How a Big 4 consulting firm is executing its ‘hybrid-first’ model

When crafting return-to-office policies, some companies have been more prescriptive than others. Google and Amazon, for example, have both mandated that corporate employees work from a physical office three days a week, and indicated there may be consequences for workers who don’t comply.

For Ernst & Young (EY), a Big Four consulting firm that employs nearly 400,000 employees worldwide—95,000 of whom are in the Americas—a top-down RTO mandate would have been tricky to pull off.

“We can’t have a one-size-fits-all to how we execute,” Frank Giampietro, EY’s chief well-being officer for the Americas, said of the firm’s approach to hybrid work. “But we can have a strong set of principles. And we can educate people as to why we believe that [a] balanced model is the right model.”

Giampietro spoke with HR Brew about EY’s “hybrid-first model,” and how the firm has used financial benefits as an incentive for employees to spend time in the office.

Embracing “predictable flexibility.” Currently, EY expects most people to spend between 40% and 60% of their time working “together in person,” and the rest remotely, according to Giampietro.

EY leaned on data to inform its current policy, he said. His team analyzed regular pulse surveys, and found employees working in a hybrid arrangement had higher well-being scores, as well as skill and career development scores, than those working remotely. About 400 EY leaders now have access to a dashboard showing employees’ well-being data through a people experience platform so they can identify opportunities for improvement, Giampietro said. Workers can see how their team compares with the rest of the US firm on PTO, for example, to implement healthier behaviors, and ensure employees feel comfortable taking time off to recharge.

Because EY is such a big organization, hybrid work looks different depending on the business segment. Employees may spend time together in person at a client site, rather than in an EY office. And while certain parts of the business spend over 80% of their time in a hybrid environment, others are closer to 50%, according to Giampietro.

No matter the business segment, Giampietro’s team is encouraging EY leaders to embrace “predictable flexibility,” so that employees are “actually spending time working in the same room, where we can get some on-the-job learning, some real-time feedback, some mentoring conversations,” he said. To find the right balance on hybrid work, managers are planning ahead of time, sometimes looking at the cycle of an entire year to figure out the best periods for employees to work in-person.

Investing in hybrid work. EY first rolled out its hybrid policy in June 2021, but it was implemented in fits and starts at the beginning due to Covid-19 surges that kept workers from coming into the office.

Last year, Giampietro and his team sought to understand “what else was holding people back from coming together,” besides upticks in Covid-19. They picked up on financial concerns related to commutes, as well as dependent and pet care, and decided to offer employees an $800-a-year “way of working” fund to alleviate some of these costs.

EY rolled out the fund in February 2022, and has since seen a 150% year over year uptick in time spent together in the office, Giampietro said. Due to the success of the stipend, EY will offer it annually going forward. The idea, he added, is to “ease the burden for you to kind of get back into new habits of coming together again.”