The health and well-being of our people is a key priority. Our people feeling safe and well – both mentally and physically – also supports engagement and retention rates, and contributes to our ability to execute on projects by maximizing performance and reducing absenteeism. Our Code of Conduct (new window) commits us to providing a safe and healthy working environment.
Psychological safety begins when people feel included, welcome, and able to be who they are – which is why we adopted a full-focus approach to psychological safety alongside our inclusion strategy in 2022/2023. This approach will support work carried out previous financial year, including empathic leadership training for 110 development managers to encourage a more supportive and compassionate style of management, as well as confidential counsellors, a dedicated complaints committee and a whistleblowing hotline.[1] There are several contact moments per year during which the effectiveness of these grievance mechanisms are evaluated.
The Board of Management ensures that employees have the opportunity to report on alleged irregularities without fear of reprisal. All notifications are investigated independently by the Internal Audit & Compliance Office. The Supervisory Board is immediately informed by the Board of Management of signals of critical concerns within KPMG.
We are also working on providing the opportunity for all our people to connect with a coach, as well as other mental health services, in both online and offline settings. This is being organized in partnership with well-being platform OpenUp (new window), which brings together (mental) health and vitality programs and other HR services on one easy-to-access platform that has been used extensively by our professionals in the first year. You can read more about our wider digitalization efforts in the Digital & innovation (new window) section. Absenteeism rates remained stable compared with the previous year.
- Absentee rates above are based on a moving 12-month average at the end of each financial year; they show hours lost to sickness, injury or other enforced absences as a percentage of total base hours.
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Calculation changed based on base hours.
For comparison reasons the 2021/2022 absentee rate has been restated, see Restatement of prior year figures (new window).
- 1 During 2022/2023, we received 13 reports or complaints through our hotline (compared with 11 the previous year). Five reports related to other KPMG member firms and were forwarded to KPMG International for follow up. All other cases have been included in our follow-up process and actions were imposed when necessary.