Health and Well-being: Providing for the Needs of Our People

The Employee Experience

The big picture: At KPMG, our people are the heart of our business. That’s why ensuring positive employee mental and physical well-being is critical. By offering holistic benefits and support for our people, we attract highly skilled, sought-after professionals and produce consistently high-quality service for our clients.

We ask a lot of our audit employees, so providing them with the fit-for-purpose tools and learning and development opportunities is critical to ensure that they are set up to succeed.

Trust is the cornerstone of the work we do. Providing our people with the tools and resources to deliver quality audits and an exceptional experience for our clients, and also to grow, rest and recharge is at the core of that.

What this means: In the past few years, KPMG has expanded its offerings to support the well-being of our people, including:

• Resources for Living: KPMG expanded mental health benefits available through Resources for Living.
• Mental Health Matters: The firm launched a mental health training course, available for CPE credit, to teach employees why it’s important to discuss mental health in the workplace and to hear from our partners and co-workers on how they’ve managed challenging mental health issues.
• Increasing back-up care and support for employees who require child and/or elder care, doubling the number of days available per dependent.
• Expanding access to discounted tutoring, academic support and homework assistance (preschool through 12th grade).
• Collective and customizable learning experiences for school-age children, helping parents find educators for in-home/virtual learning.

Digging into the details: Two major proof points of these efforts are Resources for Living (RFL) and cultural shifts around peer support.

Resources for Living provides comprehensive and accessible resources so our partners, employees and all members of our households can benefit from a wide range of services and feel that their needs are met. KPMG’s use of RFL is more than double the vendor’s average, a sign of successful resource visibility and a point of pride for our firm. We host events to increase awareness of RFL and share employees’ personal stories, knowing mental health programs are often stigmatized and underused.

KPMG also expanded its Resources for Living benefits, increasing the number of free counseling sessions to 10 per issue per year and making counseling available through more avenues, including in-person, virtual, and chat. Resources for Living offerings include a 24-hour mental health hotline and a new feature through our Talkspace Online Therapy benefit that allows our people to connect with a licensed behavioral therapist virtually, which is included in the 10 free counseling sessions.

Accompanying mindfulness resources include a library of audio and videos, a comprehensive resilience guide and the option to attend a series of live mindfulness sessions, individually or in groups.

But our efforts go beyond Resources for Living: We strive to reduce internal pressures to help support mental health. We aim to create a culture of well-being and burnout prevention that is woven into the fabric of daily life at KPMG. In practice, this looks like providing work/life coaching; a “Flex with Purpose” hybrid work model; generous paid leave; and structured efforts to flatten the peak workload associated with the traditional “busy season.”

• Work/Life Coaching Program: We enhanced our internal Work/Life Coaching Program, which provides up to five hours of confidential one-on-one coaching about managing professional responsibilities and plotting a career path.
• Flex with Purpose: We believe flexibility— a blend of fully remote, hybrid, and purposeful in-person work, combined with mentoring, learning and development — has the potential to sustain deeper connections among current and potential employees and leaders, creating new and lasting relationships. KPMG regularly brings people together to connect at its cultural home, Lakehouse, which has hosted more than 26,000 professionals since it opened.
• Paid leave: On top of a generous PTO program, 16 paid holidays and expanded caregiver leave, the firm shuts down for two weeks each year to provide people an extended break. KPMG also provides paid time off for volunteering, including a Community Impact Day where professionals devoted more than 60,000 hours to giving back. During the summer, KPMG encourages everyone to end their Friday two hours early. In May 2023, the firm provided a two-hour mental health break to recognize Mental Health Awareness Month. The break followed a talk about mental health, part of well-being programming provided year-round by KPMG’s Business Resource Groups.
• Well-being ambassadors: We recently launched a well-being ambassador community that aspires to build a community of professionals with unique skills to enable their colleagues’ well-being and differentiate the KPMG experience through the facilitation of well-being and resilience workshops and 1:1 coaching. Piloted activities to date have received overwhelmingly positive feedback.
• Well-being and the audit:
  • Reducing stress: KPMG continues to focus on completing certain audit work earlier in the audit client’s fiscal year, enabling more supervision and review and more time to focus on areas of complex judgment. Not only does this effort enhance audit quality, but it also has dramatically reduced weekend and evening work hours during the traditional “busy season” for a vast number of our professionals, enabling them to better plan time off, rest and recharge.
  • Working better together: The Audit practice uses a framework and digital tool called Be the Team of Choice to help engagement teams foster a culture of connection, care, celebration and to cultivate team and personal growth. It enables teams to provide anonymous feedback on their experience and co-create a team charter that sets team norms. Ninety-nine percent of teams have reported that the tool positively impacted team well-being.
  • Checking in proactively: KPMG Audit launched energy check-ins, encouraging people managers to have proactive check-in conversations with counselees about work pressures caused by factors such as high hours worked and low PTO. Data has shown that simply having a conversation can positively impact employee well-being and enhance psychological safety.

All of these efforts are evolving continually based on feedback. Our efforts to facilitate conversation between peers and teams hinges on our understanding that one of the most important facilitators of well-being for our employees is the space to receive support they need from their peers. Team leaders open the door to compassionate conversations with employees and take the time to notice those who may need more support. Over 16,000 KPMG professionals have completed our Compassionate Candor training, grounding these conversations through learned techniques. Additionally, KPMG piloted a well-being program for partners focused on role modeling well-being for their teams.

The bottom line: Delivering our employees an experience is at the heart of who we are, which is why we place a large emphasis on their well-being. To continue thriving and succeeding together, and to continue producing a high-quality audit, KPMG is committed to providing first-in-class support for our people’s needs.

Learn more about our efforts