If your only response to staff complaining about long hours etc is “I had a to do it too”, you are a shitty leader. Period.

likefunny
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Let see where we can improve/ and be more efficient with your time. Are you spinning your wheels? Are you having trouble understanding what we are testing? Are you not getting the right guidance? Is it client delays that is causing the work to pile up?

There's a lot of ways to help. If your immediate answer is " that sucks, deal with it". You are the reason it sucks and you are a bad manager/ leader.

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Agreed

My usual response (that I don’t say out loud) is “If you spent this time doing your work instead of complaining, you’d be done by now. And I wouldn’t have to review this at midnight.”

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Very interested to know, what type of response would you find reasonable?

likesmart

Empathy, frank conversations, leading by example and working those hours along side you, going to bat for his team, recognition. All great options besides “‘my life sucked so now yours has to”.

likefunny

I admit, I am going to give the koolaid version here, but here goes.

Your teams do not want you to work long hours if they can help it. We have a budget that we want to hit so we earn as much as possible on the fee. Long hours are prompted by one of three circumstances:

1.) The audit is structured with mini deadlines / milestones that need to be hit to ensure that the overall project reaches completion by the true deadline

2.) The time spent is inefficient (no judgement or connotation intended). This can be due to personal circumstance, the time it takes to be acquainted with the work in order to confidently master it, the degree of coaching received or the quality of PBCs obtained from the client.

3.) Youre staffed on multiple engagements that aren’t busy, but the combination of work translates in the staff being unnecessarily burdened.

All of these are what should be addressed when someone is being burned by long hours. Talk with your executives openly and honestly.

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I agree with your gist, but will have to challenge the first point. I don’t like micro-managey deadlines, but some general “milestones” really helped clean up some of my jobs. They can really help with the backlog and the classic “manager reviews work 4 months after it was done, no one remembers how it was done, person who did it may have rolled off, and client will lose it if we ask a follow up now.”

Sigh. Well first of all...you do have to. Not because that’s what your managers did. Because that’s the industry you signed up for.

Second and more importantly, managers work just as many hours as you, probably with more flexibility and probably offline some of the time. Just because you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I do a lot of things my staff doesn’t even know about, and doesn’t need to worry about.

Thirdly, and this will undoubtedly trigger you, but I’ve also heard the perspective that managers, partners, and some seniors are ultimately doing a different type of job. It’s less working in Excel and and more dealing with judgmental issues and also being presentable to the client on short notice. If you’re wondering why your manager goes to sleep an hour earlier than you, maybe it’s because he/she also has 3 meetings in the morning where they’ll get grilled by the client.

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I said 3-4 months of busy season is expected. If you are on 9 months straight then I would say it’s not acceptable, would need to go over your schedule and workload and see what can be done to shift some of the work. I motivate my staff and team during busy season all the time and encourage them to take much needed PTO after busy season. No one can do that for more than a couple of months straight.

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I’m curious, what would be an appropriate, satisfactory response?

like

It may come across strange to you, but the “pay your dues” mentality is there because, well, if you don’t, you’ll never be at the level to replace your manager. When they say you should work as much as they did, they say that because they want you to be as good (from a technical standpoint, not your empathy standpoint) as they are.

Unfortunately, the top tier seniors and managers are almost exclusively people who’ve been through some sort of hellish experience.

I will qualify with two statements:
- I am heavily opposed to working late for the sake of working late. Unless we’ve a deadline in 2 weeks, I don’t expect anyone to work past 9-10. I expect they’ll take some evenings off to go get dinner or chill. However, the reason I have that philosophy is because, like you, I got dragged through an insanely long busy season as a senior. I don’t blame my managers at the time - we were all responding to curveballs the client threw and they were bad. But I learned from it and my managers did too. I’ve a different perspective now on how these things should be or should’ve been treated.

- I don’t personally ever say the words “pay your dues,” but I do get annoyed when staff approach things with entitlement. I used to want to be as helpful as possible when I was at that level, and I expect that now

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Lol my manager pulled up the utilization report and showed our staff that they were smack in the middle of all employees their rank. This was after multiple rounds of complaining.

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Lol I’ve been told explicitly there isn’t money in the budget for 60 hour weeks. But this was a client we are trying to build relationships with so we’d have to suck it up and eat the hours and still produce the work.

Posts and the responses to the posts like this make me wonder how the hell people in this industry even survive with all this negativity for so long. Drugs, alcohol, affairs, a mix of all three?

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Set your boundaries and push back if needed is what I would say. We aren’t saving lives here. The more you give the more the firms take.

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As a tax manager heading into a deadline, the response I would like to give is "You've had this stuff for 3-4 months and gave me a poor work product days before the client deadline with scores of review notes i stayed up late adding, so I'm not too concerned that you now have to stay up late a few days doing something that should have been done weeks ago while I was coming up with excuses to the partner and client why the work wasn't done"

What I would say though is something like "appreciate the hard work! We're all in this together!"

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