Christopher Stark, President & CEO, Cetrom appeared as a featured author in Accounting Today on December 22nd. The full article can be read here.
New Year’s resolutions are sometimes a challenge to follow through on due to a whole host of reasons. However, a manageable resolution for IT professionals and accounting firm leaders heading into 2022 is to provide first-rate IT solutions to their employees and firms.
Investing in superb technology is beneficial in innumerable ways to firms overall, and employees specifically. As the transition to more flexible and remote work options continues, it is juxtaposed with increased cybersecurity risks. Below are some of the benefits of investing in best-of-breed IT in 2022.
- Attract and retain superior employees. Outdated technology can decrease a firm’s ability to attract and retain high-quality talent, which is especially concerning in the current tight labor market. A survey titled the State of Software Happiness Report 2019 found that more than half of all employees are unhappy at work because of the software tools they are using. About a quarter of employees said the software they are using caused them to consider leaving their jobs. Further, more than one in eight employees indicated they have quit a job because of mismatched software.
- Provide employees access to new technology. According to a study completed by Adobe, 32% of employees said they left a position because their employers’ technology “was a barrier to their ability to do good work” and almost half said they would be likely to leave a job if unhappy or frustrated with the technology used at work.
- Provide employees choices of tools to achieve positive outcomes. Research suggests it is important to trust employees to know the right IT tools for themselves in order to be successful in achieving the goals of the business they are involved with. Offer employees the opportunity to have input into the best-of-breed options right for them so they can be successful in helping achieve the desired outcomes necessary for a firm’s success.
- Proactively support remote and flexible work environments. As more people work remotely, IT professionals are shifting from “reactively supporting telecommuters to proactively empowering them.” Employees are requiring access to hardware, software, and cloud services to effectively work remotely.
- Offer employees manageable cybersecurity measures. A 2020 global study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and reported by IBM found that businesses have slowly improved in their ability to “plan for, detect and respond to cyberattacks over the past five years, [however,] their ability to contain an attack has declined by 13% during this same period.” Respondents to the survey said that their security responses were harmed in part by the use of too many cybersecurity tools and a lack of specific instructions for common cyberattacks.
Read the full article placement in Accounting Today.