Our people in focus
Through our flexible and agile work settings, we encourage our people to find the best setup for their daily working priorities and adapt these throughout their careers. We know that priorities and interests might change throughout a career, and we want to meet changes in people’s motivation and purpose while also making space for personal and professional development. We want to create a lifelong learning environment which will provide our people with the opportunity to apply their curiosity and ambition for their own development throughout their entire career – no matter their role or level of experience. To support this, we are continuously working on our feedback culture, and we have, among other initiatives, improved our training programmes for leaders as well as enhanced our internal survey setup which encourages our leaders to request feedback on their own performance.
The new feedback programme not only allows our leaders to ask for feedback as often as possible, but also to tailor the requested feedback to specific leadership deliverables, whether that is a service for a client, facilitating training or the daily management of a team. We will continue our work aimed at building the right setup to ensure that our people are in focus. And we will continue, too, to celebrate their achievements – for the second year running, we ran the People Awards, flagging up the excellent efforts that characterise our talents.
Happy parents
Giving equal parental leave terms to all parents in Deloitte (mothers, fathers, and co-parents) with 24 weeks of paid leave.
We did this to help create an equal playing field for all parents pushing for an equal distribution of parental leave across society. Our motivation for doing this is straightforward: we want to attract and retain the best talents – also when they become parents.
Our improved parental leave policy was part of an upgrade of our existing Happy Parents scheme, which also include different flexibility options to ease the transition back to work after parental leave. With these initiatives we improved our already existing offer to new parents in Deloitte, which consists of:
- coaching sessions for employees before and after parental leave
the Deloitte Parental Leave Network and other offers to talents on leave - support and training to leaders on how to best support employees through the transitions around parental leave
- day-to-day practical support in terms of home services and the child’s 2nd and 3rd sick day with pay.
A year on from the implementation of better parental leave terms and improved flexibility options, we can already see that this has had an impact:
Length of leave among mothers and fathers:
Implementing our improved parental leave policy, we see that the average length of parental leave has increased by approximately four weeks for fathers and decreased by approximately two weeks for mothers. A more equal distribution of parental leave between mothers and fathers is crucial when it comes to levelling the playing field and increasing equality between men and women in the Danish labour market. We are proud to be among the first companies to push this agenda forward.
Flexibility after parental leave:
Talents returning from a period of parental leave lasting longer than 16 weeks are now granted five Flexible Return Days. Flexible Return Days are paid days off and can be used by the talent in any way that fits them, helping to create flexibility in the transition back to work. Over 90 per cent of the talents eligible for the Flexible Return Days have made use of them. The days can be used within the first year after returning to work as a way to, for example, work reduced hours on full pay the first months or create flexibility regarding the child’s day-care start.
For many years we have tracked our ability to retain talents after parental leave, and we see that we are making progress. Our target is an 80 per cent retention rate of employees one year after they return from parental leave. We are pleased and proud to share that in this financial year we reached this target.
Retaining our position as one of the best places to work
We are honoured that students repeatedly name Deloitte one of the best places to work in Denmark, as our people are essential to us and we want to continue to attract and retain top talents. This year, we are incredibly proud that we climbed 8 places among IT students in the annual Universum ranking, making us the 14th most attractive employer among IT talents in Denmark in 2023. Additionally, we remain top of the audit and advisory industry for the 14th year in a row.
At Deloitte, we want to give back to the society we are part of and make an impact that matters. One way in which we do this is by collaborating closely with Danish universities to help develop the talents of the future. In 2023, we launched the Deloitte Master’s Thesis Hub, where we paired 10 master’s students from Copenhagen Business School with experts from Deloitte to help the students create impactful master’s theses while growing professionally.
On top of this, and as part of our focus on attracting top IT talents, we have worked closely with a course at ITU, giving a group of software development students hands-on experience working with clients and developing a useable product.
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A step towards gender balance
We continue our focus on gender balance in leadership positions. We are making progress, but not as quickly as we would like, and we have not yet reached our target. As such, gender representation amongst middle and top-level management is still unsatisfactory. But we are dedicatedly working on our structures and processes when it comes to pipeline management and promotions. This year we have implemented a better talent pipeline management system, which improves our abilities to forecast gender distribution at
all levels. With the new talent pipeline management system, we are focusing on a 5-year talent pipeline for talents at all levels.
In general, more women in leadership positions and a better gender balance are top of mind and a key part of our talent reviews, as well as nominations to top talent programs and commercial leadership positions. We continue to set and monitor clear gender diversity targets for commercial roles in our market programmes, and we continue to improve our female sponsor programme to ensure the continued development of our female talents.
Gender balance is now an integrated part of our culture and mindset. We can see this in our work on psychological safety within our leaderships, and across initiatives such as those on bias conscious leadership. When we ask our talents in employee surveys to respond to statements such as “I feel I can be myself at work”, we are seeing high scores from male and female talents alike. Gender balance is a long-term journey, and we are committed to creating an equal playing field – structurally, mentally and in terms of competences.
Women now make up 40 per cent of our elected board members, and we are pleased to see that we have improved the gender balance here substantially.
Our target has historically been at least 25 per cent female or male board members. Moving forward, our target will be 40 per cent. The board is also diverse in terms of professional backgrounds, geography, and international experience to ensure we reflect a global view. In compliance with the Danish Act on Approved Auditors and Audit Firms, most board members are state-authorised public accountants.
Our second level executive management are Business Unit leadership teams. The share of women in this leadership group is 19 per cent. We have not historically tracked the gender balance at this level, but we will do so moving forward. It is our ambition to raise the representation to 33 per cent by 2026. This will also require a strengthened focus on succession planning in the Business Units. Furthermore, we will work with an internal succession board with top management that oversee new appointments.
During FY23, the People & Purpose Strategy Team has had increased collaboration with these groups – all of which are employee-driven networks, created with the purpose of providing a community for employees with shared identities and interests. They foster a diverse and inclusive workplace by providing input on their talent experience, our talent policies, our internal employee surveys, and internal communication to ensure that different minorities are taken into consideration in this work. In FY23, we also collaborated with the ERGs for the annual Diversity & Inclusion Week, which you can read more about below.
The international community:
- With every new FY, a new steering committee for the International Community is appointed. We mark this change by having a kick-off meeting with the new and outgoing committee members. The outcome from this meeting is ideas for projects that the new SteerCo can work on whilst they are in post. One of the projects in FY23 was a cultural awareness campaign focusing on different winter traditions to create awareness of traditions other than Christmas Members of the International Community shared winter traditions from all over the world, and this was subsequently disseminated as a communication campaign. The campaign ended with a successful social event for internationals and Danes with a quiz covering the different winter traditions.
- Proud, our LGBTQ+ and allies network in Deloitte, once again participated in the 2022 Copenhagen Pride Parade – the annual demonstration for freedom and human rights and a celebration of diversity, respect, and inclusion. It was a huge celebration with lots of happy faces, important messages, and people cheering along the road – and Deloitte was there as a proud supporter and partner of Copenhagen Pride. Proud arranged a fantastic celebration featuring a colourful float filled with happy Deloitte employees. Many colleagues also walked behind the float – with some bringing their friends, partners, and family along for the fun. It was an afternoon to remember, but we are also aware that we still have a way to go in terms of LGBTQ+ inclusion. After the Copenhagen Pride Parade, we therefore continued our dialogue and collaboration with the Proud Steering Committee in order to continue our focus on LGBTQ+ inclusion.
- Members of the Steering Committee for our LGBTQ+ network in Deloitte Denmark represent the Nordic region in the NSE LGBTQ+ Advisory Board, which supports the LGBTQ+ initiatives across NSE, fosters greater collaboration, shares best practices, and establishes consistency in our approach to LGBTQ+ inclusion.
Deloitte Muslim Network:
- Having existed for less than a year, the Deloitte Muslim Network has had a fantastic start as an employee-driven network in Deloitte. They hosted their launch event in October 2022 with a guest speaker talking about his career journey and offering lessons from the obstacles he had faced due to his Muslim identity. The network quickly grew to 60 members, leading our company-wide Eid celebration where approximately 200 colleagues joined the celebration to learn more about Ramadan, Eid, and the Deloitte Muslim Network.
- This year Deloitte Muslim Network hosted the first ever Ramadan Dinner – where talents representing more than ten different nationalities broke their fast together and prayed in congregation. The success of, and overwhelmingly positive feedback towards, this event has ensured that the Ramadan Dinner will now become an annual tradition.
- Thanks to an initiative driven by the Deloitte Muslim Network, lunch in our canteens is now specifically labelled as Halal for the convenience of our Muslim colleagues.
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Leadership
As our talents are our most valuable asset, we place a lot of importance on continuous learning and development. To enable all of our people to be successful, we have a strong focus on leadership development. We therefore offer a wide range of leadership development programmes focusing on everything from the fundamental skills which new leaders need to attain, through to the more advanced skills required of experienced leaders, e.g., understanding how to create a motivational work environment.
Over the past year, our internal training institute Leadership Academy has increasingly focused on personal development, and at the same time we have had an increased focus on how to ensure not just high performance within a team, but also sustainable performance. To us, sustainable performance is about making sure that our talents can effectively deliver on certain work goals while at the same time maintaining a focus on personal well-being. Our mental and physical health is vital. Beyond this, studies show that a focus on sustainable performance is crucial when it comes to creating and maintaining a strong learning culture, which is also a top priority among both current employees and future talents.
To achieve sustainable performance, we are dedicated to creating teams with a high level of inclusion, respect, commitment and psychological safety. To ensure we meet this aim, psychological safety is an important ingredient in our new training course: Leading High Performance Teams. In Leading High Performance Teams, we therefore focus on teaching our leaders how to foster a psychologically safe environment, where everyone feels secure that they will not be punished for speaking up about their concerns, ideas, mistakes or asking questions.
After evaluating our final pilot regarding Leading High Performance Teams, we are now ready to launch an improved version for all our leaders with responsibility for a team, with the first programme starting in September.
