In the latest episode of MOVE Like This, host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk talks with Kassi Rushing, strategist and speaker with Kassi Rushing Consulting, about what future-ready accounting firms need from their people strategies, and why culture, caregiving, leadership, and performance are increasingly hard to separate. Rushing has spent 20 years working in and with the accounting profession, and she says most firms now recognize people as a critical business asset. The harder part, she says, is building an environment where people can actually do their best work.
One firm Rushing worked with added a single question to its employee survey: how many employees identify as caregivers? Leadership expected some. More than half said yes, many caring for aging parents, stepparents, or siblings alongside their own kids. The finding reshaped everything from when the firm scheduled social events to whether its benefits and leave policies matched how people actually live. Rushing frames caregiving as a business continuity issue, not an accommodation, since the people most likely to be caregivers are often in the exact years firms expect them to take on bigger leadership roles. “We take care of, love, and nurture people,” she says. “That’s great, and there’s a real business continuity aspect to understanding how it all works together.”
Bonnie and Kassi also push back on the idea that younger professionals lack ambition. Millennials and Gen Z still want growth and meaningful work, Rushing says, they’re just more likely to ask why something is done a certain way. Firms can’t say they want innovation while only rewarding ideas that succeed on the first try. “If we say we want innovation, but we reward the old way of doing things, guess what’s going to happen?” she says. “We’re going to keep doing things the old way.” Her larger point: most of what’s reshaping accounting is out of any one firm’s control, but how it treats its people never is.
Key Takeaways:
- Caregiving Is a Business Continuity Issue, Not Just an Accommodation: The people most likely to be caregivers are often in the exact years firms expect them to take on bigger leadership and client responsibilities.
- Firms Can’t Support People They Haven’t Taken the Time to Understand: Benefits, flexibility, and workplace practices work best when they’re built around how employees actually live, not assumptions about them.
- Younger Professionals Aren’t Less Ambitious, They’re Asking Different Questions: Millennials and Gen Z still want growth and meaningful work, but they’re more likely to question practices that exist only because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
- Innovation Requires Room to Get Things Wrong: Firms that reward only ideas that succeed immediately will keep getting the same outcomes they’ve always gotten.
- Culture Is Built Person to Person: Policies and programs matter less than the everyday behaviors firms actually reward.
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