Grant Thornton Australia confirms EA job cuts, offshoring
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The mid-tier firm has confirmed that it will make a “small number” of job losses while establishing a partnership with a Philippine labour vendor to potentially offshore executive assistant roles.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on HR Leader’s sister brand, Accounting Times.
Last week, professional services gossip Instagram account The Aussie Corporate posted that Grant Thornton Australia will be making job cuts to local executive assistant roles and will outsource some of these roles to the Philippines – claims that have been largely confirmed by the company.
“As part of this change, we have engaged an experienced vendor based in the Philippines, and unfortunately, there will be a small number of job losses as we transition to the new model,” a Grant Thornton spokesperson told the brand.
While the firm did not confirm the number of executive assistants that will be impacted, it said it will provide support during the process of its more flexible model.
“While these decisions are never easy, we are committed to supporting our people through the process as we create a more flexible model that will also deliver consistency and quality across our firm nationally,” the spokesperson added.
The model, which the firm calls a National Administrative Operations model, was created to support its company aims moving forward.
“To support our firm’s strategy and future growth, we have designed a simpler, more standardised National Administrative Operations model to ensure we have the right mix of skills and roles that can grow with the firm’s needs,” the spokesperson said.
“This is a specific change focused on our administrative support function and is not part of broader plans to make similar organisational changes across other areas of the firm.”
“We began the process of reviewing our administrative support function well before the firm entered exploratory conversations to join Grant Thornton Advisors.”
Amid these reported lay-offs, Grant Thornton Australia appointed a new national head of forensic consulting earlier this month, the firm’s appointment of a new not-for-profit national leader in September, and a majority vote by Grant Thornton Australia partners to complete a $1 billion buyout agreement with multinational platform Grant Thornton Advisors LLC in August.
Executive assistants in some of the country’s biggest firms have also faced major change, with PwC Australia mandating that its executive assistants (EA) spend 60 per cent of the workweek in the office from January next year after making over half of its EAs Manila-based in the mid-year, and KPMG offshoring three-quarters of its 260 executive assistant roles to the Philippines around the same time.
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Offshoring is the practice of hiring labour from other nations to carry out a portion of corporate activities to benefit from tax savings, lower wages, or less regulation. This happens frequently in businesses like call centres and manufacturing.
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