Voices of the CFO: Competing for and Retaining Talent

When it comes to recruiting and keeping talent in an organization, chief financial officers (CFOs) do more than provide data about the salaries the market offers or handle payroll.

Several CFOs have told PYMNTS that they also play a key role in facilitating engagement and communication, not only within the finance team, but across the organization.

Interviewed for the PYMNTS series “A Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO,” finance leaders shared the ways in which they contribute to their organization’s goal of competing for and retaining talent.

Building a Culture That Is Inclusive

Helping their companies retain talent is one of the top challenges for CFOs, Riskonnect CFO David Rockvam told PYMNTS in July.

Read more: Engagement Key to Taming ‘Great Resignation’ of Finance Teams

That’s a chore for companies across industries in the midst of the Great Resignation, but it’s especially true in the tech industry, where it’s easy for people to move around and work from home.

Riskonnect has kept its employee churn quite a bit below the industry benchmark of 20% to 22% employee turnover, Rockvam said.

“I’m new to the company, but I think we’re doing a good job of helping our team members get acclimated with the work from home and building a culture that is very inclusive,” Rockvam said.

Facilitating Connectivity Between Teams

With today’s remote workforces, it can be a challenge to facilitate an entirely digital hiring and new employee onboarding process, and to foster a collaborative environment among current employees, Vacasa CFO Jamie Cohen told PYMNTS in February 2021.

See more: Vacasa CFO Talks Modernizing Finance Through Collaboration

For Cohen, one of the most important roles a CFO can play within the enterprise is to act as the facilitator of connectivity, not only within finance teams, but across the entire organization.

“I think that finance can often be that communication hub between departments, where finance is talking to sales, or talking to operations, making sure they’re also talking to one another about initiatives,” Cohen said.

Keeping Employees Engaged

Automation is another aid to employee engagement and retention during the Great Resignation, Coalfire CFO Dennis Schumacher told PYMNTS in July.

Watch the video: Growing a Company Means Looking Beyond the Books

With automation, employees can focus on adding value to the business rather than spending time doing work that could be automated, Schumacher said. What’s more, it helps with employee retention by enabling the company to keep them engaged and doing challenging work rather than manual work.

“That value prop is very important to us externally, but we have to do it for our resources as well so that we can maintain high-caliber resources, both client-facing as well as in the back office,” Schumacher said.

Promoting the Overall Employee Experience

The overall employee experience is important for obtaining and retaining employees, ChartHop CFO Matt Wolf told PYMNTS in July.

Read more: Finance Leaders Balance Spend With Remote Employees’ Needs

For that reason, Wolf uses ChartHop’s own people analytics platform to track not just compensation but also diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB), employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and other factors that come into that employee experience.

“Companies have a better view of their customers than they do of their own employees in some cases,” Wolf said. “So, that’s really what ChartHop looks to do is to give people a very visual look into their company for planning purposes, for engagement purposes and all the things that go around that employee experience.”