Grant Thornton

Case Study

“Our vision is to remove gender disparity and optimise the lived experience of all our people. We know that gender balanced leadership teams are better for business and diverse decision-making. People thrive best when they can balance their lives with work, and our flexible policies support this balance and the work that we do to promote a family-friendly workplace is beneficial to all our people, regardless of their family status. The Family Friendly Workplaces Accreditation is a validation and benchmark of our investment and efforts and helps to amplify our culture of everyday inclusion.”

Jenn Barnett | Head of ESG and ED&I

About Grant Thornton

Why is your organisation committed to be a family friendly workplace?

We know that the work we do to promote a family-friendly workplace positively impacts all of our people – regardless of their background or caring responsibilities. That’s because we recognise that people thrive when they can balance their personal and work responsibility in a way that works for them, so we’ve developed flexible policies that enable this balance, as well as improving wellbeing and productivity.

Gender disparity still exists in how caring is shared, and so we’re working to change this by supporting all working parents at every stage of parenthood, but we also know that gender balanced leadership teams are better for business and diverse decision-making. Our culture, enabled by our How We Work framework, makes us immensely proud of the flexibility we offer our people, based on trust, and we’ll keep providing and enhancing support so that everyone can have a sustainable and balanced career.

Point of Difference

What makes your organisation family friendly? What family inclusive programs, practices and processes does your organisation currently have in place?

Our policies show our commitment to growing an inclusive environment that centres people, including:

Enhanced family leave. Non-birthing parents can take up to six weeks of full pay under our enhanced paternity leave policy, spread over a period of up to 12 weeks if they wish, ensuring gender-neutral caregiving support.
Up to five days of fully paid carers leave per year.
Paid time off for fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, and neonatal care.

Returning to work following family leave can be a challenging, daunting and vulnerable time for new parents. Employees returning from long-term family leave receive coaching to support reintegration and career progression, and our new parent mentoring scheme helps manage this transition. This scheme, which enables parents returning to the workplace following family leave the option to be paired with a mentor who has had a similar lived experience. The mentoring relationship creates a safe space for mentees to share any challenges including balancing work and family life, parenting concerns, future career development and confidence issues. Over the past two years, 80% of those who participated have remained with the organisation, with positive feedback highlighting the programme’s value.

Through the Let’s Care Together programme, unpaid carers are paired with trained ‘befrienders’ who offer mental health and wellbeing support. This initiative encourages self-care and aims to make carers feel supported.

Our flexible working approach focuses on trust, output, and individual needs, ensuring all employees can balance work and life effectively, and where performance is measured by outcomes, not presence. By embedding flexible working as the default, and leaders actively model flexible work patterns, we avoid anyone facing bias and demonstrate it isn’t a barrier to career progression.

Employees choose how, where, and when they work from day one. We recommend 1-4 days per week in the office for collaboration, whilst empowering teams to agree on patterns that suit their circumstances. Flexible bank holidays are available, which is important in supporting diverse teams.

We promote flexible hours and job shares as default options for all vacancies to attract diverse talent, particularly for senior roles. Additionally, we are actively increasing reduced, compressed, and annualised hours to support career progression, especially for women and employees with caregiving responsibilities or disabilities.

A Flexible Working Project Team with senior representation challenges barriers, monitors uptake, and reports KPIs to the senior leaders who are accountable and responsible for progress. The process for requesting flex has been streamlined and managers must provide clear reasons if a request is declined.

Flexible working training is accessible, with guides, top tips, and video testimonies from colleagues at different levels, helping managers co-create roles that support flexibility without compromising operational delivery, and helping shape a culture that values flexibility and inclusivity.

Our commitment to flexible working is consistently communicated through internal channels, including newsletters, intranet updates, and forums. This is embodied in our culture, with senior leaders actively promoting and role modelling flexible working, ensuring visibility and support across the firm, including through their outlook calendars with open appointments regarding childcare arrangements during the workday and openly talking about their families and flexible work approach.

How

How have the above impacted your workplace culture and productivity? How have your people responded?

We measure the success of our approach through gender-specific dashboards, pulse surveys, and tracking of flexible working requests and approvals. We also monitor the retention of employees who have taken maternity leave, which we have seen an improvement in over time. We’ve increased job shares from 0 to 12, supporting greater gender diversity. In addition, promotion rates for women are equal up to director level, showing an improvement in our pipeline for gender equality in senior management. Insights from these data sources help us refine our policies and ensure no bias against those working flexibly.

We have won Working Families’ Best Practice award for ‘All round flexibility’ 2024 and are consistently rated a Top 10 Employer by Working Families and a Times Top 50 Employer for Gender Equality.

Our flexible working strategy has led to increased informal flexibility across teams, a shift in focus from hours worked to outcomes, and improved employee satisfaction. Our recent employee engagement survey, found that:

93% of people say they connect and collaborate effectively while working remotely
84% say they have control over their working life
81% say they have the same opportunities whether remote or office working
73% say they effectively balance work, life and wellbeing.

Outcomes

What has your organisation learned as it has become more inclusive of families? What business benefits can you link to being a family friendly workplace?

We’ve learned the importance of leadership, courage, male allyship, and having a top-down approach, for example the power of partners embodying a flexible working culture through having open diaries and working flexibly ‘out loud’. It’s not enough to just focus on women, it has to be a holistic approach to culture change.

The business benefits of working in a family-friendly way have been wide-ranging. We’ve found that improving the diversity of people and experiences leads to more diversity of thought. The long-term trends suggest improved wellbeing for our people, where they feel more like they belong and greater pride in being part of our organisation. We are able to attract and tap into a wider pool of talent, and our clients are increasingly engaging more with us, to learn from us with regards to best practice for family-friendly working. This enables them to improve their own policies and workplace culture and enables us to build on our client relationships, so it’s a win-win.