These three spring cleaning strategies will start you on your journey to building a happier and more productive finance team.

Just as you give your house a good spring clean, you shouldn’t let your finance function end up covered in cobwebs. To create the happiest, most effective team, it’s essential to clear out the processes that don’t work and find new ways to keep things fresh. Here are three strategies to get you started.

#1 Declutter Your Calendar

Invoicing, disputes, payments, deductions and cash application. It’s tiring just reading about what accounts receivable teams manage on a daily basis.

Finance professionals constantly face pressing deadlines and challenging customers. The last thing they need is to be pulled away from priorities for a meeting that isn’t a good use of their time. In a Harvard Business Review study, 65% of senior managers said meetings prevent them from completing their own work and 62% said they are ineffective in bringing teams together.

 

 

A more outcome-driven approach is hosting daily or weekly stand-up meetings. These last ten to fifteen minutes and give teams the opportunity to stay aligned on objectives, identify obstacles and eliminate unnecessary communication.

#2 Deep Clean Your Culture

Did you know that over 50% of the US workforce is not engaged? That’s worrying when you learn that motivated teams achieve 21% greater profitability.

Creating a workplace culture that recognizes success and rewards high performance is critical to keeping employees onside. Too often, promoting an enabling environment is considered optional, yet these statistics show that it should be a priority.

Sarah-Jayne Martin, Director of Financial Automation at YayPay by Quadient — and previously a Global Director of Order to Cash — says:

 

“My team had a personal monthly collection target and a shared goal with a cash reward, which ensured they worked collaboratively and pulled toward the same objective. I also had the top three collectors called out at the quarterly all hands meeting by the CFO. It was fantastic to see how much they enjoyed this recognition, as well as the positive impact it had on their success.” 

Sarah-Jayne Martin, Finance Industry Expert

 

Financial incentives are — of course — always well-received. But what also makes a difference is simply making staff feel valued. Research finds that only 56% of employees feel they receive thoughtful recognition from their manager. Leaders have a big opportunity to improve employee engagement and performance by being authentic with praise and regularly acknowledging efforts.

 

Sarah-Jayne is hosting a 20-minute masterclass — How to Vacuum Up Your Working Woes — on Thursday, April 21st at 10am EDT / 3pm BST. Save your seat below!

 

#3 Spruce Up Your Tech Stack

At the heart of a happy and effective team is collaboration. Unfortunately, the era of remote work has made it harder for people to support each other. In finance terms, this can mean process delays and frustrations unless you’re equipped with the right technology to overcome this.

Asana and Slack are useful tools that can help build a culture of collaboration. They encourage teams to interact frequently, exchanging information and identifying symbiotic areas. For example, your AR team may need to establish a stronger relationship with sales so that they can  work together to quickly assess things such as customer creditworthiness, and the types of terms to extend. These applications will help support this.

 

 

 

An even better investment is an automated finance platform. YayPay centralizes all your ERP, CRM and billing system data to provide a single source of truth that’s displayed on intuitive dashboards. This gives teams access to real-time information at any time, from anywhere. Departments no longer have to work on disparate systems, passing messages back and forth to complete tasks. This takes your collaboration to a whole new level which enables your team to manage their roles more effectively.

A Polished Performance

These spring cleaning strategies will start you on your journey to building a happier and more productive finance team. If you’re interested in learning more tips and tricks that will elevate your people AND their performance, save your seat at our upcoming masterclass 👉 https://www.yaypay.com/vacuum-up-working-woes