6 minute read 30 Aug 2022
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How can you boost employee engagement and finance transformation success simultaneously?

EY Americas
By EY Americas

Multidisciplinary professional services organization

6 minute read 30 Aug 2022
Related topics Government and Public Sector
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Finance transformations intend to accomplish one or more of the following outcomes: optimize workforces, enable decision-making, improve the stakeholder experience and empower efficient stewardship.

In brief

  • EY research shows that 65% of transformation programs fail to meet their intended goals.
  • Our research shows that the consistent driver of success and failure in those transformations is not technology or data, but people.
  • Our research identified six personas that drive success in the finance organization to help professionals envision how the personas influence and impact the organization and its mission, and we designed a short quiz to identify these distinct personas.

Government Business Council (GBC) survey data shows that 65% of finance transformation programs fail to meet their intended finance optimization goals. That’s a discouraging failure rate, especially for those that understand the benefits and target outcomes. Discouragement grows when you consider the expense, time and effort leaders invest in process improvement techniques, new project management tools and methodologies, and leading-edge technologies pursuing unsuccessful transformation efforts.

Based on years of surveying finance executives globally and across sectors, there are four key desired outcomes that resonate. Finance transformations intend to accomplish one or more of the following outcomes: optimize workforces, enable decision-making, improve the stakeholder experience and empower efficient stewardship.   

What do the 35% of finance transformations that get this right do?

While emphasizing that processes and technologies are important, history shows people wield more influence. The GBC survey responses show that the consistent driver of success and failure in those transformations is not technology or data, but people.  Respondents named putting people first, before processes and technology, as one of the chief lessons learned during their transformation experiences.  The survey results show that communicating and engaging with staff and stakeholders is the deciding factor of transformation programs, with 73% of respondents identifying communication as the most critical tool for change.

The survey responses show how important it for finance leaders to get individual members of their workforce in alignment with the changes they hope to make to the workforce as a whole. Understanding how each individual team member perceive themselves and their roles in relation to the work their team needs to perform is crucial when leaders seek to reimagine how the team functions. When your people understand the vision, see themselves in the vision, have the skills needed for the vision and want the vision fulfilled, the probability that your vision will be realized is greatly improved. 

Because people dictate the fate of change in organizations, aligning individual goals with the finance organization’s needs is the cornerstone for building sustainable transformations. 

For today’s finance functions, transformation isn’t a luxury — it’s an imperative.

Exacerbated by the pandemic, the unprecedented level of change in finance1 requires a new way of thinking about transformation initiatives. Increasing the probability of success requires re-examining the human side of transformation. Before leaders embark on a new transformation journey, they need to consider who is on that journey with them. Successful organizations establish a vision of the roles people must play in the future state finance organization. 

How EY can help

Government and Public Sector financial management services

We are helping the federal government, state and local organizations, and nonprofit entities realize the NextWave of finance transformation and digital finance.

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Federal government consulting

Through the transformation of people, processes and infrastructure, we help create digital experiences that help the government achieve its mission and interact in purposeful ways with its customers. We combine human-centered design with modern technologies to help federal agencies improve operations and deliver measurable results.

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Understanding finance function personas to drive employee engagement

NextWave, the EY perspective on powerful trends and forces shaping the future, suggests that finance function professionals understand two key individual (better me) persona concepts: 

  • Passion persona – reflects how the individual desires to impact the organization 
  • Primary persona – how you perceive your supervisor assesses your contribution to the organization’s mission

The NextWave concept shows that recognizing the passion persona helps optimize productivity by empowering people to do what they’re asked to do, and what they desire to do. The passion persona is driven by the individual. The primary persona is driven by the supervisor. 

The six NextWave finance personas

The survey results from respondents representing a wide range of federal agencies and military branches, shows that that people are at the core of any successful technological transformation. For finance leaders to understand the people in a finance function, they need to understand the need six personas finance functions need to achieve peak operational performance: curator, guardian, steward, catalyst, concierge and oracle. While there’s no hierarchy to these personas, the transactional curator, the steadfast guardian and the value-seeking steward personas have longer histories, while the mission-focused catalyst, the people-first concierge and the decision-making oracle became prevalent after the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 formalized, and subsequent legislation further evolved, the CFO function. 

  • Curator

    • Role: collects, processes and delivers timely transactional information to get things done cheaper, better and faster 
    • Focus: operation and transaction processing
    • Objective: seeking new and automated ways to perform transactions and respond rapidly to regulatory changes, transaction volume increases, real-time monitoring or other stimuli 
    • Key success metric: ability to produce accurate and timely results

  • Guardian

    • Role: about trust: trust in process, trust in mission and trust in suppliers
    • Focus: driving trust into daily operations through internal controls, enterprise risk and audit impact
    • Objective: automating compliance and controls and providing value-add risk management
    • Key success metric: ability to manage risk

  • Steward

    • Role: optimizes program mission resources and translates spend into value
    • Focus: getting the most value and impact to the mission from funding and seeking ways to spend less on operations
    • Objective: optimizing use of funds across the enterprise through automation and strategic investments, while maintaining or increasing performance levels for agency and citizens or residents
    • Key success metric: ability to optimize value delivered from allocated funding

  • Catalyst

    • Role: mission-oriented change agent who disrupts the status quo
    • Focus: using insights to drive mission impact within enterprise from a strategy or policy perspective
    • Objective: executing strategy and business changes and maximizing speed to value realization
    • Key success metric: ability to support the organization by executing strategic programs and change programs

  • Concierge

    • Role: three priorities: people, people, people
    • Focus: having pulse of the people and advancing customer experience for internal customers and program recipients
    • Objective: serving internal and external customers of finance who want to know where dollars go and how that translates into value
    • Key success metric: ability to maximize delight in customers

  • Oracle

    • Role: enabling better decision-making by helping get data and quickly translating it into insights by focusing on analytics and tech enablement
    • Focus: getting good ideas understood well enough to be executed
    • Objective: providing leaders with insights needed to make informed decisions
    • Key success metric: ability to create organizational value

Putting purpose behind personas to unlock successful financial transformation

Finance leaders shouldn’t worry if there isn’t a perfect alignment between the person and a persona. A finance professional may serve as a mix of an oracle and a concierge, a catalyst and a curator, and so on. The personas are intended to be complementary, so some overlap is expected.

We designed this quiz to power a human-centered design finance transformation approach. Once we understood how people determine transformation success, we were inspired to create a persona framework that could help finance function leaders get people to stop thinking about outputs and start thinking about outcomes. As the finance function evolves its focus on the customer experience, analytics and enabling decision-making, organizations need their finance function to be a trusted advisor in the enterprise, which makes outcomes much more critical. It’s not enough to have a clean audit opinion anymore. Finance leaders need to discover how to leverage the audit as a mechanism that drives change within the enterprise.

The NextWave concept makes it clear that successful transformation and modernization start with people. The NextWave Persona Quiz is an opportunity for organizations to gain clarity of the vision for their work, better align employee skills and passions with organizational work, understand the measures of success, and glean how staff interests and goals impact the organization’s ability to successfully achieve its transformation objectives.

These results can help finance professionals understand how supervisors gauge their success and spur constructive dialogue about their role in the function, team or organization, while clarifying the choices they need to make to achieve success.

This seven-minute assessment could save finance leaders millions of dollars in time and effort. The risks and costs are too high to rely on traditional ways of change and transformation in nontraditional times. 

  • References#Hide references

    [1] Fueled by the proliferation of data, speed of technology, significant federal grant funding, and evolving citizen and resident expectations.

Summary

Exacerbated by the pandemic, the unprecedented level of change in finance requires a new way of thinking about transformation initiatives. Increasing the probability of success requires re-examining the human side of transformation. Before leaders embark on a new transformation journey, they need to consider who is on that journey with them. Successful organizations establish a vision of the roles people must play in the future state finance organization.

About this article

EY Americas
By EY Americas

Multidisciplinary professional services organization

Related topics Government and Public Sector
Upvote