Emotions are running high, the workload is piling up and late hours are standard – it must be tax return season!

And while everyone is running around like a headless chicken and panicking about making deadlines, it’s up to you as their leader to breathe, take a step back and evaluate the situation.

Keep your workforce motivated during this hectic time with some of these tips.

Encourage self-care

At such a heated time, it’s important to give employees their space and encourage them to take a little time out to look after themselves.

Whether you treat everyone to lunch one day or plan a staff night out as soon as the season is over, offering your workforce something extra can really go a long way in solidifying their loyalty to the company and their drive to complete that final set of accounts.

Be motivated yourself

By looking at how to motivate your employees, it’s clear that you’re a relatively motivated leader. Just make sure you carry this with you in day-to-day life.

By being a purposeful and motivated leader will show your employees that they can keep their heads throughout this stressful time and rely on you to give them a helping hand.

This will also keep them motivated to complete work to the best of their ability.

Gage the response

Take time to monitor how engaged and motivated your workforce are (or aren’t).

This will help you decide the best approach to take going forward.

Of course, you won’t get an overall signal for the whole office. Instead you’ll be able to see how individuals work and what motivates them.

For example, your most motivated employees will be the ones always looking for new processes, keeping up-to-date on industry insights and always learning. These people will be invaluable as they will take the initiative and produce a higher quality of work in the long run.

However, if an employee does not seem motivated or even completely disengaged, this could not only be detrimental to the workload, but also to the rest of the team.

This attitude can infect the rest of the office and soon have your staff looking for new posts in a more energized workplace.

Don’t let this fall through the cracks and address the cause of unhappiness as soon as you see it. A gradual improvement will have a huge effect on office morale.

Look to technology

Cutting out processes and making time for work that your accountants really need to focus on will halve the workload.

Technology such as cloud accounting software can save your employees hours in paperwork as they instead they can simply guide clients through the process of online bookkeeping which they can then update themselves in the future.

Fewer receipts, fewer mistakes and fewer processes. What’s not to love?

Are you struggling to keep up-to-date with your systems? Pandle offers partnerships for accountancy firms looking to offer clients simple and effective bookkeeping with cloud software. You can find out more here.