Grant Thornton
Empowerment up nine percentage points. Findings on day one. Change tested every six weeks.
Grant Thornton had already launched its Coaching Culture initiative. What it needed to know, and fast, was whether the change was actually being experienced across the firm. Twelve months of structured listening gave leadership a real-time read on whether the intervention was landing.
The question they came with
Grant Thornton had made a firm-wide commitment to a coaching-led way of working. The initiative was live. The question was whether people were actually experiencing it in practice.
With more than 4,500 people across the UK, an annual survey would have been too slow and too blunt. By the time the findings arrived, the moment to act on them would have passed.
What they needed: a fast, repeatable way to track how people were experiencing the change, broken down by region, service line and role.
What they wanted to avoid: a single delayed data point that arrived after the window for action had closed.
What happened
Q&R designed an independent listening programme that ran every six weeks across the firm. Each cycle asked employees to rate both Grant Thornton’s performance in creating the right conditions for a coaching culture to thrive, and their own behaviour in areas such as trust, empowerment and support.
Findings were segmented by region, service line, gender, generation and role, with representative results shared on day one of each five-day window. That gave Directors and Partners a live picture across levels, locations and business units, while the year-on-year benchmarking showed whether the programme was shifting behaviour or merely sounding good.
The outcome
Empowerment scores moved upwards by nine percentage points after twelve months of programmes running every six weeks. Representative findings were shared on day one of each cycle.
What Changed Because of It
Grant Thornton moved from assumption to evidence while the change was still underway.
Instead of waiting for an annual engagement study to confirm or contradict what leadership hoped was happening, the firm had a live read on whether its Coaching Culture initiative was being experienced at ground level, and where it was not. Directors and Partners could respond to issues and opportunities as they emerged, rather than after they had compounded.
The segmentation mattered just as much as the speed. A single firm-wide average would have hidden the variation. The variation was where the decisions were.
The nine-point rise in empowerment was not a target met on paper. It was a change verified.
Proof Back
Employees were told what had been heard across each cycle, and action followed at a pace that matched the listening rhythm. That mattered.
The point was not simply to gather data more often. It was to make the asking feel serious by showing that the findings led quickly to attention, discussion and response. In a change programme, speed is part of credibility.
The Method, in One Line
This followed the Listen Better Loop: independence, judgement, follow-through, proof back.
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If you have launched a change and need to know whether it is actually landing before the annual review tells you it was not, start with a call.