KPMG scraps Summer early Friday finish for staff

Big Four giant KPMG is revoking its Covid-19 employee benefit of letting staff clock off early on Fridays over the Summer in the latest cut at the firm.

The firm introduced the policy in 2021, focused on the Summer, which is a quieter time in the City, to allow staff to take two and a half hours off each week until the end of August to support wellbeing.

However, that benefit has been reversed for UK staff for this coming Summer for the first time since its introduction, as first reported by Bloomberg. According to a KPMG UK spokesperson, said: “Every year we review our summer ‘jump start’ programme to make sure we are considering market conditions and business needs.”

The firm’s closest competitor, PwC, has a similar early-finish policy on Fridays in the summer, but the firm has not revoked its benefit for its staff. A spokesperson for PwC confirmed the firm will run its policy again from 20th July to 28th August, during which staff can condense their working week to four and a half days, finishing at lunchtime on Fridays.

Initially, PwC’s policy in 2022 allowed staff to take this benefit over June, July, and August – 12 weeks, but has now been trimmed to 6 weeks.

Internal fallout at KPMG

In late March, KPMG UK revealed it was going to axe more than 500 staff in the latest redundancy round at the Big Four giant. Those affected include 440 assistant manager roles in the audit business (Grade D) and 120 roles across the advisory arm, which impacts roughly 6 per cent of the division’s 7,100 employees.

For cuts in the audit section, the firm blamed the “current market conditions mean[ing] our attrition rates are very low within certain parts of our audit population, which is why we are proposing to right-size those areas.” For its advisory department, the firm said at the time it blamed “the ongoing evolving market conditions,” which meant roles would be reduced “following careful consideration.”

City AM reported an uproar among staff over the firm’s handling of communication about layoffs. Staff said there have been complaints of a lack of communication during what was deemed to be a ‘mismanaged’ redundancy round.