We champion diversity, sustainability, and inclusion in business practices
People are at the heart of the business and teams built with varied backgrounds, cultures, ages, genders, gender identities, abilities and family types present diverse viewpoints. Celebrating our integrated approach to sustainability, we strive to actively promote and embed the Sustainable Development Goals within our social sustainable business practices.
We constantly seek to improve and review our ED&I programme, ensuring our programme remains committed to an equitable, diverse and inclusive environment at Grant Thornton.
Investors in Diversity Gold
Grant Thornton Ireland has been awarded the prestigious "Investors in Diversity Gold Award" from the Irish Centre for Diversity. This award is the only Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Mark for business in Ireland and demonstrates our continued commitment to enhancing our culture throughout equity, diversity and inclusion activities. We are delighted to have achieved this accreditation and join an exclusive number of organisations in Ireland who have achieved Gold.
In 2023, our ED&I framework evolved to embrace five pillars
These pillars provided the catalyst for our ED&I actions, activities, and initiatives, to which we then extended to incorporate an additional pillar, our Positive Pathways Pillar, ensuring the fundamental aims and objectives of our ED&I activity was future-forward thinking.
Unconscious Bias
In 2024, our ED&I team collaborated with our Learning & Development team to create a bespoke, mandatory Unconscious Bias Programme for our colleagues.
Benchmark Policies
Our benchmark policies, such as our Gender Identity and Gender Expression Policy, Domestic Abuse Policy, and Family-friendly Policies leads industry standards to champion ED&I excellence.
Inclusive Recruitment Toolkit
Visual Guides, preferred pronouns on email signatures and MS teams; and inclusive lanyards have been introduced, promoting and championing inclusivity at the firm. We are also focusing on the barriers for trans and non-binary applicants when applying for jobs at the firm.
Data Campaign
We launched and rolled out our Data Campaign with the objective being to carve out awareness of the importance of populating our Workday data profiles in order to have an accurate company profile and to meet our colleagues’ individual needs.
ED&I Supplier Framework
Grant Thornton has robust mechanisms in place to ensure that the assessment and selection of partner and supplier organisations are underpinned by ED&I principles. This includes asking these organisations to provide information in relation to ED&I and demonstrate that their policies are inclusive of people from all nine grounds.
Diversity at our core
The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion programme at Grant Thornton is called Embrace and currently has five main Employee Resource Group (ERG) pillars:
- Ability
- Ethnicity & Culture
- Family
- Gender equality
- LGBTQIA+
Our Ability ERG works to remove barriers to inclusion for our people, to actively engage in providing employment and placement opportunities, supporting our people and creating awareness of all aspects of mental health and disability.
Our Ethnicity and Culture ERG works to empower all our colleagues by celebrating our rich cultural diversity. With empathy and compassion, we strive to create awareness and embed an environment of inclusion and belonging, by encouraging intercultural collaboration across all service lines.
Our diverse teams thrive because we respect that each of us is different, and we approach those differences with an open mind, creating inclusive teams where everyone feels welcome, valued, and heard.
Our Family ERG’s purpose is to provide support to employees at all stages of their lives and encourage intergenerational collaboration, promoting a productive work environment that allows Grant Thornton employees to be engaged in a challenging career and balance their work life need.
Our Gender Equality ERG ensures that all staff, regardless of gender, have access to the same opportunities and resources and to support them in their personal lives and professional careers.
Through awareness and respect, we strive for systemic change that supports the differences between genders and to harbor a safe and empowering workplace for our staff.
LGBTQIA+ ERG works to provide support to employees of all gender identities and sexual orientations. Our aim is to promote awareness of issues faced by our LGBTQIA+ community at Grant Thornton, creating a safe and inclusive workplace culture.
Underpinning our ED&I strategy and initiatives are three core principles
Educate, Integrate, and Celebrate. This three-pronged approach provides a holistic foundation for all of our ED&I milestones at the firm, playing a symbiotic role with our firm’s values: being collaborative, passionate, and fun, grounded, and maintaining integrity in everything that we do.
Learn more about ED&I at Grant Thornton
Our latest Transparency Report demonstrates the effect of our continued focus on and investment in quality.
The report serves as a comprehensive overview of Grant Thornton's operations, practices, and commitment to maintaining high standards for stakeholders and regulatory bodies.
Gender Pay Gap
At Grant Thornton, we believe in the significant benefits that derive from a more inclusive and diverse organisation.
Women in Business 2024
2024 marks the 20th year of Grant Thornton’s work to monitor and measure the proportion of women occupying senior management roles in mid-market companies around the world.
Family-friendly policies
New policies introduced in move toward radical overhaul needed to reflect diverse employee family needs.