Employee Accountability

What Is Employee Accountability

Employee accountability is the way in which your team members accept responsibility for their actions and inaction, as well as the outcomes they produce. It describes the ownership your team has of their work.

Employee accountability includes different dimensions:

Ownership

Your team owns tasks and outcomes. They deeply care about their work, and accept that their outputs are theirs.

Example: Your account manager loses a client. Instead of blaming the delivery team, they own it and look for solutions.

Proactiveness

Your team proactively collects information, clarifies unclear assignments, forces decisions they need to do their work.

Example: You give an unclear briefing to your marketing manager. Instead of ignoring it, they start working on it and get back to you with questions and options to refine the assignment.

Communication

Your team proactively communicates if they can't complete a task or foresee a delay.

Example: Your account manager foresees a problem in a client account and communicates that to you before things escalate.

Answerability

Your team can explain why they made certain decisions, and know the status of tasks assigned to them at any given moment.

Example: You ask a question about a decision made on a client's ads campaign, and get an immediate substantial answer.

Care beyond their own work

Your team monitors events and decisions outside of their control, and takes action if they will affect them. They proactively work to improve processes and infrastructure in their field of work.

Example: Your business development rep autonomously pushes for an updated CRM setup that replaces the inefficient process that you've set up.

What employee accountability isn't

Employee accountability is not about control, surveillance or micro-management. It's about a situation where these aren't necessary.

Signs of Low Accountability in Your Team

Low accountability surfaces in different ways. What they all have in common is that it appears that nobody cares.

Here are the signs that your team lacks accountability.

Missed deadlines and nobody cares

Your team misses client deadlines or internal deadlines. Instead of owning it and rectifying it, you get the sense that they're not really bothered by it.

You only find out about issues after things have blown up

You learn from a client that they're unhappy. A client churns out of the blue? These are strong signs for low accountability in your team.

Constant follow up required

You need to constantly follow up on tasks that you had briefed days or weeks ago. You can't trust the team to autonomously complete them.

Team members don't follow the process

You have processes defined, but your team doesn't follow them. They don't attempt to change or improve the process, they simply ignore it.

The CEO is the only one who catches errors

You're the only one who catches errors. Deliverables that you review are not complete 100%, assuming you'll give them a thorough review and flag issues. The team relies on you for that.

Team waits to be told what to do

Your team waits until you hand over tasks and tell them what to do. They don't act or improve things without you telling them to.

You need to firefight

You need to continuously step in on short notice to fix things last minute, because initial results are poor and nobody else owns that.

Signs of High Accountability in Your Team

The stereotypical well-oiled machine, high accountability will typically show as calm, controlled execution. If you observe the below, your team will likely be very accountable.

Client delivery is quiet and transparent

You don't hear a lot from clients, but instead from your account managers and delivery teams through regular updates. If something needs attention, your team brings it to you proactively.

Meeting cadences work

Your team brings issues up in recurring meetings, instead of needing emergency support because something went wrong.

Continuous improvement

Because the team owns their outcomes, they care about the process and tool infrastructure they have to achieve them. Hence they continuously work on improving the operational infrastructure in your business.

The Cost of Low Accountability in a Service Business

Low accountability produces ripple effects that seriously harm your ability to run and grow the business successfully.

It's specifically harmful in service businesses. By nature, services rely on people delivering them. If these people aren't reliable, then a service business can't function well.

Here's what low employee accountability is causing in service businesses.

Poor client experience

One core objective for every service business is to deliver outstanding client experience. Experience includes both outcome quality as well as quality of communication. Both will be harmed by low accountability. If the results aren't up to standard or clients feel they need to chase your team for updates or responses, they will grow unsatisfied quickly.

Increased client churn

Unhappy clients end their engagement earlier than happy clients. If they don't feel well taken care of and that your team cares about their success, they'll look for another provider. This will decrease your LTV.

Long hours and stress for CEO

Low accountability directly results in you needing to catch things that would otherwise fall through the cracks. Inevitably, you will work longer hours. We've seen CEOs work 60–70 hours per week in a business that isn't growing. That's usually caused by low accountability.

Growth is capped

Low accountability leads to slow or no growth in various ways. Clients churn prematurely, reducing your current client roster.

The ability to take on new clients is capped, because you don't trust your team's ability to deliver. You're the only one driving process improvements.

Hiring new team members becomes difficult, if you're the only one building systems or taking care of new employees, you'll need to accept the trade-off between this and other important tasks in your business.

If you already have a demand gen or sales team, then the level of their accountability will also directly impact your growth trajectory.

Higher employee turnover

Low accountability will lead to higher employee turnover. Employees value clarity of what's expected of them. This doesn't exist in low accountability teams.

A-players, even if they join your team, won't stay long because they're looking for environments where they are challenged and can shine. This requires accountability.

Low revenue and profitability

Your revenue will be lower than it otherwise would be. A team that's not accountable will miss or not close upsell opportunities.

Also, the risk of having to do expensive rework or see regular scope creep is higher when your team lacks accountability.

Your business remains unsellable

A business with low accountability is unsellable. You as the CEO are the only one holding things together, making sure clients are happy, and things move forward.

Now, if you sell your business, this driving force disappears, leaving a bunch of loose ends and a team that doesn't care.

Any potential buyer that does their operational due diligence will detect that, and immediately walk away from the transaction.