We aim to offer all our people the very best human experience and an attractive place to work: one where all our colleagues feel welcome and included, able to thrive and develop, and proud to make an impact. In 2023/2024, we continued investing heavily in the well-being, growth, and engagement of our people, from training in critical areas such as ESG and technology to additional investments in remuneration and benefits. Our priorities were to strengthen our ethical foundations, model desirable behaviors at leadership level, futureproof our talent and resourcing models, and set our people up for success in the age of the twin transition.
Emphasis on ethics and psychological safety
In 2023/2024, we focused on the first steps of our cultural transformation. As well as strengthening our ethical foundations, we are committed to creating a psychologically safe environment.[1] We believe psychological safety is necessary for ensuring the well-being of our people, which is itself fundamental to our success as a high-performance business. To support our transformation, we held ethical decision-making workshops during the year for all partners and directors and launched our Values First program. This kicked off with a listening phase that included RCA discussions at partner/director level as well as firm-wide Values Dialogues and breakfast sessions led by our Board of Management, where people shared their views and expectations.
Inclusion, diversity, and equity
IDE is closely tied to our focus on ethics and psychological safety. We aim to attract and retain talent from different backgrounds and to put everyone on an equal footing within an inclusive and supportive workplace. Rooted within a psychologically safe environment, IDE is fundamental to our people’s sense of belonging at KPMG N.V., their ability to fulfil their professional potential, and their capacity to deliver the high performance that we, our clients, and our other stakeholders expect. For details of our policies, actions, metrics, and targets related to IDE in our own workforce, please see the Social chapter 3.1 Own workforce (new window) of our sustainability statement.
In 2023/2024, we focused on creating more cohesion in how we communicate about IDE. We followed the example set by the first-ever global IDE Super Summit, which brought together all KPMG’s IDE focus areas and topics in a single event for colleagues worldwide. We also prioritized initiatives that make a positive impact on – in particular – inclusion and equity at KPMG N.V. This included training our leaders on the empathetic, inclusive leadership style that today’s employees increasingly expect.
We also further embedded our Spike concept into development management conversations at partner and director level. The Spike approach is about identifying where individuals experience their own strengths and can add most value to our firm: professional (thought leadership), business development, or leadership. Our goal is to counter bias and improve talent diversity as a catalyst for collective leadership and success.
Being an employer of choice
Attracting and retaining the best talent with the right skills remains one of our key challenges, especially in roles requiring in-depth and specific expertise. Nevertheless, in 2023/2024, we were able to find ways to appeal to talented professionals in the market at all levels of experience, while retention rates declined compared to last year, coming in just below target. We focused on hiring new talent with backgrounds in technology and sustainability, thereby continuing to reshape the overall skills profile of our workforce in response to the changing needs of our business functions. Our approach included recruiting from the international talent pool, hiring specialist contractors, and increasing the use of our global network. We remain committed to rewarding our people well and fairly; see the Social (new window) chapter of our sustainability statement for more information on our approach to market-based salaries and equal pay.
We also supported our workforce in upskilling and reskilling, reflecting our dedication to empowering our people with the resources, capabilities, and tools they need to carry out high-quality work and grow their careers at KPMG N.V. We believe that the digital transformation, far from making people obsolete, means our human strengths are more important than ever. Our learning and development landscape is therefore increasingly geared toward empowering and enabling colleagues through technology (see Digital & innovation (new window)). ESG – particularly CSRD – was another key training and development area during the year, helping ensure that our people and our firm are ready to respond to our clients’ CSRD challenges and to help them capture the opportunities of the sustainability transition.
Another way in which we support our people is by paying close attention to work-life balance. The results of our Global People Survey (GPS) identify workload as an important factor in our people’s well-being, and we therefore consider this central to employee engagement and talent retention. In Assurance, we updated our PTO initiative (see Public trust (new window)) with a weekly pulse survey in 2024, further fostering psychological safety and a speak-up culture among our engagement teams. This pulse survey is also being piloted in departments within Advisory and Business Services.
Since our workforce is an important material topic for KPMG N.V., information on our workforce-related impacts, risks, and opportunities – and on our policies, actions, targets, and metrics for managing them – can be found in the Social (new window) chapter of our sustainability statement.
Outlook
The 2024/2025 financial year will see us continue to address specific culture topics through our Values First program. We will put the lessons learned from the listening phase into action: first ensuring we all understand what it means to live our values, and then accelerating the transition toward the behaviors we want to see and model in our organization. Alongside this, we plan to roll out a wider program to foster well-being among our people – supporting our people’s health as well as driving our organization’s continued success.