Elva Geaney

Getting your work-life balance right 

It goes without saying that KPMG is an environment that demands high levels of ambition and drive. But it’s not the case that working hard means you can’t also have a rewarding and successful personal life.

One of the ways in which we support this is through an approach to flexible working which aims to allow people to make their own choices about how they work. We recognise that one size doesn’t fit all, and that our people have different and changing needs when it comes to working patterns. Any employee, at any grade, and in any part of KPMG can apply to work flexibly. Last year 98 percent of all flexible working applications were accepted, and around a quarter of those applications came from men.

Flexible working doesn’t have to mean working part-time. We also offer a wide range of other options including:

  • job sharing
  • annualised days – where you contract work a set number of days each year
  • ‘glide time’ - the option of shifting work hours to earlier or later in a day
  • unpaid leave of up to three months
  • career break - an opportunity to take an unpaid break of between three months and three years
  • additional holiday purchase – the opportunity to purchase additional annual holiday, up to a maximum of 35 days per annum, in addition to the extra five days you can buy via our flextra benefits system
  • regular home working

We encourage the business to be creative in offering flexible working. For example, the business unit that completes tax returns has teams of people who agree the number of returns they will process each week; they then complete them at home, working hours to suit themselves.

We were pleased to have been recently awarded the Business in the Community/Opportunity Now award for our commitment to flexible working. These awards, now in their twelfth year, recognise outstanding best practice in the workplace and are regarded as one of the UK's most prestigious workplace awards for gender equality, diversity and inclusion. We’re pleased to support flexible working and a healthy work-life balance in KPMG, because we know that they are good for you, and good for the business too.