Glassdoor data show pandemic-era disruption was especially hard on audit team leaders. Worse, the effects have likely lingered until the present day.
It’s been six years since the Covid pandemic swept the world, and by now we are all familiar with the pros and cons of remote working. As the protracted battle over return-to-office (RTO) mandates suggests, a number of personal and professional factors—including your standing in the organizational hierarchy—can determine whether your overall experience of telework is positive or negative. And the Big Four accounting firms are no different, according to Steven Maex, assistant professor of accounting at Costello College of Business at George Mason University.
Maex’s recently published paper in Accounting Horizons looks at how the abrupt transition to remote working during Covid-19 affected a particular group of accounting professionals: audit engagement leaders. This group comprises partners, directors, and managers supervising audit teams.
The paper was co-authored by Joshua A. Khavis of University of Buffalo-SUNY, Jagan Krishnan of Temple University, and Colin Tipton of Georgia Southern University.
Especially during the traditional audit busy season—spanning the first few months of the calendar year—engagement leaders must be in constant contact with their team to wrangle the countless moving parts that go into a financial statement audit. For the managers doing the bulk of the hands-on collaborative work with junior team members, it’s a scorching trial by fire.
“You may have this intuition that remote work is going to add flexibility and allow more work to get done. But I think we also need to recognize the costs that come with it. Giving engagement leaders some latitude to determine where and how work gets done is likely a prudent middle ground for many firms.”
— Steven Maex, assistant professor of accounting at Costello College of Business
“Many managers in public accounting firms have only been formally managing others for a short time,” Maex says. “And Covid forced them to develop their management skills in a fully remote environment, which could be a real challenge.”
To grasp the impact of this struggle on engagement leaders’ work-life balance, the researchers turned to primary sources, namely audit-employee reviews on the workplace platform Glassdoor. They analyzed 1,919 Glassdoor reviews posted between January 1, 2018 and April 30, 2021—so they could compare the pandemic years to the pre-Covid “Before Times.” Approximately three-quarters of the reviews pertained to Big Four firms.
The results show a sharp drop—around 13 percent—in self-reported work-life balance for engagement leaders between 2019 and 2020, as compared to a gentle downward slope for junior auditors. As the pandemic stretched into its second year, work-life balance scores rebounded somewhat, but had not returned to pre-Covid levels.
The researchers contend that work-life balance will present challenges for audit engagement leaders as long as remote and hybrid working models persist. “There are inherent differences in conducting an audit remotely versus on-premises,” says Maex.
Maex is a former KPMG IT auditor, and co-author Colin Tipton was an audit director at PwC during the pandemic. Based on their industry experience, the pair observe that remote working obligates engagement leaders to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to keep track of dispersed team members.
“As a manager, you have a pretty good pulse on what’s happening in the engagement when everyone’s together in the office,” they say. “You know what people are working on, whether they’re stuck, etc. When you leave at the end of the day, you know where you are. When you’re stranded at home, you lose that intuitive sense. You try to cover that ground by having individual meetings with all of your team members.”
Not all engagement leaders experienced the same level of work-life imbalance. The effect was muted within Big Four firms, presumably owing to the availability of advanced audit technologies that made telework more efficient. Leaders at firms with an international client portfolio also saw less imbalance than average, ostensibly because they were more experienced working across physical distances. On the other hand, the impact was more acute for leaders at firms with financially distressed clients demanding more intensive assessments.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Covid-era plunge in work-life balance did not affect engagement leaders’ general work satisfaction or intention to look for another job. “Working for these firms can be challenging, but there are many benefits as well,” Maex says. “It is telling that even in this environment when the responsibilities are absolutely overwhelming, engagement leaders seem to see other benefits—or perhaps their outside prospects weren’t as good.”
But that doesn’t mean senior leaders at accounting firms can afford to ignore workforce disruption stemming from telework. Past research by co-authors Khavis and Krishnan found direct links between work-life balance and audit quality, suggesting that feelings of overwork have concrete implications for business outcomes.
The proper response may not be to abolish telework entirely, but instead to craft more effective policies. “You may have this intuition that remote work is going to add flexibility and allow more work to get done,” says Maex. “But I think we also need to recognize the costs that come with it. Giving engagement leaders some latitude to determine where and how work gets done is likely a prudent middle ground for many firms.”