Let’s Talk Job Satisfaction and Hours Worked

Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. This week's episode is going to be another solo episode. It's going to be a little bit of a shorter one as well. So no guests for this week, however, I recently pulled together some content for a few newsletters on job satisfaction and hours work. And I really wanted to talk about the results with you and share some of the findings for folks who might be more into podcasts and less into reading newsletters. So what I found to be most interesting when I was working on these was to look at the overall trajectory of job satisfaction in our industry. So this is including tax, audit, consulting, advisory, all of the above. And the overall trend here has been a slight positive curve. So people have become a little bit more satisfied with their jobs as kind of the years go by. And I have some theories about why that I want to talk about. Now when we break it down into the service line level, that's where things get really interesting. So consulting and advisory had higher starting points for job satisfaction in 2023, which is when I started collecting this specific data point. They trended downward a little bit in 2024 and are rebounding slightly so far in 2025. I think some of that might have to do with, you know, things are drying up a little bit in some areas of consulting and advisory. There have been some layoffs. So, you know, things like job insecurity can really, really negatively impact your job satisfaction. And then when we look at audit and tax specifically, these two service lines have had a very consistent upward trajectory since 2023. I found that to be really fascinating and it also just gave me pause to think about why this might be the case. So first of all, I think the world of tax, CAS as well, although I don't collect as much data on CAS, but I think both of these industries are evolving very rapidly. So the technology sector has taken a pretty keen interest in core accounting work. And I think the additional leverage this provides has enabled it to become more rewarding and interesting. You know, you're spending more time on kind of higher level things that bring value to your clients. And that just feels good. And there's a little bit less friction these days from all of the busy work that, you know, these tech companies are really working on eliminating. Additionally, where there have been some layoffs over the last year, audit and tax have been a much more secure place to be than a lot of other industries, particularly for people who are working outside of government. Although that's kind of, that might be changing now as well. And this job security, I think is something we probably don't value as much in a zero interest environment, which is kind of where we were in, you know, 21, 22, where it seems like if for whatever reason you lost your job, you could almost always go find a higher paying job anywhere else, you know, at a lot of these tech companies that we're hiring like crazy, possibly like an industry role, anything like that, it felt like you had a really strong backstop. But right now, when there is some general market uncertainty, which has been the case for the last couple of years, being somewhere safe becomes very, very valuable. And I think that that is also kind of contributing a little bit to this positive trend in job satisfaction. Overall as well, salaries have been trending upward at a strong pace, you know, in the accounting industry as a whole. I talk about this a lot, but I think that they kind of had stagnated for maybe 10 ish years and, you know, since kind of 2021, 2022, salaries have been moving up very quickly in the accounting, in the accounting world, as well as many other industries. And many accounting firms, a lot of the larger ones, but some of the smaller ones as well have maintained hybrid and remote work options where we see a lot of other people in other fields being called back in for more stringent RTO demands. So I think that that might be contributing to this increased job satisfaction as well, where once you see some of the things that you really value, like the job security, like the ability to work remotely being taken away in other areas, I think you start to value it in your own role a little bit more. Next, beyond looking at the different kind of service lines and all of that, we looked at job satisfaction in hours worked by level. So level of seniority, unsurprisingly here, interns are over the moon satisfied. I think in that role, sometimes you're a little bit sheltered from some of the difficulties. You may be a little bit naive and just overall, just really excited to be there, which is, you know, it's good. If you can maintain that energy, that's awesome for you. So interns on average self-reported just around 40 hours per week, and they had an average job satisfaction of 7.5 out of 10. Hours jumped up to almost 47 hours as soon as people kind of started looking at the analyst level and satisfaction dropped off quite a bit once you reach that point. And then senior is where job satisfaction bottomed out. For anyone who is, you know, into that culture, there's the whole, there's a YouTube video that I'm going to link here that kind of references the problems where a lot of the issues kind of bubble up towards the senior and manager level area. And you know, I think that that does kind of ring true with my experience and the experience of people that I've spoken with as well. And yeah, so when we were looking at job satisfaction, seniors were at bottomed out and then it started to climb pretty steadily from there up to partner. However, you know, even equity partners were not recording super high levels of job satisfaction, which I think is an overall issue in the industry, right? Like when we're looking at this aspirational end of the journey, this is where so many people hope to end up. And then when you actually kind of like look at people who are in that partner position, them not having a very high degree of job satisfaction, I think is a very big problem for the industry as a whole. And when we look at the hours worked, it kind of explains that. So the hours kind of, they kept climbing pretty steadily. So huge jump between interns and analysts, another decent jump between analyst and senior level. And then it actually continued to trend up a little bit all the way up to equity partners. So you know, that's, I think something that needs to be worked on. I think people and firms need to become better at sort of leveraging their hours. They need to be a little bit better at adopting technology and processes that take them out of the weeds and maybe working more on the business versus in the business. But yeah, this is kind of what we saw. And then the last of the findings that I wanted to talk about here were findings around firm sizing. So this probably won't be a big surprise to most people. On average, the smaller firm segments had lower hours. So the number was 44.3 hours work per week on average. These are all self-reported numbers, by the way. Other top 20 firms, so other very large regional firms, excluding the big four, came in at just below 46 hours on average. And the big four came in at a steady 46 hours a week on average worked. So the job satisfaction at these smaller firms was also just around 5% higher than at the big four firms. And the other top 20 firms was just very close behind as well. So hours and job satisfaction, they definitely have a pretty good link. However, when I started kind of looking at the firm specific data, so we did an award of the best firms to work at based off of hours, the best firms to work at based off job satisfaction, as well as the worst. We found something really interesting here that kind of, you know, debunks that hours work and job satisfaction are that closely correlated because Citroen Cooperman came in with the lowest self-reported hours of any firm. However, they also came in as the second lowest job satisfaction overall for all of the firms on big four transparency with 10 or more responses. So there's obviously more to it than that. There's a lot of culture that goes into that. There's a lot of perception. I know, you know, Citroen Cooperman just kind of had its turn where it got, you know, a stake of it got sold from one private equity firm to another. So maybe that kind of had a lot of like belt tightening and, you know, things like that. I don't, I don't have someone internally at Citroen Cooperman who can confirm, but I thought that to be really interesting. So if you're interested in kind of looking at some of the charts around this, the first newsletter is already out. The second one's going to be out probably within a week of this episode airing. And yeah, I hope, I hope you find this kind of content interesting. If not, don't worry. We're going to be right back into the kind of interview type structure for the next many, many weeks. I've got some amazing guests lined up. And if you do like this, I would really appreciate if you could give it a rating. I don't know if it makes a big difference or not. But I have heard anecdotally that, you know, more five-star reviews can help the podcast reach more people out there. So yeah, thank you very much and hope you enjoyed this.