What KPMG Australia’s FY22 impact report means for their engagement, inclusion, and learning

Having recently reflected on the progress of our purpose-led growth strategy in the release of our latest impact report, unveiled as part of our commitment to greater transparency, it’s clear we are already reaping the benefits of our strategic investment in our people.

Gender pay gaps were reduced at KPMG Australia over the past financial year, while headcount grew by 25 per cent, thanks to a focus on three key aspects: an inclusive culture, a great people experience, and a future-fit workforce.

Great people experience

The labour market has significantly changed. Unemployment levels are at record lows, more people than ever are changing course or opting out of traditional careers entirely, and we’ve seen a net migration loss of 89,000 workers.

Without a doubt, it’s a challenging time to attract and retain good talent – and that’s putting it lightly.

Yet, our talent attraction team has managed to achieve one of the biggest years on record, growing our workforce by 25per cent, helped by our particular focus on offering a great people experience.

Last year, KPMG Australia undertook a firmwide review of our reward strategy, which included examining salary levels across the firm to ensure pay rates are competitive in market. The result of this review was released publicly as part of our commitment to transparency. We also transformed and rebuilt our recognition platform and awarded $1.5 million to our people through employee awards for living our values. We know that recognition through acknowledgements like these coupled with the right reward framework and employee listening mechanisms are key motivators for productivity and retention.

Over the next year, we’ll be focussed on growing talent corridors with non-traditional pathways into the firm to ensure that we are set up for future growth whilst reaping the benefits that inclusion, equity, and diversity brings to organisations.

And we will have an even bigger focus on wellbeing and investing in upskilling and development to ensure our people are continually supported, inspired, and equipping themselves with the skills required by our clients in a rapidly evolving market. This will see us launch several fantastic new learning programs, including technical training through Pluralsite on things like Blockchain, AI, and in-person data wrangling programs.

Inclusive culture

At KPMG, Inclusion, Diversity & Equity (IDE) is embedded within our values and aligns to our purpose. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it also makes business sense and there is an expectation from our people, our clients and broader society that we have a robust IDE agenda.

Through this, we will attract diverse talent that is representative of the world in which we live in and create an environment where everyone can bring their whole selves to work.

Six of the nine commitments in our ‘people’ pillar of the impact report relate to IDE: championing gender diversity, being a family friendly workplace, building cultural diversity, becoming a leading employer and championing people with a disability, ensuring our LGBTQ+ community feels safe and supported, and being an Indigenous-inclusive workplace.

Our commitments have led to the introduction of several initiatives in the past 12 months to better support our people, including an expansion of our cultural diversity program, introduction of a day of Indigenous cultural and ceremonial leave, a refreshed wellbeing strategy, and we launched a refreshed ‘Gender Affirmation Policy’.

Pleasingly, when it comes to the gender pay gap, over the last year it was reduced by 2.3 per cent for employees and 4.1 per cent for partners at KPMG Australia. Still, we have a way to go.

We’ve identified that gender pay gap is driven by several factors including conscious and unconscious bias in hiring and pay decisions, higher rates of part time work for women, as well as time out of the workforce for caring responsibilities. The most significant factor for us is the need to continue to build female representation in senior or traditionally male dominated roles. When we talk about having gender balanced pipelines of talented people, this is why. It is not just a number; it is also driving gender pay equity.

In order to actively enable gender workforce participation and positively impact the gender pay gap, we have introduced a number of initiatives, including hybrid working and various ‘women in leadership’ programs. We’re also confident that sitting down at the end of the performance year with each part of the business and ensuring all our people are equitably promoted will go a long way.

This is further supported by the introduction of a 26-week parental leave policy, brought in in FY22 and available to all parents, and the extension of our flexibility options to include a ‘Work from Anywhere’ policy, allowing employees to spend time with loved ones overseas. So far, we’ve had over 200 people access our Work from Anywhere policy, with employees able to spend time with loved ones overseas after being kept apart by the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Future-fit workforce

We actively encourage our people to explore new skills and opportunities to support their future with the firm.

In line with this, we launched an internal competition to understand how we could help foster learning in our people to aid us in recognising what learning experience, environments and areas of focus we should deliver now, and in the future, to engage our workforce.

We also announced our plans to develop the KPMG Eclipse Academy. Eclipse will engage our people, clients, and communities through best practice learning and operate across physical and virtual learning environments to provide access to unlimited content, curated by experts. It will also offer programs for specialised certifications, deep-tech training, hackathons, virtual reality experiences, learning gamification, and more.

We look forward to seeing this really come to life for our people across FY23 as we home in on becoming future fit and digitally enabled.

Dorothy Hisgrove is the national managing partner – people and inclusion at KPMG Australia