Congratulations KPMG...

...on winning the "City award" at the Opportunity Now annual awards dinner.

For those of you who don't know, this is an award for gender equality, inclusion and innovation in the workplace, particularly in helping women to succeed.

The firm's winning entry focused on its flexible working programme for its 10,300 UK staff, which offers a wide range of working options to its people. These include shorter working weeks, home working, job share, unpaid leave, annualised days, career breaks, additional holiday purchase and ‘glide’ time – when the start and finish times of the working day can be adjusted.

Such a positive award gives great PR to firms that can often be seen as "offices of grey men in grey suits". Those of us who work in and with these firms know that they aren't (usually!) like this, but not so the 'outside world'. So the more that clients and potential clients get to see that the professional services are staffed by an array of different kinds of people - different genders, different ethnicities, different cultural orientations and different sexual orientations - the more likely they are to want to establish client-adviser relations.

After all, rather than a man in a grey suit, they may be able to find someone who acts like them and thinks like them, and so relates better to them. And that builds a stronger client relationship which lasts longer too.

the Heresiarch
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