On purpose: Making an impact that matters in New Zealand

A message from our Chief Executive

The fiscal year FY19 was a significant year both for our purpose of making an impact that matters, creating visible opportunities for our people and our firm’s approach to broader sustainability matters.

Over the last 12 months the New Zealand firm grew from strength to strength, including becoming part of Deloitte Asia-Pacific. Two reference points are that at the end of May 2019, 119 partners and 1357 Deloitte people across 7 offices generated close to $300m in revenue, we also contributed 13,719 hours to non-profit organisations, social enterprises and initiatives focused on providing benefits to our communities and our environment.

As with the wider population, the Deloitte team are concerned about the impacts of our business on critical societal issues. We want to apply our skills and talents to be part of the solution on topics such as inclusion, diversity, inequality, climate change, the future of agriculture and our financial systems. It is incumbent on our partnership to provide visible opportunities for Deloitte people to play their part.

In 2018 we committed to developing and communicating our 2030 sustainability strategy, targets and plans. Sustainability in this context means taking a long-term, holistic view of commercial success - ensuring that we keep the firm healthy, continue to attract the best people, respond to client and regulator changing expectations, and maintain an authentic licence to operate.

The focus of this strategy is looking at how we can tackle issues important to our clients and the wider business eco-system, how we use our influence – such as in the area of sustainable development - and how we embed these broader sustainability concepts into our day-to-day work.

Looking forward to 2030, we now have clear pathways to achieving what we believe are some important aspects of enduring commercial success. For instance, here in New Zealand, we aim to realize gender pay equity gap of 1% or less by the end of 2020, and Deloitte globally aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% per person below FY17 levels by 2025.

As global discourse about the purpose of business continues to evolve, we are clear that impact is implicit in everything we do. There is much to be gained from a purpose for our business that supports society’s goals for sustainable development. To this end, the need to understand, measure and report our impact and contribution increases every year.

We therefore continue our commitment to regularly report our progress on these challenges in alignment with our global firm. Our FY19 snapshot sets out areas of global focus (top right-hand side) and the NZ response to a certain number of these (the columns).

This is simply a snapshot that we want share of what we do here and globally, marking a line in the sand from which we can continuously improve.

- Thomas Pippos

Our material issues

As a professional services network, understanding and engaging the interests and concerns of our stakeholders is embedded in our drive for excellence. Deloitte identifies key stakeholders as those who:

• Help influence Deloitte’s success;
• Are highly affected by what Deloitte does;
• Affect the markets, regulations and industries in which Deloitte operates; or
• Affect the supply of resources that Deloitte member firms need to serve clients, talent and society.

Continual engagement with key stakeholders by Deloitte people is supported by a periodic, in-depth materiality assessment. Please download our “Reporting Approach” for additional details on the materiality assessment process. In the context of this report, material topics are those that reflect Deloitte’s significant economic, environmental and social impacts, or substantively influence the assessments and decisions of stakeholders. Topics were classified into three categories according to their relative rankings on a materiality matrix.