Accounting and the cult of busy-ness

Accountants are notoriously busy. ‘Busy’ is also the only acceptable answer to questions like ‘How are you?’ and ‘How’s work?’. If you were to answer in any other way, for instance explaining that things are ‘chilled’ at the moment, you would be revealing that you are not making budget and that others in the company are carrying you.

Being ‘busy’, while stressful and lamentable, is also an occupational expectation (for some a badge of honour). It demonstrates that one is a team player, that one’s professional skills are in demand, and that one is a dependable contributor to the whole.

Behind the cult of busy-ness, however, lurks moral, professional, and social concerns. For the individual, the time and energy dedicated to work can hamper the pursuit of happiness or a flourishing human life. For the profession, a lack of work/life balance can make the profession less attractive in an era abuzz with concepts like ‘the four-hour work week’, ‘agile working’ and ‘wellbeing’. For society, under-resourced professions with members on the verge of burnout is a risk – be in the fields of healthcare, audit, or national prosecution.

A recent review of ethics issues in the accounting profession flagged ‘work climate’ and ‘pressure’ as ongoing concerns¹. The authors of the review describe high-pressure environments caused by, among other things, profitability concerns and reporting deadlines, which ultimately result in a culture of long working hours and high levels of stress.

This dynamic has also become self-perpetuating. New entrants into the profession are inculcated into the cult of busy-ness, adopt a focus on productive and recoverable hours, and believe that the rewards will be reaped later in their career. As the authors note, however, ‘by the time … junior staff reach leadership ranks they have so bought into this culture of long hours and putting work above other life commitments that they feel trapped in and helpless to change the culture …’².

Beyond the personal sacrifices and the risks related to the recruitment and retention of talent, the pressure experienced within the profession also threatens the public interest. Researchers warn that time and resource constraints can lead to the rationalisation of lower-quality work, as well as other unethical behaviours such as ‘premature signoff’ and ‘underreporting of time’³.

To address these concerns will require more than wellness workshops and time management training. These initiatives ironically make more time demands on professionals while also privatising stress – implying that issues with deadlines and workload are the responsibility of the individual and can be solved with improved self-management.

Instead, we may need to add a new ‘threat to professional integrity’. Beyond the threats of self-interest, self-review, advocacy, familiarity and intimidation, we should add a ‘pressure’ or ‘resource’ threat. This threat requires safeguards that are more ambitious, including a re-calibration of the profession to restore balance between professional and commercial considerations, the recruitment of more people to the profession, and the adequate resourcing of teams.

AUTHOR: Schalk Engelbrecht, PhD, is the Chief Ethics Officer for KPMG South Africa and a research associate at the Centre for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University as well as the Stellenbosch University Business School

¹ Cf L Baudot, M Hazgui & E. Altiero, 2023, Ethics and public accounting firms: something old, something new in M Brivot & CH Cho (eds), Research Handbook on Accounting and Ethics, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, pp 9 – 10.
² Ibid, p 9.
³ Ibid, p 10.