People and purpose
Dimple Agarwal
Deputy CEO and Managing Partner for People & Purpose
I am delighted to reflect and report on my first year as Deloitte’s deputy CEO and managing partner for People & Purpose. It has been a privilege to hold this role given the unprecedented events that have taken place which have undoubtedly brought along challenges.
We have developed a robust and focused People & Purpose agenda which sits at the heart of our firm. The COVID-19 crisis, followed by the killing of George Floyd, have only made this agenda more relevant and urgent. This agenda is built around three pillars: Purpose, Inclusion and Development.
Passion for Purpose
In this video, I will introduce you to the Purpose agenda, what it means for Deloitte and examples of how this has been brought to life through clients, people and society over the last year.
Inclusion: be the true you
Inclusion has long been core to our business. It makes up one of our five shared values, and is central to the People & Purpose agenda for the firm. We want everyone to be able to be their true selves, and to do this we are continuing our journey of creating an environment where everyone feels they belong, they are supported and heard, and empowered to make a valuable, personal contribution.
We want to have a more diverse workforce, bringing strong representation of society and a diversity of thought, which will drive success.
We are focused on all elements of inclusion, however this year, the
UK Executive has committed to being accountable for gender and ethnicity targets at all levels, to help accelerate progress.
In addition to gender and ethnicity, in the UK we have and will continue to work hard with our networks, allies and partners to achieve all dimensions of inclusion. This includes supporting social mobility, neurodiversity and the LGBTQ+ community.
We have put in place various interventions and policies to support gender inclusion. These include increasing the paternity leave allowance, refreshing our approach to the Gender Balance Network (an employee group which supports gender inclusion), ensuring all our recruitment and reward processes are objective and working to remove unconscious bias.
We continue to track and monitor our gender pay gap. This year, we have seen small reductions in both our mean and
median hourly pay gaps and our total earnings gender gap (which
includes equity partners).
Wellbeing
During COVID-19 lockdowns we started The Wellbeing Movement – to help our people look after themselves at home.
One Million Stories
We helped one million people get to where they want to be through education and employment.
Black Action Plan
Five commitments to address specific challenges faced by the Black community.
We have also again, voluntarily, calculated our ethnicity pay gap. Our headline figures show minimal increases on the mean and median hourly pay gap figures but this was expected as our efforts to recruit a more diverse workforce have led to an increase in the proportion of our colleagues from ethnic minorities at our more junior levels. Our total earnings ethnicity pay pap (so including equity partners) has reduced. Please do take a look at the dedicated web pages explaining these pay gaps.
This year we have made a commitment to specifically address the experience and representation of our Black colleagues. This was already a priority for us, however the tragic death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement catalysed further specific, targeted actions. We developed a Black Action Plan, working with our Multicultural Network, Ethnicity Council and a newly formed Black Action Committee. The Black Action Plan details our commitments to supporting the Black community within and outside of Deloitte. This will remain a priority for us.
Our firm has needed to respond to and support our people through COVID-19 and the different, nuanced challenges to work and wellbeing that this has brought. We have monitored how our people have been feeling through targeted and tailored surveys, and from this, developed specific interventions. We introduced the Wellbeing Movement, a daily calendar of people-led initiatives including yoga and nutrition webinars. We also supported carers and working parents through extending our carer sabbatical policy, introducing a voluntary reduced working week to make agile working easier and more accessible, and equipped our leaders on how to motivate and look after their teams during these uncertain times.
All of this resonates strongly with the existing focus we have had on wellbeing and mental health, including our insight on the costs of poor mental health at work, published in January 2020 in collaboration with Mind. I have been inspired and humbled at the stories and examples of our people looking after one another as we strive for inclusion and diversity to no longer be our strategy but our reality, and am confident we will achieve this.
Development: never stop growing
Offering our people world-class development opportunities is key to our agenda and integral to the talent experience we seek to create. This year, we have focused on building leadership capability through a leadership framework and a dynamic and layered curriculum which reflects the people and purpose agenda and our shared values. Examples include a specific purpose learning offering for our leaders, as well as one focused on climate change as part of our strides to make an impact on society.
We have made investments in learning including in a new Deloitte University EMEA, being built near Paris, which will become the leadership and professional development facility for talent across the region. We look forward to opening our doors to this in 2022.
Furthermore, we have embedded development in the career paths for all grades – from our Summer Vacation Scheme students and inductions of our experienced hires, for whom we have developed a market-edge virtual offering, to our partner candidates preparing to join the partnership.
In the months and years to come, we will continue to flex our agility as a business and create virtual development offerings so we may ensure that personal development can and will be front and centre of the Deloitte experience.
Built on our values, culture and benefits offering, Deloitte’s Employee Value Proposition sums up why people should join, or stay with Deloitte. It is to show people, within and outside the Deloitte network, what we stand for and offer as an employer.
Reflecting on the past year
As I reflect over the last year, I am proud of our achievements as a business and the focused efforts to make an impact that matters to our clients, people and society. There is still a long way to go, though I am confident our shared values and an agenda with People & Purpose at the heart of the firm will mean that we can achieve what we have set out to do – as it is, simply, the right thing to do.
Dimple Agarwal
Deputy CEO and Managing Partner for People & Purpose