesn’t degrade.
2. CFOs must prioritize the nurturing of interpersonal relationships and facilitating profession development opportunities, which both increase retention and build a positive culture.
3. To remain competitive, agencies must keep and open mind toward new considerations in balancing employee well being with productivity and value for their agency.

Real Estate

Prior to COVID-19 the federal emphasis was on footprint optimization, lease cost avoidance, and office space optimization. The goal was to save money by reducing real estate costs. With employees working from home, CFOs are looking at resizing offices and office space. The main issue is that if office space is reduced and the trend turns towards having more employees in the office, the downsizing is hard to reverse.

Recommendations

1. Agencies should consider the financial and non-financial costs and benefits of downsizing and analyze the best way to transform their space to support employees for optimal mission success.

IT Investment

The work from home environment has focused attention on IT. Most CFOs felt their IT departments did a good job in making a smooth transition to remote meeting and teleconferencing platforms. They felt that the CIOs did a good job in increasing connectivity and band width. There were some problems noted. For instance, mobile phone charges increased. To reduce these costs, it is being recommend that employees use voice over the internet and video conferencing platforms. Such actions may also allow management to reduce landline costs. Several CFOs felt that the pandemic provided the impetus for the organization to reevaluate data and IT needs.

Recommendations:

1. CFOs and CIOs need to consider and potentially reprioritize financial systems modernization efforts and other major IT spend initiatives, against the need for stable IT infrastructure support.

Organizational Resiliency and Planning

Overall, CFOs felt their agencies responded well to the issues created by COVID-19. They credit the resilience of their organization to three actions. These are: maintaining culture, supporting employees, and managing risks.

The first two are covered in the workforce portion of the survey. Managing risk was considered a key to both. COVID-19 forced all of management to consider risks across the board. It highlighted the need for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). Organizations with a formal ERM/Risk Management Governance Council enjoyed considerable engagement across the C-suite. This enabled them to identify adverse impacts on programs.

Recommendations

1. Agencies should consider asking employee feedback, scheduling touch points, and giving employees the opportunity to lead initiatives and learn to fail and be part of the solution.
2. Agencies should prioritize ERM as a critical component of strategic planning and agency operations. Managing and mitigating risks requires effort from the entire C-suite.

Take Away

Normally I would present conclusions. However, since the recommendations are from AGA, take away is more appropriate. The key things to take away are.

1. Work from home is likely to remain a common feature in both the public and private sector.
2. The percentage working from home and in the office, has yet to be determined.
3. The duality of where employees work from will impact recruitment and selection practices.
4. Maintaining quality control of work products will be a major concern.
5. The excess office space will pose problems for management in both the public and private sector. It will also impact the central core of most major cities. Fewer office workers downtown mean fewer patrons for central core businesses.
6. COVID -19’s impact has resulted in closer coordinate and increased contact among C suite members. This has resulted in a greater emphasis on ERM.
7. AGA is promoting ERM to its members.

Endnote

1. AGA, 2021, The COVID-19 Challenge: CFO Views on Organizational Resiliency in Pandemic Conditions, July, https://www.agagfm.org/AGA/Resarch-Pubs/AGA-2021-Survey-Report-Final-July-2021-July-2021.pdf.

Bio:

James J. Kline is a Senior Member of ASQ, a Six Sigma Green Belt, a Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence, and a Certified Enterprise Risk Manager.  He has work for federal, state, and local government. He has over ten year’s supervisory and managerial experience in both the public and private sector.  He has consulted on economic, quality and workforce development issues for state and local governments.  He has authored numerous articles on quality and risk management. His book “Enterprise Risk Management in Government: Implementing ISO 31000:2018” is available on Amazon.  He is the principle of JK Consulting. He can be contacted on LinkedIn. (My e-mail was hacked. For those who received a request for money, it was not from me. I apologize. I am working to resolve the issue.)