Futureproofing your finance team

Company finance teams face not so much the winds of change as a gale – and the resulting turbulence throws up significant challenges for those charged with decisions on organisational structure and recruitment.

What sort of people will be needed in the years to come and how should they be organised? Once on board, how can they be persuaded to stay? And where should the balance between flexible generalists on one hand, and specialists with deep knowledge of their subjects on the other, be struck?

Above all, what are the big changes that will be wrought by accelerating technology?

Let’s start by noting the paradoxical position in which many finance teams currently find themselves. A good proportion of their most loyal and dedicated members are probably not the sort of people for whom they will have a major requirement in future, while the talent they need to attract is increasingly to be found among young people with an aversion to working for large organisations.

Bridging the generational divide

There is a generational divide between the Nintendo generation and their forebears. Their differences go some way beyond the obvious point that pre-Nintendos are comfortable with smartphones, but not necessarily with everything that comes with the latest communications technology, while the Nintendo generation has been acclimatised from birth to a landscape of mobile apps and social media. It is a divide seen in the divergent skills and attitudes that these different generations bring to the world of work.

To take one example, more established finance team members are likely to have progressed in their careers at a time when legacy IT systems – accumulated in overlapping layers over the decades – needed to be managed in order to make the system work. This gives them (albeit subconsciously) an interest in maintaining the status quo and in creating obstacles to replacing the legacy systems with completely new and fully compatible IT.