Preparing students for the future of work: Lessons learned from telecommuting in public accounting

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic required essentially all public accounting professionals to telecommute. However, alternative work arrangements (AWAs) such as telecommuting have long been offered by accounting firms to mitigate work-family conflict and other concerns inherent to the public accounting profession. Prior research has examined attitudes and perceptions about AWAs, but relatively little is known from the AWA adopters themselves and those who work directly with them. Given the heavy reliance on teamwork, multiple supervisors, and multiple clients in public accounting, it is not clear how telecommuting impacts critical relationship dynamics. Accounting students, though experienced with remote learning, can learn from pre-COVID telecommuters’ insights and experiences. In this paper, we interview telecommuters in public accounting as well as a non-telecommuting teammate (subordinate or superior) to develop rich insights about telecommuting’s impact from multiple perspectives. Our findings present best practices and challenges regarding telecommuting implementation within a team setting. Our results are useful to accounting educators as they advise and mentor today’s students, who are likely to enter a workforce with increasing prevalence of telecommuting post-COVID.