Case Study: Women Returners - KPMG

In March 2006 three of KPMG (UK) Board members, including the CEO, hosted a one day conference with over 100 of the company’s top performing women managers to gather their views about what KPMG needed to do to retain talented women. Before the conference a survey of 400 managers revealed a perception that many of the barriers to women’s career progression were related to the experience of balancing work and family. The findings were shared with business leaders and a number of priority actions were put forward in response. One of these was that each business leader identified a senior person to lead on Retaining Talented Women in each function.

A project was launched to explore the support provided to women before, during and after maternity leave:

• A questionnaire was sent to all women who had returned from maternity leave in the previous two years, enquiring about their experiences before, during and on return from maternity leave. The aim is to generate data to help make informed choices about increasing support to this group of employees The data will be tested with focus groups and a selection of People Management Leaders.

Setting up ‘coaching for coaches’ course to help internal coaches better understand the psychological and emotional changes that women go through around maternity. This is in addition to the support currently offered by HR teams around legal and policy matters

KPMG has now identified and prioritised the tangible and cultural factors that need to change to improve the experience of women before, during and after maternity leave in particular.

The ‘coaching for coaches’ training has been completed.

A proposal to improve the way the company manages the maternity process and support women before, during and after maternity leave has been approved by KPMG’s Executive and is about to be implemented. The maternity returners rate is now 90%.

Sarah Bond