Building a strong culture is essential for any team, but it can be especially important for bookkeepers. 

Many bookkeeping businesses operate with flexibility, often including hybrid or remote teams. 

Connecting everyone under a united team culture makes for a great working environment and a productive business! 

So, we’ve assembled a guide that is packed with practical steps to foster connection and purpose in your business, regardless of your team’s location. 

Why Team Culture Matters In Any Business 

Strong team culture boosts engagement, retention and performance throughout your business. This applies whether your team is located down the hallway or across the country! 

How does team culture do all of that? 

Well, it’s all about creating trust, clarity and regular connection throughout the various members of your team. When everyone is on the same page and feeling positive, it is much easier to achieve compliance, better work quality, and nurture successful client relationships. 

Basically, being connected and working as a cohesive team means better business and enjoyment for everyone. 

7 Practical Ways To Build Team Culture 1: Autonomy and Clear Goals 

1: Autonomy and Clear Goals 

It can be tempting to micromanage the tasks your team completes to ensure they are being done right. But a better way to foster a strong team culture is to build trust through autonomy and clear goals. Set the expectations and let your team get on with it. 

Define clear, measurable outcomes and trust your team to own their work. Don’t forget to check in regularly, offering support where needed. A robust onboarding process will help with setting expectations upfront.  

Action Point: Create a set of written expectations and goals for each member of your team. Share them and review the progress together each week or fortnight. 

 2: Set Regular Times To Connect 

Good communication is vital for keeping everyone on the same page and building a strong team. It is important to schedule regular times to connect. We suggest things like weekly team huddles, regular team chat slots, peer catchups or Friday wrap-up calls. These can all help keep your team aligned. 

Agree on communication protocols like preferred methods and expected response times to reduce the chance of miscommunication. Also, define when a call or a meeting is required, rather than an email or chat message.  

Action Point: Set a recurring weekly meeting time and send calendar invites to all team members. Consider what other touchpoints you would like to include in your regular workflow too. 

 3: Embrace Technology To Help You All Out 

Whether you are sitting right next to each other or cities apart, it is important that your team has visibility over what is going on in the business. Technology can help you create this visibility by enabling you to tag tasks for certain people, comment on the work that has been done, or work with a shared dashboard.  

Visibility ensures transparency and team cohesion without needing to be in the same office. 

Action Point: Research collaboration tools like Trello, Asana or Slack to see if they might be a good fit for the way your team works. 

 4: Prioritise Shared Learning 

Learning together is a great way to ensure your team is all on the same page. Organising regular knowledge sharing sessions and group training has the dual benefit of encouraging learning and development, as well as providing opportunities to support each other. 

Being part of an organisation like the ICNZB gives you access to training, workshops and even an annual conference, which are all great opportunities to empower your team with shared knowledge. 

Action Point: Take a look at all the learning benefits and CPD programme an ICNZB membership can offer you here. 

5: Keep Being Human 

Just because you are brought together by work doesn’t mean you can’t all have a strong human connection! Have plenty of ways to encourage social connection and team fun. Examples could be virtual lunches, quick quizzes during your weekly meetings, local team drop-ins, or a chat channel to celebrate wins and personal milestones like birthdays.  

Action Point: Set up a chat channel for personal connection and schedule a monthly social event. 

 6: Embrace Flexibility 

People are generally very good at managing their own schedules, so trust them to do so! Being able to have flexible working conditions can increase motivation and job satisfaction. So, rather than enforcing 9-5 desk hours, focus on the outcomes your team are producing.  

Action Point: Define clear working expectations, like core hours or meeting attendance and then look for ways you can honour each team member’s individual flexibility. 

 7: Review and Adapt 

Culture-building is not a one-off task. It is something that should be ongoing in your bookkeeping business. Make regular sense checks on how your team are interacting and what the working vibe is. You can observe the situation yourself and gather feedback from the team on what’s working. From there, you can adjust communication, processes, formats or tools accordingly. 

Action Point: Ask three simple questions: What should we start? Stop? Continue? Once you have those insights, act accordingly to implement what is needed. 

ICNZB Supports A Strong Culture In Your Business 

Running a bookkeeping business can feel isolating, especially if your team work remotely for some or all of the week. A professional organisation like the ICNZB can help support a strong team culture. 

Here are just some of the ways: 

• Opportunities to connect: ICNZB runs regional meetings and events which allow you and your team to connect locally or online. This is a great way to share culture-building wins and brainstorm challenges.  

• Community resources: Our knowledge base offers guides, templates and fact sheets on certification, industry standards and effective bookkeeping practices to help you strengthen your team culture. 

• Professional standards: ICNZB members all have to adhere to an ethical framework and have a commitment to ongoing professional development. This encourages purposeful and respectful team behaviours and a measurable standard to follow.  

Cultivating team culture is not about grand gestures; it is about consistency, care and connection. An ICNZB membership will help you to foster all of that through connections, resources and a shared commitment to building great, professional cultures. 

Find out more about becoming an ICNZB member here.