Whether you want to boost your household’s healthy snack options or create a year’s supply of fresh, local produce, growing your own food is an eco-friendly and rewarding process. Just make sure to break the habit of reaching for synthetic pesticides and fertilizers.
KPMG’s US partners have been told that they will be put on 50 per cent pay during six months of gardening leave if they quit to join a rival, marking an escalation in efforts by the Big Four accounting firms to stop staff poaching.
The move sets KPMG apart from its rivals Deloitte, PwC and EY and complicates the decision by partners to leave, since they may have to find money to cover the bills until they join the next firm, even if their new place of work agrees to make them whole later.
The imposition of financial penalties for gardening leave — a required hiatus between jobs — has spread across the Big Four in the US in the past decade as competition for talent and clients has intensified, particularly on the consulting sides of their businesses.
Deloitte, EY and PwC claw back an equivalent amount of pay to KPMG, but not until the end of the six-month notice period, often as a deduction from a partner’s equity in the firm.
Yazdi Deboo, senior partner at the headhunter Korn Ferry, said that competition had also prompted US firms to step up enforcement of notice periods and their use of gardening leave, echoing practices in Europe.
“Putting people on garden leave but on the payroll keeps someone out of the market, stops them activating their network and gives the firm time to ringfence their team and clients,” he said.
“For the most part in the US, it is not possible to stop a person working at a competitor, but the pieces that are enforceable are clauses that stop people taking clients or poaching staff, and the financial penalties and clawbacks that have become commonplace.”
KPMG’s move, previously unreported, was communicated to US partners in an email sent by the firm’s vice-chair for talent and culture, Sandy Torchia, in late July, according to people familiar with its contents.
A KPMG spokesperson said the policy “more closely aligns with industry practice, maintains partners’ full long-term compensation plan, and compensates them in the short term recognising they are no longer working full-time”.
One former partner at a Big Four firm said that KPMG’s move was more likely to discourage someone from leaving than the arrangements elsewhere.
“I was annoyed at the garden leave until, a month in, I realised this was the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, like a fully paid retirement in the middle of my career,” the partner said.
Source: ft.com
