Flex Time Flourishes in Accounting Industry

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: January 7, 2011

As the peak season for the nation’s accounting firms begins, David Leeds’s team at Ernst & Young is once again bracing for two months of 60-hour weeks auditing the books of a major bank in Atlanta.

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Rex C. Curry for The New York Times

Brooke Sikes, an Ernst & Young partner, took six months of maternity leave when her first child was born and then spent four years working a 35-hour week.

marital spats about missed dinners and children’s tantrums over forgotten basketball games.

Not any more. At Ernst & Young, as at the nation’s other major accounting firms, workplace flexibility has been built into the culture — even during crunch time.

Every Monday morning, the 15 people on Mr. Leeds’s team meet and lay out the personal commitments that might interfere with work — basketball games, teacher conferences, Pilates classes, weddings. They arrange to cover for each other, helping make the busy season tolerable for everyone. Despite the auditing team’s six-day weeks, one Auburn University graduate, for example, is taking next Monday and Tuesday off to see the school’s football team play in the national championship bowl in Arizona. And Mr. Leeds plans to escape to New Orleans for three days to see his daughter run a marathon.

“We face very tight deadlines from our clients, but at the same time we try to make sure that team members have the flexibility they need,” said Mr. Leeds, a partner at the firm.

Indeed, when it comes to respecting the work-life balance of employees, the accounting industry far outshines the rest of corporate America, workplace experts say.

Some firms allow employees to take off the entire summer to devote to their children; some let employees work just three days a week during nonpeak months. The big accounting firms generally give 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, with fathers often receiving six weeks — and that is on top of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave provided to parents under federal law.

Several firms grant sabbaticals of three or six months at 40 percent pay and full health benefits, so employees can chase life dreams like climbing mountains or building schoolhouses in Africa. And since these are bean counters we’re talking about, they’ve done the math: flexibility enhances the bottom line.

“The nation’s accounting firms excel at this for a boring, accounting reason — they’ve looked at the numbers, and they see it helps,” said Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute.

Jennifer Allyn, managing director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ office of diversity, said stepped-up flexibility policies had helped cut turnover to 15 percent a year, from 24 percent. Firms estimate that the cost of hiring and training a new employee can be 1.5 times a departing worker’s salary, so reducing turnover by 200 employees could mean $30 million in savings. Sharon Allen, Deloitte’s chairwoman, said her firm’s flexibility policies saved more than $45 million a year by reducing turnover.

Working mothers, especially, are drawn to employers that offer flexibility, although all employees want some control over their work hours.

“Flexibility is the No. 1 issue for women, but it’s also the No. 2 or 3 issue for men,” said Cathy Benko, a vice chairwoman at Deloitte. She created its much-praised “mass career customization” program in which all employees work with management to factor their individual goals and needs — like raising three children — into their career plans.

“The issue is, How do you scale, how do you systematize a more tailored, customized model?” Ms. Benko said. “You can’t do it by exception. You can’t do it by accommodation. You have to put everybody in the model.”

Michelle Hickox, an accountant with McGladrey, the nation’s fifth-largest accounting firm, based in Bloomington, Minn., said her firm’s Flexyear policy had helped keep her from quitting. For the last nine years, she has worked full time September through June, while taking off July and August to spend time with her two school-age daughters. She opted to do this even though she feared it would damage her chances of making partner.

But things took a surprising turn. “One day, my partner-in-charge came into my office and was adamant that being in this program shouldn’t make a difference in my goal of becoming a partner,” Ms. Hickox said. “It felt awesome.” Soon after, she was promoted to partner.

In the Full Circle program at PricewaterhouseCoopers, new mothers take off several years with the expectation that they will return to the firm when their child enters kindergarten. The firm helps ensure that these women keep current on continuing education and licensing requirements so they are up to speed upon returning to work.

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At times, the big four accounting firms — Ernst & Young, Deloitte, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers — sound like preening basketball stars as they all boast that they are No. 1 in providing flexibility. One reason the industry leads the nation on flexibility is that the big firms are constantly trying to keep up with each other, if not outdo each other.

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Rex C. Curry for The New York Times

The firm McGladrey lets Michelle Hickox take two months off during the summer to spend time with her children.

that flexibility is incredibly important to them and to their family,” said James S. Turley, Ernst & Young’s chairman. “Every night, our assets walk out the door and go home. And we need to be the kind of place that they want to come back to the next day.”

The accounting industry has improved its flexibility policies in three waves. Deloitte led the way in the early 1990s, adopting more generous maternity policies and more flexible scheduling. At the time, many accountants worked 60 hours a week, sometimes more, during peak months. The firms saw that many young women were entering the profession, but quitting at a far faster rate than men, largely because they viewed the grueling, inflexible schedule as incompatible with raising a family.

In the second wave, shortly after 2000, many employees complained that the new flexibility policies were geared only to mothers and were not systematic. So several firms broadened their policies, making them available to everyone.

In recent years, with the demise of Arthur Andersen and the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which greatly increased auditing requirements, accountants felt more swamped than ever with work. As a result, many firms took yet more steps to ensure flexibility — for instance, Ernst & Young adopted four-day weekends for Memorial Day, July 4 and Labor Day. Workplace experts stress that employees must not fear they will be penalized for participating in flexibility programs.

Among Ernst & Young’s 23,500 United States employees, 1,700 women and 300 men are on flexible arrangements. Women are so confident that adopting such a schedule will not hurt their chances of promotion that 25 percent of the firm’s female senior managers — the step before partner — are on flexible arrangements.

Brooke Sikes, an Ernst & Young partner in Dallas, took six months of maternity leave when her first child was born and then spent four years working a 35-hour-a-week schedule, down from her typical 45- or 50-hour weeks. The firm promoted her to partner even though she was working less than full time.

“The firm very much rewards you for your performance,” she said. “It’s not about punching a clock. It’s not about face time.”

Kathleen E. Christensen, director of workplace flexibility programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, said accounting firms should serve as a model for all of corporate America.

“They have really thought through the way they do their work and how their people can control the hours they work,” Ms. Christensen said. “Some businesses treat flexibility as just a set of policies — if we put policies on the books, that’s all we need. But what you really need is to have those policies embedded in the way work is done, and that’s what a lot of accounting firms have done.”