How to Get the Most Out of Your Outsourcing Staff This Tax Season

The January tax season stretches your internal tax staff to the max. Everyone ends up working long hours and sometimes you even have weekend staffing requirements. So you decide to get some extra help. But the last thing you need is to have your outsourced tax professionals not aligned to your tax season strategy and requirements.

Luckily, there are things you can do to make sure that you outsourced tax staff are not only productive but also valuable to your practice in the long run. Let’s take a look at what you can do to get the most out of them.

Change your mind-set

It’s time to stop thinking of outsourced staff as just ‘tax season help’. If you think of outsourced workers as nothing more than temporary workers to fill your short term gaps in staffing, this attitude will carry over to how you deal with them.

If you want your outsourced staff to be valuable contributors – and potentially a long-term solution to your staffing woes – then you need to think of them accordingly.

Make them a part of your global team

Your outsourced staff will perform much better if they are effectively integrated into your team. One of our accounting practice clients – owner of six offices across London – has this to say about integrating them, “We hold weekly client service level review meetings across our shops and this now includes our colleagues in Ahmedabad, India. This is really helping to drive best practice standards and production efficiency across the business.”

Basically, instead of handing outsourced tax professionals a stack of tax returns and leaving them to it, get to know them and encourage your internal staff to do the same. Make them part of our weekly meetings and ensure the outsourced staff understands how their efforts are contributing to the overall growth of your practice.

Not only will they feel that you value their contributions, but you get to know them well enough to make the most of their unique strengths. Who knows, once the tax season employment term has ended, you could enlist them for other accounting tasks that you might need help with.

Offer incentives

Incentives are not just about tempting you outsourced staff to do the work when you are struggling with resource issues in-house. It is a good way to show your outsourced staff how much your value their contributions.

Ultimately, if you have gone through all the effort of turning them into valuable contributors to your practice growth, you should definitely take the last step and reward them for the value they have provided. Sometimes gestures such as cakes on their birthdays or online shopping coupons can go a long way in cementing a long-term, profitable relationship.

Looking for a way to handle the tax season stress? You can test-drive our tax outsourcing services without spending a penny, at zero obligation. Click on the link below to try two tax returns, completely free.