Voices of the CFO: 5 CFOs Share Tips on How They Make a Remote Workforce Click

When people in business talk about the lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic, much of what they remember revolves around the finance department. Sending and receiving payments, accessing documents and getting any required signatures suddenly became a challenge if members of the team were working remotely for the first time.

As the shift to remote work endured, in many cases, additional challenges came to the fore. For chief financial officers (CFOs), those included managing the finance team, instilling company values and maintaining camaraderie.

During interviews for the PYMNTS series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO,” these professionals shared their own experiences and how they’ve dealt with the new normal of remote work.

Replicating Watercooler Conversations

One of the challenges of remote work is replicating watercooler conversations, Onbe CFO Brian Levin said in a January interview.

Watch the video: CFOs Move Beyond ‘Bean Counting’ to Collaboration, Efficiency

Onbe began holding weekly, 30-minute videoconferences between employees and leadership, and Levin noted that this turns what would have been commuting time into something productive.

“You take the lemons and make lemonade out of it by communicating with them in ways that make them more efficient,” Levin said.

Improving Access to Information

While easy access to information had already been becoming a requirement, that demand was accelerated by the pandemic, said Paymentus CFO Matt Parson said during a February interview.

Watch the video: CFOs Must Seek Internal, External Opportunities To Drive Digital Efficiencies

During the pandemic, there has been a greater need for information as teams have had to make day-to-day decisions to keep companies moving forward.

“So, as an organization, the more digitizing we can do internally and take things out of spreadsheets, take things out of manual processes, allows us to be able to respond to those things faster,” Parson said.

Understanding the Limits of Collaboration

Understanding how collaboration can both help and disrupt a business is an important lesson to learn — and one that can help CFOs shape their digitization roadmaps, LoginID CFO Vince Man said during an April 2021 interview.

Watch the video: CFOs Seek a Delicate Balance in Collaborative Technology

“As a CFO, there is a lot of opportunity because of the acceleration of collaboration technology,” Man said. “As a CFO, we need to leverage the acceleration of that technology to get everybody collaborating on creative ideas, to improve processes and the way we do business. However, on the flip side, we also have to make sure we don’t collaborate too much, so we have time to do our daily work.”

Empowering the Enterprise with Data

The pandemic and the consequential increase in product demand reinforced the prioritization of the connectivity between the finance function and customer relationships, Featurespace CFO Jonathan Crossfield said during a March 2021 interview.

Watch the video: Digital-First CFOs Empower The Enterprise With Data

For finance teams, that meant collaborating with sales and customer success teams and supporting the shift from in-person customer outreach efforts to online marketing and webinars.

Though being restricted to virtual customer meetings could be frustrating, these digital interactions also created an opportunity to use data from those client interactions — and use it to guide other financial initiatives.

“We want to make sure we have all of the data to support customers as best as possible,” Crossfield said. “We use that to drive our investment decisions throughout the organization, whether it’s in the customer support, engineering area or implementation area.”

Maintaining Camaraderie, Focus on Joint Goals

With the start of the pandemic and the move to remote work, Plastiq focused first on protecting employees, and secondly on making sure there is still camaraderie and a focus on joint goals, Plastiq CFO Amir Jafari said in a November 2021 interview.

Watch the video: Plastiq CFO Says Today’s CFOs Must Make Sure Companies are ‘Built to Last’

Noting that the employees at many companies went from spending their entire working lives in an office to spending no time in an office, Jafari said that going forward, each company will find a combination that works for them.

“But I think the No. 1 asset to be considerate of, and to make sure we find the highest level of efficiency for, is the people,” Jafari said. “It’s typically — on most companies, unless you’re obviously manufacturing based — but for most tech companies, your greatest asset is your employees. So, that would be where I would say we focus.”