Mental Health is Health

The big picture: In an industry where busy seasons, and even the anticipation of them, are predetermined, auditors traditionally face tremendous risk of burnout. Our efforts to pull work forward and create a more streamlined work experience throughout the year is at the center of a comprehensive initiative to help prevent burnout and support the mental health and well-being of our professionals, day in and out.

Reimagining the traditional busy season:

Between long hours and tight deadlines, the traditional busy season – which lasts from early January to March – creates a perfect storm where balancing work and personal life, time management, and mental health challenges are heightened. Two years ago, we set out to end the traditional busy season as we know it and better identify individuals at the highest risk of burnout. These outcomes have enabled a better experience for our people and our clients:

• The outcomes: Our efforts to increasingly standardize, centralize and automate our audit approach enabled us to better spread our people’s workload throughout the year, reducing the amount of overtime and number of weekend hours worked – without sacrificing quality outcomes – allowing them time to rest and spend with family and friends.
  • In 2023, our professionals saw their average audit hours decrease by 11% from the year prior, from 51 hours per week on average to 45.
  • We were able to minimize the weekend hours our professionals worked during this period and increase the percentage of professionals who worked no weekends at all from 18% to 29%. Additionally, we saw a decline in the percentage of our professionals working 50+ hours over those eight weekends, from 31% to 17%.
  • As we advance our approach, we continue to see those numbers trend in the right direction – this year, we are on track to pull forward more hours than last year – and, relative to the pandemic (audit year 2020), we’re pulling nearly 20% more hours forward.

Supporting our people outside of audit work:

Recognizing the signs of burnout and preventing them is also critical to our approach. Through the last year, we piloted a new data-driven approach to identifying risk factors for or people These Energy Check-Ins combine tracking across metrics aligned to burnout with promoted and purposeful conversations between managers and their teams as well as personalized mitigation strategies. This pilot is already showing signs of success:

• A majority of managers (88%) report that Energy Check-in prompts are helpful, and 77% of our professionals who participated in Energy Check-in conversations reported that they were helpful in supporting their overall well-being.

These efforts work in tandem with existing programs including:

• Embracing proactive rest through summer Jumpstart Fridays where our people can sign off two hours early, two week-long, firm-wide shutdowns in the summer and winter, and federal holidays and paid time off.
• Resources for Living that include access to 10 free counseling sessions and other online therapy options for our professionals and their dependents.
• Enabling coverage to support our people and their families, including expanded caregiver leave, parental leave, and concierge programs.

Long story short: The experience of our people is directly tied to our ability to deliver quality audits. By enabling on a culture of mindful ambition and supporting our people’s well-being, physically and mentally, we are able to help them grow and thrive.