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The Impact of Best Practices on Employees
The primary reason for listing all of these causes of failure is not to discourage
the reader from ever attempting a best practice installation. On the contrary, this
allows one to prepare for and avoid all roadblocks on the path to ultimate imple-
mentation success.
THE IMPACT OF BEST PRACTICES ON EMPLOYEES

The impact of best practices on employees is significant. In the short run, there
is an overwhelming feeling of discontent, because any kind of change makes
employees nervous about what the impact will be on their jobs. Admittedly, a
primary purpose of using best practices is to reduce the payroll expense in
the accounting department, or at least to handle an increased workload with
the same number of employees. Consequently, employees have a reason to be
concerned.
There are several ways to deal with employee concerns. One is to create a
standard policy of rolling all displaced employees onto a project team that will
be used to implement even more best practices. This approach tends to attract
the best employees to the project team, but also has the disadvantage of eventu-
ally displacing so many employees that there are too many people staffing the
implementation team. The opposite approach is to be up-front about projected
changes to employee jobs and to give a generous amount of both notice and sev-
erance pay to those people who will be displaced. Given the realities of paying
extra money to departing employees and the need for well-staffed implementa-
tion teams, the recommended approach is somewhere in the middle—to retain a
few of the best employees to run new projects, which reduces the amount of sev-
erance that must be paid out to departing employees.
The other problem, which is more of a long-run issue, is communications.
Even after the initial round of layoffs, there will be a continued emphasis on con-
stantly improving the accounting department’s processes. These changes cannot
take place in a vacuum. Instead, the implementation team must carefully research
the costs and benefits of each prospective best practice, discuss the issue with
those employees who are most knowledgeable about how any changes will
impact the organization as a whole, and rely to a considerable extent on their
advice in regard to whether there should be any implementation at all, and if so,
how the best practice should be modified to fit the organization’s particular cir-
cumstances. Only by making the maximum use of employees’ knowledge and by
paying close attention to their opinions and fears can an implementation team
continually succeed in installing a series of best practices.
Thus, communication is the key—both in handling employee departures in
the short term, while the accounting department is reducing its staffing levels to
match greater levels of efficiency, and in the long run, when employee coopera-
tion is crucial to continued success.