Grant Thorton UK Offshoring EAs #accounting #accountant #accountingma...

Grant Thornton, UK, just fired most of their secretaries and executive assistants to replace them with cheaper workers in India. This happened less than a year after a private equity firm bought a majority stake in the firm. Partners are reportedly, quote, really embarrassed, unquote, by the decision and, quote, definitely didn't want to do it, unquote. But there's increasing pressure to move the roles offshore. Between 40 and 100 positions were cut, with staff asked to leave in June. And EY did the same thing last month with their US-based executive assistants, but they went with South American and Caribbean replacements instead. I mean, talk about a dumb move. You are taking the people who directly support your biggest producers, the partners in the firm, you're taking their critical support, and you are putting that in another country. And you think that's going to be a good thing because you're saving so much money on these expensive executive assistants, who are expensive for a reason, because they are really talented and good and responsive. Now you're going to put them in a totally different time zone. You're going to make them work, like, night hours. What's going to happen is your partners are going to be more stressed out and less productive. And yeah, you save money in the short term, but you're going to lose those partners. And it's probably a transition step to when they go to the partner next year and say, hey, good news, now you have to use our AI platform we built, our people-first AI platform. This is the dirty secret of public accounting and big firms, is that the vast majority of partners, they get that title partner and they are theoretically equity owners in the business. The way they are treated is basically like employees. They are told what to do, and they are assigned work, and they are told to work more hours than anyone in the firm.