It’s been great to be part of the Accounting Virtual Summit. For our panel discussion, which focussed on how mid-tier accounting firms are being impacted and reacting to COVID-19, we had over 4,000 registered for our talk.
Our CEO, Brian Coventry, was joined by Julie Berry (IT partner, Saffery Champness), Andrew Collings (Enterprise Team Manager, Xero) and Toby Woodhead (Head of Technology, Armstrong Watson).
Part of our panel discussion focussed on health and wellbeing as a result of remote working due to COVID-19. Here’s some of the key takeaways.
Andrew Collings from Xero gave tips on some helpful apps that his company has used.
Office Vibe
The Officevibe platform helps develop trust, collaborate, and drive team performance. As described by Andrew in the session, by sending out a questionnaire to team members it helps give a temperature check on how people are feeling.
Unmind
Unmind is a workplace mental health platform. It enables your employees to assess, track, and understand their mental wellbeing over time.
Mentimeter
Mentimeter adds an interactive element to meetings for remote teams with questions, polls, quizzes, slides, images and more. Andrew described how posing an anonymous question on how everyone is feeling that day they can create a word cloud which presents a powerful picture and insight back to the team on how everyone is feeling.
Julie Berry shared how this new way of working has helped to break down barriers. As we hold more and more meetings remotely, we see inside people’s homes and what would traditionally be a formal meeting has now become more informal.
Something that their accountancy firm has implemented is a ‘list of etiquette’ for remote working including diary management. What’s key is allowing space between meetings and giving yourself the time to close the meeting and make a cup of tea – as you would in an office environment.
The panel discussed the future and finding a balance between face to face meetings and webinars. As we all embrace webinars, Toby Woodhead suggested that in this time they have perhaps spoken with more clients than ever before. But moving forward, suspects that webinars and video conferencing will dial down when we are allowed to meet face to face, but crucially they will not go away.
One final comment from Toby was how this current situation is a defining moment. Everyone in the world has a common topic of conversation. People buy from people.
Therefore, it’s vital to be sensitive in your approach to communication and getting the right tone.
If you missed our talk or any others, you can still upgrade to a VIP ticket where you can access all the recordings. Plus, all money is being donated to the NHS. So far, that's £30,000 raised.
With over 14,000 registrations to the Summit, it's officially the largest online accounting conference in the world.
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