Thriving by delegation
Advisers that thrive in times of industry disruption and pressures are good at offloading work, as categorised by an industry wellbeing researcher.
Speaking at a HUB24 webinar, Adam Fraser, e-lab performance research and co-author of the Australian Financial Advisers Wellbeing Report 2021, said he had been studying industries for 25 years and financial advice was the worst in terms of industry wellbeing.
“Whether that's work life balance, whether that's your love for the role, mental health burnout, unfortunately, you guys are topping the charts on all the areas you don't want to be,” he said.
Fraser said the leading driver of poor industry wellbeing across his research was usually cashflow, but that cashflow issues only came in at number five for the advice industry, with regulatory change and high educations standards at the top.
He said adviser were having to ‘wear different hats’ as a result.
“One minute they're doing admin, then they've got a client meeting, then they've got to think about the advice that they've giving, compliance, emails, phone calls, then they've got to think about staff.
“They're having to wear these different hats and every time we shift between different roles we have to shift our focus in our mindset, and we have to basically change our brain to suit that new interaction.
“So if this is happening a lot in your day, it's incredibly wearing on the brain.”
Fraser said the ‘thrivers’ controlled their environment much more by outsourcing stuff they should not be doing or by giving themselves time to focus intently on the work they were doing.
The thrivers did 43% less time on admin, 97% less time in compliance, 34% more time in client meetings and 83% more time on new business.
“They were continually evolving so that they could keep [doing] that more strategic… important stuff.
“Whereas the people that were struggling had this mentality of you’ve got to be across everything and even if they had staff, they were micromanaging them.”
The study was broken down into two components. Study 1 had 43 advisers fill out a survey measuring psychological and wellbeing constructs followed by a seven-day diary study and interview process. Study 2 had over 700 advisers fill out the survey that was used in Study 1.
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