Grant Thornton’s culture journey and the difference for our clients

Our deep commitment to a healthy, high-performance culture drives how we do our work and run our business. Extraordinary people come together to deliver a culture of quality, innovation and collaboration to our clients.

Over the years, the business world has evolved in rapid and dramatic ways. We’re proud that many ambitious companies have counted on Grant Thornton’s services and expertise to not just survive the shifting landscape, but to thrive in its midst.

Meeting those client needs meant doing our own growing—sixfold since 2002. We expanded our staff to bolster our resources and ensure unmatched responsiveness. Rapid growth has the potential to effect a company’s culture and cause it to become diluted.

At Grant Thornton, our culture has always been a priority and a source of great pride. So preserving it, by keeping it energetic and consistent even as we grew, was very important.

Watch Mike McGuire, Grant Thornton CEO, describe our culture journey.

To do that, we set out on a culture journey to reexamine (and find new ways to strengthen) what’s been at our core all along: an environment that feels collaborative and unified.

Our culture journey focused on three areas.

1. Culture at all levels

For a culture to feel unified, it has to inspire—and be accepted by—employees throughout the company, from top to bottom at all office locations. We started by earning belief and buy-in from the very top. We made sure our leaders saw this culture journey not as a project or initiative with an end-date, but as a long-term commitment.

From there, a deep belief in our culture—in what it should be and how much it matters—spread downward and throughout, in a way that remained strategic and felt authentic.

2. “Unfreezing” our employees

Getting our employees engaged started with “unfreezing” them—pushing them beyond their comfort zones by getting them to ask questions, feed their own curiosity and see things differently.

To that end, we held unfreezing sessions at 60 offices. This engaging series of large-group exercises led to new ideas, new ways of thinking, and employees feeling eager to contribute and collaborate.

3. Redesigning the recruiting process

Being “disruptive” wasn’t always an appealing quality in a candidate; now it’s the first thing we look for. At Grant Thornton, we hire creative thinkers, those who are determined address problems in new ways and propose different solutions. In short, we hire industry disrupters.

We also make them mobile and accessible, anywhere they’re needed in the Grant Thornton network, regardless of how far away the client, team or office. This helps make our culture company-wide.

Where has this journey taken us? It’s helped us reach all-time-high levels of retention and engagement, as well as high net promoter scores. It’s empowered us to deliver new levels of service to clients (who say things like “Talk to Grant Thornton, they really are different”) and help them achieve staggering levels of success.

Finally, the journey has solidified a company culture that’s clearly defined and known throughout the industry—for being curious and creative, collaborative and agile. We’ve changed what it means to be, as our CEO Mike McGuire calls it, “a Grant Thorntonite.”