Grant Thornton – The Power of Propinquity

Build the foundation for a Future of Work experience model, including the philosophy and rituals required to engage a professional services workforce and their clients in a virtual-first environment .

About

Grant Thornton LLP (GT) is the sixth largest U.S. and seventh largest worldwide tax accounting and advisory organization, with 8,400 US employees across 53 locations and nearly $2 billion in FY 2020 revenue.

The Situation

For Grant Thornton, how they work means as much as what they do. Key Grant Thornton differentiators in the professional services industry include being easier to work with, building better relationships, and creating shared experiences, trust and success with clients and colleagues. The firm invested in client experience to manage and nurture this culture after a Grant Thornton leadership change in 2019, then the 2020 pandemic created a palpable firm wide culture drift.

Despite a familiarity with hybrid working, Covid challenged the firm’s routine, such as in-person information exchanges, working shoulder to shoulder to develop true understanding of clients’ businesses, and firmwide collaborative onboarding, learning and growth experiences for new hires, literally impossible.

The CEO and leadership team galvanized, crafting a new go to market approach putting people over profits with three simple pillars: take care of our people, be there for our clients and keep our firm strong at this time of need. Collaboration and inclusivity were fundamental to this philosophy and embraced firmwide, but how Grant Thornton’s Future Work would look in practice needed intentional consideration and redesign. The leadership team understood they needed to actively support the effort and One Workplace Consulting was engaged as a thought leader/workplace culture consultant to add resources to support this evolution.

“…there’s a quote that you’ve probably heard before that ‘leaders know the way, go the way and show the way’. Because it is my life duty to live by example, I thought it was critically important that I be involved together with my most senior executives, because anything else would feel false and more like a policy than the true change that was required for us to be successful, and for that to be sustainable change.”

Brad Preber, Grant Thornton CEO

The Solution

As a nimble and fast paced organization, GT asked +One, a One Workplace venture to partner on a three-phased engagement to help define their Future of Work philosophy, to workshop that philosophy with a cross functional/cross level/cross location Grant Thornton group to solidify the framework and then to deliver a workshop insights report and suggested action plan to anchor that direction into the future.

In Phase One, the consultants liaised directly with the firm’s senior people experience leaders to interview stakeholders, contribute market research and professional services category knowledge, trends, observations, and expertise to validate and expand GT leadership thinking about their Future Work philosophy.

“When Laura spent time talking about what has come out of think-tanks she leads, what other best in class organizations are thinking, and trends they are sensitive to and anticipating over the next ten years, I thought that our direction was validated.” says Courtney Anderson, Organizational Strategy & Alignment | Office of the CEO. “The engagement gave me, and I think, the broader senior team, the confidence to know that even though this will be temporarily hard for some, it is an investment and a decision that will pay dividends in the future to get ahead of future needs now.”

Scope Evolution

+One adapted the engagement content to meet the pace and emerging needs.

“I believe we started out with a bit broader change management focus. It could be that Laura was talking about rituals from the beginning and it was just not resonating with me because it wasn’t very tangible. Or it could be that our work evolved and our scope fluidly evolved to address the current problem. I didn’t worry about it a lot, I just needed a really intelligent, productive thought partner that could help this initiative move with pace and bring in outside thinking.”

Courtney Anderson, Organizational Strategy & Alignment | Office of the CEO

Phase Two required co-development of a series of workshops designed for a cross functional manager/staff group of participants, delivered by facilitators who would complement the GT culture, speak the language, elicit active engagement to represent the diversity of thinking, and exceed the expectations of participants who regularly attend workshops.

“I think there’s the element of actually building something that’s really neat and feeling like I, as one of 15-20 employees at Grant Thornton, am shaping the return-to-work experience for the whole firm. This is something that the firm is supporting. And that’s what’s neat about it to me, coupled with just really good execution from the vendor, on the One Workplace side”.

Brandon Joseph, Partner, International Tax

Phase Three produced a consolidated report from workshop responses and insights, along with a plan and list of actionable activities to support the Future Work philosophy roll out firm wide. The scope covered a variety of suggestions for immediate change and stretch goals to address strategy and employee engagement for the GT evaluation and implementation.

“I think the topic itself differentiated this engagement. We’re trying to figure out what the future of work looks like, and it’s at time that there’s not a ton of research to tell us here’s the right answer. It gave us three steps in the right direction and the tools that we needed to continue doing It on our own because of the foundation +One laid for us in those workshops.”

Janae’ Morren, Employee Engagement Manager

We asked Grant Thornton why consultants would hire an external consultant and CEO Preber responded,

“This is a circumstance where we only know what we know. We’re deeply rooted in an apprenticeship model to support success in our practitioners’ careers, and we can’t afford to miss something. We needed to get someone that not only doesn’t think like us, but thinks but thinks dramatically not like us, so that we can get broader perspectives on what we’re missing.”

Each of the GT project leaders had specific responsibilities and goals, and each was comfortable that their needs had been met.

“+One didn’t come back with a bunch of our own ideas, which often happens with consultants. And they also didn’t come back with pie in the sky, unrealistic things that you simply put on a shelf and say, ‘well, that was so far out there we could never do it.” The deliverable was squarely in the middle of where we were versus where we thought we needed to go with information. That was not something we could have ascertained ourselves. A credible consultant gave us an answer that was practical, that we felt we could implement and probably create the greatest amount of good work in that moment, knowing full well these things are dynamic”

Brad Preber, CEO.

“The biggest accomplishment, the biggest milestone was developing a philosophy, getting universal executive support for that philosophy and then getting our partnership general partners to give their buy in, in order to publicly declare our position in the market.

Courtney Anderson, Organizational Strategy & Alignment | Office of the CEO

“+One really helped us think about what the future of work looks like for a firm. That means thinking through our policies that allow working solutions and figuring out how to create meaningful moments that bring people together in person or virtually. Overall, they provided a clarity in the sense of behavioral alignment on how people show up every day, and how we can all move towards a direction to help us achieve the strategies of the company and of our clients.”

Janae’ Morren, Employee Engagement Manager

The biggest accomplishment was developing a philosophy and getting universal executive support for that philosophy, and then getting our general partners to buy in and publicly declare our position in the market.

“…there’s a quote that you’ve probably heard before that ‘leaders know the way, go the way and show the way’. And from that lead by example way to live your life, I thought it was critically important that I be involved together with my most senior executives, because anything else would feel false and more like a policy than the true change that was required for us to be successful, and for that to be sustainable change.”

Brad Preber, CEO