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

Penelope L. Bagley, Derek W. Dalton, C.Kevin Eller and Nancy L. Harp

Journal of Accounting Education, 2021, vol. 56, issue C

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.

Keywords: Alternative work arrangements; Team dynamics; Work-life balance; Public accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0748575121000154
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joaced:v:56:y:2021:i:c:s0748575121000154

DOI: 10.1016/j.jaccedu.2021.100728

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Accounting Education is currently edited by Natalie Tatiana Churyk

More articles in Journal of Accounting Education from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().