Scaling Culture Transformation in Remote Teams at KPMG
“Just a quick note to let you know how happy I am with the program. The pace, energy, content, and effort being put into this training shows how seriously KPMG is taking this program and how much they value us. Simply brilliant. Thank you and I’m thrilled to be a part of the team.”
- Senior Manager, Compliance Practice
The Challenge.
Scaling culture transformation
In late 2019, KPMG launched a new set of organizational values meant to inform its management practices and business operations. The roll out of the associated cultural transformation efforts was stalled by the pandemic and had to be redesigned for a new reality.
Successful transformation efforts rely on the visible adoption of new values and behaviors by leaders and influencers. The shift to remote work created significant gaps in visibility, along with high levels of general uncertainty. To advance the cultural shift, KPMG needed to support leaders in their efforts to build and maintain trust, create psychological safety, and role model values-aligned behavior for their remote teams.
Our Work.
Design and deliver a targeted program to advance culture change
We partnered with KPMG’s Chief Culture Officer to design and deliver a targeted program to advance culture change through the company’s cross-organizational Culture Champions Network in North America. This cohort of the company’s most engaged employees in North America included more than 100 key leaders across business lines, ranging from associate to partner.
We developed a skills-based curriculum focused on KPMG’s cultural imperatives, integrating evidence-based practices from positive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In addition to giving leaders small, but mighty transformation tools to advance their own efforts, we taught them how to share these tools and highlight transformational stories through a train-the-trainer module. The result was a highly scalable intervention, driven by an empowered group of cultural influencers.
Transformative Results.
Following our program, KPMG leaders showed huge increases in cultural transformation indicators:
Measures of psychological safety increased 60% and measures of trust increased 25%
Leaders who felt confident in their ability to role model KPMG values increased 20%
Each leader passed on skills to an average of three team members in the first month alone, creating exponential impact.
One of the most highly rated programs in KPMG history with a Net Promotor Score (NPS) of 72
While the initial survey comments were largely focused on ineffective leadership, toxic work environment, and struggling operations, there were was no negative feedback on any of these topics in the post-project survey.
This speaks to major improvements in leadership effectiveness and the culture of the organization.