Workday Rising Europe: The Future of Professional and Business Services - Adapt, Innovate and Thrive

According to Sacha Romanovitch, to truly understand the professional services industry, you need to start at the beginning. Maybe not the very beginning, but around 160 years ago when many of the professional services were being, well, professionalised. “It was really around the 1860s that we started to lay down the foundations of the professions, of the lawyers and the accountants.”

Amongst the prevailing attitudes of that period, she cites three whose influence still lingers today. The first is how the public interest was viewed at that time. “In the 1860s, the public interest was really the interest of a relatively small group of rich, typically white, property-owning men, and in a world where resources were seen as this world of abundance, there for the taking.”

The second was how the industrial age treated ordinary working people. “The people were resources to be used,” points out Romanovitch, “the cogs in the machine that you turn the handle and out pop the outcomes.” 

Then finally, the notion of competition as it was engendered at the time. “The fights fostered on the playing fields of public schools were the things that actually drove how the world worked, and if you look at our legal systems, our parliamentary systems, that combative force still very much lives on today.”

While a lot has changed in the last 160 years, Romanovitch believes those dated attitudes continue to influence the world of professional services and cause friction when they come up against the challenges businesses find themselves confronting today.

Adapting to change  

Since the 1860s, the world’s population has grown by over 600 percent, reaching 8 billion people in 2022. “That's changed what's valuable,” says Romanovitch. “It's not just money that's important. Actually, there are all of these other things that matter, and for us to continue to thrive on our planet, we need to pay attention to those things too.”

She also highlights the technological advances that we’ve seen over the last fifty years and the abundance of tools we have at our disposal compared with just thirty years ago. According to Romanovitch, that’s caused us to reconsider the role and value of human beings. "Many people are saying, "Well, I don't want to be just a cog in the machine. I want to be able to do work that I feel is meaningful, that makes a difference, where I can have some mastery."”

Upskilling to create value

What does that shift mean for the professional services industry? Over time, the industry has shifted towards building deeper relationships with clients. And relationships, business or otherwise, are built on trust. As the former CEO of one of the world’s largest professional services companies, Romanovitch knows that leading a business can be a really lonely place: “The people that you can actually talk to, to say, "I'm not sure, I don't quite know how to tackle this issue, I need someone to help me think it through," those people are incredibly valuable to you.”

However, the move from a service-based organisation to a trusted partner requires a shift in skills. When she was at Grant Thornton, Romanovitch led a programme working with business leaders to help them change how they were working with clients. She recalls a conversation she had with one of her tax partners, where Romanovitch suggested starting a meeting by asking the client what’s important to them. The partner replied, "That's terrifying because I've always viewed my value as being the expert who has all the answers. And to go into a room where I could ask a question to which they then ask me something I don't know the answer to, that's really scary."

The programme set up by Romanovitch to change this mindset brought people together to work on emotional intelligence, technical skills, and relationship building, as well as their ability to spot connections and see things from different perspectives. The participants would set themselves a goal and then share their experiences with the group six weeks later. 

“In one of those sessions,” she recalls, “one of the partners said, "Well, I had quite an experience with a client the other week. I'd taken them out to lunch, and we were sitting at the dinner table. And we're looking at the menus, and I said, “What mood are you in?” meaning one course or two. And the client said, “Well, I'm really quite depressed, and I don't know what to do with my life.” I kept looking at my menu. And I thought, this is the time to listen and ask an insightful question.”

From the conversation that followed the partner learned that running the family business had not been their client’s life ambition, and that they really wanted to do something different. And so it set them on a path to planning how they would safely transition that business to new ownership to honour their parent’s past, so this person could then step out into their new future. “That conversation would never have happened without starting to ask different questions to create the space to listen and to do something different,” reflects Romanovitch.  

Visions of the future 

Romanovitch also advocates encouraging everyone in the organisation to think about the future. “We've got all of these different people in our organisations, all of these eyes and ears, and yet sometimes, it can feel like it's just the leaders who are doing all the thinking. The responsibility rests on them to try and figure out the future. And yet, why would you waste all those smart people?” 

She is a believer that you can only plan for a possible future if you can envision it. And so at Grant Thornton the team identified four very different visions of the future based on two axes of uncertainty in the world at that point in time.

“We had the Disney Directorate, where companies like Disney, Apple, Google and Meta were in the ascendant. The Kickstarter Capitalist, where in the UK we'd probably call it the Hoxton vibe - the digital nomads, the individuals who are really developing businesses that are doing different and interesting things. There was the Materials Magnate, the countries that control the resources – that’s been China’s strategy in Africa over many years. And then finally the Extractive Entrepreneur, the world of the oligarchs.”

Rather than asking employees to think of the future as a nebulous concept, this gave them a tool to help them spot how the world might be changing around them. As Romanovitch explains, “Has anyone had that thing where you're thinking about buying a red car or you're expecting a baby, and then suddenly, there are red cars everywhere, and where did all these pregnant people come from? And of course, that's just your brain recognising, "Oh, this is interesting to me now. I'm going to pay attention to it," And so the point of setting out those four possibilities – to a certain extent, it doesn't matter what they are – is it lets you spot those little pockets of the future.”

From a business perspective it invites employees into those bigger visionary conversations about what the future might hold, while allowing the business to benefit from each individual’s perspective. As Romanovitch points out, “Different people in the organisation read and see and connect with so many things, and to harness those insights together and then think about which way is the world going and what are the options for my business and my client businesses in each of these scenarios - that is the power.”

The power of the wider workforce is something that Romanavitch comes back to as she draws the session to a close. The future of the professional services industry, she says, lies in the things that humans can uniquely do, “to make connections, to spot different perspectives, to imagine possibilities, and to use the data at our fingertips.” 

She ends by encouraging her peers to be a catalyst for change within their own organisations. “How can you lift that up and celebrate it and showcase it so that you can actually show within your organisations this, this is how we could be, this is us at our best? The power for us to be fit for the future is actually in all of our hands. The question really is are we ready to take it?”