How Soon Can You Expect the COVID Vaccine to Be Available to Your Employees?

With two COVID vaccines available in the U.S. as of February 2021, healthcare workers, nursing home residents, and other vulnerable people are already receiving them. Once these people are vaccinated, frontline essential workers, people over 65, and other select groups should be next in line. As an accounting & finance manager, you may be wondering what this could mean for your team. If you are still working remotely, odds are you want to get back to the office at least partially and resume some normalcy.

Here’s how soon your team members may be able to receive the COVID vaccine.

The Public Might Get Vaccines in Spring

According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, if an estimated quarter of US residents is fully vaccinated by late Spring or early Summer 2021, then healthy members of the general public may be able to get vaccinated more quickly than originally thought. The distribution would still take place over several months.

Employer Guidance May Increase Vaccination Efforts

Employers have the right to require employees to get vaccinated as a condition of returning to the office. This may help staff overcome their reluctance to get the vaccine as soon as possible. However, making something in the workplace mandatory typically leads to less desirable results than keeping it voluntary. Employees may object for reasons related to religion, ethics, disability, pregnancy, allergic reactions to previous vaccinations, or other issues. Instead, weekly COVID testing may become common for those returning to the office.

Continue to Wear a Mask

The process of vaccinating hundreds of millions of people to develop herd immunity is expected to take months. In fact, Fauci believes that 75-85% of the U.S. would need to be vaccinated by Fall 2021 to get back to some degree of normalcy. Ideally, the majority of people would need to get vaccinated to stunt or completely stop the outbreak. With the recent reports of new COVID-19 strains occurring throughout the world, social distancing, wearing masks, and vaccinations may remain the norm for some time.

Recommendations for Your Accounting and Finance Team

Although the COVID vaccine may be available to the general public in Spring 2021, there is no guarantee that everyone will want it. Also, even though employers can make vaccination a requirement to return to the office, staff members may object for religious, ethical, or other reasons. A better solution may require regularly scheduled COVID testing along with mask-wearing, social distancing, and other health standards to stop the spread.

Whether working remotely or on-site, enhance your accounting & finance team with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources help. Our in-depth understanding of the industry’s necessary functions and competencies and a role ensures that only highly qualified candidates are presented for your review. Contact us today.

Management Tips to Ensure Your Team is Actively Engaged

The level of engagement an employee has demonstrated how committed they are to your company and its success. It also shows how motivated and emotionally invested they are in their work. An employee must be motivated to work toward a goal in line with its vision and committed to the same values as the organization to remain engaged. As a result, the higher employee engagement is, the greater your company’s success. This is why you must work to maintain engagement among your team members.

Implement these tips to ensure your accounting and finance team remains engaged in their work.

Get to Know Your Employees

Learn all you can about your team members. For instance, find out about their families, hobbies, and interests. Also, discover what motivates them to perform their best. Additionally, ask what keeps them invested in the company’s future. Plus, uncover how they’d like to expand the business and increase its success. Use this knowledge to create a positive, productive work environment.

Set Goals

Create individual and team goals that are both challenging and realistic. This provides a sense of direction for what needs to be done and where your team members should focus their energy. Be sure to include milestones along the way to measure both progress and success.

Offer Growth Opportunities

Provide opportunities for professional growth. For instance, create stretch assignments that increase team members’ skill sets. Also, encourage your staff to develop and implement ideas to increase efficiency within the department. Plus, offer additional training and coaching in line with promotions.

Maintain Communication

Keep the lines of communication open with your team. For instance, encourage open discussion about problems as they come up. Work together to find solutions. Also, ask for employee feedback to improve your performance. Additionally, keep your staff updated on company news and developments.

Promote Autonomy

Let your teamwork as independently as possible. This shows you trust them to complete their tasks without being watched over. Ensure you clearly communicate what needs to be done and make yourself available to answer questions. Also, regularly check in on your team’s progress to see how they’re doing and provide feedback. Plus, encourage them to learn from their mistakes and do better next time.

Recognize Achievements

Acknowledge individual and team accomplishments. For instance, thank your team members for their efforts. Also, point out how individual contributions led up to a finished product. Provide monetary rewards for major achievements.

Hire Engaged Accounting & Finance Professionals

The promotion of employee engagement is one key to your accounting and finance team’s success. Engaged team members produce at higher levels and remain with your company longer. Setting goals, maintaining communication, and promoting autonomy are three ways to encourage engagement.

When you need to add engaged professionals to your team, partner with Casey Accounting & Finance Resources, we provide high-performance candidates who will make strong contributions to your company. Find out more today.

How to Use Disruption as an Opportunity for Change

This is the first of a two-part series of articles on disruption and the importance of customer centricity. The second article will be shared in March’s newsletter.

In general, most people are resistant to change. However, one thing great leaders do is use the disruption for change. The COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example. We can point to dozens of examples of companies, organizations, and the service industry who capitalized on this disturbance to address the needs of their customers and even gained new customers in the process by creating products and services to address these requirements.

C-suite executives who took this challenge turned it into opportunities. Is it too late to consider changes within your business? No, it’s not, and here are some ways to approach it.

Prioritizing Change

First, executives must determine what changes might be needed and then prioritize them. Sherzod Odilove, senior consultant and organizational effectiveness lead at Gallup, states that instead of wishing a crisis away, world-class leaders lean in and ask, ‘Which organizational change(s) should we prioritize?’

This decision matrix from Gallup® outlines the process.

 

Gallup has also identified seven principles leaders can use for effective change management.

  1. Clearly articulate the vision for change.
  2. Involve the right people: limited vs. broad involvement.
  3. Communicate the right information at the right time.
  4. Always account for resistance to change.
  5. Celebrate short-term wins without declaring premature victory.
  6. Effectively anchor the change to the organization.
  7. Always plan for change to be “the only constant.”

Finally, Gallup believes the best predictors of 0rganizational change success are strong leadership and engaged employees. Thriving organizations make strong company cultures and strong customer-centric practices important pieces of their business mission.

Next month’s article will share methods to build and strengthen customer relationships and why that is important in the change management decision-making process.