Our people are our most important asset. Their ability to think, innovate, collaborate and deliver quality service to our clients is what keeps us ahead of the competition.
The commitment of our most senior people to Corporate Responsibility (CR) is evident in what they do and say. Here Heather Hancock, David Cruickshank, Cindy Cahill and John Kerr, share their views on what matters most for CR at Deloitte.
- What makes Deloitte a great place to work, and how do you continue to attract the best talent?
- How is Deloitte promoting diversity, while ensuring everyone at the firm feels respected and included?
- How is Deloitte looking after the wellbeing of its employees and promoting healthy work-life balance?
- Considering the complexity and instability of the current market, why is investment in the community still so important?
- What progress has been made to minimise the impact that Deloitte's business operations have on the environment?
- What are the key challenges for Deloitte's CR programme?
- How do you engage your stakeholders with your Corporate Responsibility programme?
- What benefits are being realised from Deloitte's investment in disability sport?
- Business in the Community's Corporate Responsibility Index is one of the leading UK benchmarks of responsible business practice. In 2008, Deloitte's performance in the overall index increased to Gold (93.5%), from Silver (85%) last year. How has Deloitte managed to achieve this significant increase in overall CR performance?
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What makes Deloitte a great place to work, and how do you continue to attract the best talent?
John Kerr (JK): Our people are our most important asset. Their ability to think, innovate, collaborate and deliver quality service to our clients is what keeps us ahead of the competition. Our business will continue to grow and develop only by being able to recruit and retain the best people - and by offering them an environment where they can remain motivated and engaged enough to deliver their best work. Deloitte offers unparalleled development opportunities, working with the best clients, on exciting and challenging projects. We are committed to mentoring and developing our people and providing them with a rewarding career path.
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How is Deloitte promoting diversity, while ensuring everyone at the firm feels respected and included?
JK: For our business to succeed, we need our people to develop and flourish - while also remaining true to themselves. That's why we strive to understand - and appreciate - the many and varied differences between our people. We actively promote a policy and practice of equality of opportunity in employment for all our people - regardless of their age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, faith or disability. We're developing a culture where all the capabilities of all our people are fully harnessed and developed - for the benefit of our clients, our business and our colleagues.
Deloitte's internal diversity networks connect partners and employees who share affinity indicators such as gender, race, religion and sexual orientation. With more than 2,300 members, these groups provide our people with a shared sense of belonging, and help to build bridges between our talent and the wider community.
Heather Hancock (HH): We are absolutely clear throughout the partnership about the business imperative to have an inclusive, diverse approach to talent. One of the hallmarks of this is small practical steps rather than big grand gestures, and also learning from others - for example, inviting the Cabinet Secretary's leader on diversity in the senior civil service to share their approaches with us.
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How is Deloitte looking after the wellbeing of its employees and promoting healthy work-life balance?
JK: Our wellbeing programme focuses on treating everyone at Deloitte as an individual rather than as an employee; helping them achieve a better work-life balance - and taking a big-picture, holistic view of their needs, interests and commitments, both inside and outside the office. We've launched a number of initiatives to support this, including a full service gym and health suite in London; subsidised gym memberships throughout almost all of our offices; back-up child care; free professional counselling and regular health-related promotions and activities. Together, these can help our people achieve a better balance between their personal and professional lives.
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Considering the complexity and instability of the current market, why is investment in the community still so important?
David Cruickshank (DC): We are an integral part of the communities we operate in. Indeed, we recognise that with economic uncertainties, we have a bigger role to play because of our skills and our scale. Our partners and all of our people expect this from the firm.
HH: We believe a firm of the scale, national reach and calibre of Deloitte should be showing leadership among business and in society. The talent and skills of our people can be developed, broadened and enriched by being used to achieve social benefits and that enhances our client-facing work. Beyond this, our people partly choose to work here because of our community programme and our philanthropic tradition - they are an important motivator for our achievements in this area.
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What progress has been made to minimise the impact that Deloitte's business operations have on the environment?
Cindy Cahill (CC): Our programme of green activities, with all of our people playing their part in reducing our environmental impact, has gone from strength to strength over the last year.
Our new London campus has improved the energy efficiency of our buildings, increased the number of bicycle spaces five fold and implemented extensive waste and paper recycling programmes across London and into some of our regional offices. We will continue to work through our green champions' network to harness the creative ideas that our people have to help reduce our impact.
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What are the key challenges for Deloitte's CR programme?
CC: This year we have reduced our carbon footprint per employee by 4% but our energy and business travel emissions have increased in absolute terms. We are very focused on these areas and have programmes in place to help us reduce our impact. Following the recent completion of our London campus we are confident that we will see the energy efficiency impact in coming years. Our ambitious economic growth targets will be a challenge when trying to reduce our environmental footprint. We will continue to look at innovative ways of reducing our impact on the environment while meeting our ambitious targets.
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How do you engage your stakeholders with your Corporate Responsibility programme?
CC: We have identified our key stakeholders as those which we have an impact on and those who have an impact on us. We have listed our key stakeholders in our CR model on page 4 of this report. We work with our stakeholders on both a formal and informal basis to explain our business to them, understand our impacts from their perspective and respond to the material issues raised by making appropriate changes to our business and CR program.
This year we are going to further expand this stakeholder engagement program particularly with regard to engaging with our people on corporate responsibility issues. This will include focus groups which will be run through our already established CR champions network and CR Partners.
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What benefits are being realised from Deloitte's investment in disability sport?
HH: Our investment is helping our delivery partners - the British Paralympic Association (BPA) and SportsAid - to transform disability sport in the UK. We're delighted at what is being achieved working collaboratively and in a very focused way on two of the critical challenges the BPA identified - getting people active, then competing, in disability sport, and then overcoming the financial hurdles that stop talented young athletes from being able to combine their educational progress with sporting progress. The individual stories of how Parasport, the website we've created with the BPA, has provided the first stepping stone for people with talent and enthusiasm for sport are really heartwarming. And to have Deloitte-backed athletes competing in Beijing just two years into our programme goes to show it is possible to make a real difference.
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Business in the Community's Corporate Responsibility Index is one of the leading UK benchmarks of responsible business practice. In 2008, Deloitte's performance in the overall index increased to Gold (93.5%), from Silver (85%) last year. How has Deloitte managed to achieve this significant increase in overall CR performance?
CC: A very strong and sustained commitment from the top of our firm right through to our 12,000 plus people, with an inclusive and well-communicated campaign for change and improvement. In some areas, like community investment, we've been consistently highly rated for several years now. In other areas, the Index has been a useful prompt to harness lots of activity into a more cohesive programme and to assign clear management responsibility for it.