KPMG, Accenture and EY leaders win workplace management awards
Leaders from a number of Australia’s largest consulting and professional services firms have received recognition at this year’s TEMI awards, which celebrate workforce management.
The annual Australasian Workforce Management Awards for 2022 have marked another challenging twelve months for the industry, with individuals from three large consulting firms receiving top honours.
KPMG’s Ursula Dyer Lepporoli was crowned ‘Global Mobility Champion of the Year’, while Amanda Beazley of Accenture and EY’s Monique Dawson also received awards for innovation and distinguished service.
The awards are issued by the Employee Mobility Institute (TEMI), founded by former KPMGglobal mobility professional Deborah De Cerff. “TEMI’s Workforce Management Awards acknowledge those individuals and businesses who are successfully adapting, innovating and embedding new and different capabilities and solutions within their organisations in response to the new way of working and global talent shortages,” De Cerff stated.
Taking out the top individual leadership excellence award this year was KPMG’s Ursula Dyer Lepporoli, who was made partner in Sydney at the end of last year before immediately mobilising herself to Melbourne in order to lead the firm’s global mobility function for tax in Victoria. Lepporoli was awarded for “fostering collaboration between mobility practitioners and the remote workforce and for contributions to knowledge-sharing”.
The recognition didn’t escape the attention of KPMG national chair Alison Kitchen, who noted the TEMI awards as one of the most prestigious in Australia, while the firm’s Immigration practice lead Mark Wright added, “A prominent business leader recently stated that Ursula Lepporoli is a very difficult person to say no to . . . It’s a joy to work alongside Ursula. The passion and energy she brings to everything she does is infectious.”
Amanda Beazley, a People Mobility senior manager for Accenture who has been with the firm’s Sydney office for the past decade, was named this year’s ‘New Way of Working Mobility Partner’ in the Employee Engagement category, for having implemented an initiative to tap into previously unexplored skilled refugee talent pools. Accenture was also noted for supporting Fadi Chalouhy, the world’s first stateless person to secure a work visa.
“Employees want to work for organisations that care for them as well as those around them – and as more organisations adopt humanitarian activities in their roles as corporate citizens, we’ve seen an increasing number embracing skilled refugees in their talent mobility programs to address talent shortages as well,” commented De Cerff, who has been organising the workplace management awards since 2019.
Meanwhile, EY’s Melbourne-based People Advisory Services director Monique Dawson was paid tribute with a Distinguished Service Award for her contribution to the TEMI Taskforce over the past three years, including serving as Judging Chair for the Workforce Management Awards. Dawson has been with EY for the past decade and a half, including a six-month stint on secondment with the firm in the US.
De Cerff concludes; “Working remotely and flexibly have become the norm in recent years, but there are innovative new trends appearing in the ways these practices are being modelled, and new employee attraction, engagement, retention and wellbeing policies, and technologies, are being created to support them.”
“Amidst all of this change, priorities and metrics remain in a state of flux as practitioners unfreeze, change and freeze again and new technologies and equitable frameworks are playing critical roles in good workforce management.”
