MBA401 Assessment: People, Culture, and Leadership at Deloitte

This report examines Deloitte's approach to people, culture, and contemporary leadership, focusing on initiatives to improve workforce performance, culture, and employee engagement. It analyzes performance-related initiatives like agile goal management and cultivating employee passion, culture-based initiatives centered on continuous improvement and established principles, and engagement-related initiatives that include reinventing performance management. The report further assesses the success of these initiatives by incorporating metrics and referencing credible theory. Finally, the report offers recommendations for enhancing these HR strategies, such as motivating the workforce, investing in employee perks, and optimizing the frequency of performance reviews to maximize effectiveness. The report is based on the student's understanding of the assignment brief.

Running Head: PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP 0
PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Performance-related initiatives..................................................................................................2
Culture-based initiatives.............................................................................................................3
Engagement-related initiatives...................................................................................................4
Recommendations......................................................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................7
References..................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
An internal service network, Deloitte was founded in 1845 by William Welch Deloitte. In
United States, it is one of the largest accounting firms and they have a global network of
employees around 250,000 (Peterson, 2008). Deloitte offers various important services like
taxation, finance , auditing, consultancy and risk advisory solutions. The overall earning of
Deloitte in 2017 was $38.8 billion USD.
In 2018, Fortune Magazine gives rank to Deloitee as one of the 100 best companies’ culture
all over the world (McCabe, 2018). During the business cycle of Deloitte, there were various
acquisitions, mergers take place, and these all help in its growth, development and
diversification.
Performance-related initiatives
Most of the corporations viewed performance management as a backward-looking
assessment system administered by Human Resources (Burdan, 2010). Though, Deloitee is
continuously doing various experiments in relation to the performance management practices
that can be easily deployed on a wide scale. They belief in setting up standardized and agile
goal management with a continuous feedback model (Cappelli and Tavis, 2016).
For increasing the performance of the employees, the company has changed their
performance management system. One of the bottlenecks of the employee performance is
pressure. Deloitte found the antidote to the increasing pressure. This name of this antidote is
worker passion (Hagel, Brown, Wooll and Ranjan, 2017). With this passion, the organization
tends to determine a business capability to respond effectively to mount performance pressure
of the big shift. According to the company, cultivating passion into the workforce help them
in developing new opportunities and required skills or resources important for pursuing those
opportunities. They define passion of the explorer includes three components – a long-term
commitment help in making important and increasing impact in a domain, a seeking character
searching out for new challenges in order to improve faster, and a connecting disposition
looking to develop trust-based relationships with others who can help passionate work force
in getting better answers.

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An employee who has all these three attributes will work passionately. The company get this
concept with their research and through the book – The power of Pull. There it is stated that
organizations and groups were achieving accelerating performance improvement under the
phase of rapid change and they were having these same attributes. Most of the employees in
Deloitee are having one or two attributes, each of them will help them and the company in
few ways but collectively all these three attributes create a drive to take on difficult situations
and challenges necessary in the today’s business environment (Hagel, Brown, Wooll and
Ranjan, 2017). The success of this success can be measured by doing an edge survey across
various job levels in the company. These measures can also be related and compared to the
traditional manifold of employee performance to gain knowledge about the employee
performance on passion.
Culture-based initiatives
Changing organization culture will always be a priority and a challenge for Deloitte
(Verschoor, 2007). The company is building a culture of continuous improvement in an age
of disruption. In terms of taking culture-based initiatives, the company is following five
established principles in order to constant development. These are stubborn leadership, real
change management, managing what gets measured, customizing the information to get the
goals fit and sound governance capabilities (Deloitte, 2017).
In the continuous improvement of culture, involvement of organization leaders plays an
important role. This improvement just not happens instantly, as it is a multiyear passage,
which requires long-term vision and pledge. The second principle change management, often
seen as a bad reputation for good reason. This makes Deloitte focus on real change
management, which is quantifiable and can be tangibly measured (Deloitte, 2017). For
example, how well a future state vision was communicated or understood, and how much
people involved in that vision.
Their third principle is related to – “what gets measured gets managed”. It is true that
applying metrics and measurement to behaviour can have profound effects; however,
measuring wrong things can be counterproductive. It is believed that an effective continuous
improvement culture has a knowledge of what should be evaluated – and how this evaluation
will create value for both organization and the consumer (Deloitte, 2017). The fourth

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principle states that no one-size-fits—all model for constant improvement. Well-established
business enterprises alter and employ various development tools and procedures to apt their
specific objectives, challenges and culture. The last principle concept starts with rolling out
continuous improvement capabilities. Big companies start with smaller-scale; however, they
are still fully invested and empowered.
In order to achieve great things, Deloitte corporate culture is nurtured with open, flexible, and
multifaceted aspects. In addition, it is also based on trust, respect, fairness and openness. The
culture of Deloitte is also built on collaboration and innovation, which is the key to success in
the dynamic environment. They have substantial resources such as innovative workplaces,
virtual meeting technology that creates out-of-the-box ideas in the changing world (Deloitte,
2018).
Engagement-related initiatives
In terms of engagement related initiatives, Deloitte has reinvented their performance
management system, which helps the company in improving the rate of employee
engagement. The company also found that their old style of managing performance i.e. 360
degree feedback was killing 2 million hours per year (Buckingham and Goodall, 2015).
Moreover, it decreases the overall performance of the employee, as employees were not
engaging. This makes the company get with an innovative approach that set out to construct
something much more nimble, individualized and real-time. This approach was focused on
increasing employee engagement rather than assessing in the past.
Earlier, the objectives were fixed annually and reviewed annually. This issue with this
methodology is that yearly objectives are too “batched” for a real-time world and a lot of time
is lost on performance ratings. On the other hand, it should be like spend time speaking to
person about their work, enactment and careers (Buckingham and Goodall, 2015).
The next dimension of this approach is that someone skills is subjective and say more about
the rater instead of ratee. This is also called an idiosyncratic rater effect. This dimension
makes Deloitee bewildered. The management of company known that in order to acquire the
best feedback and make the employee engage, it has to be coming from an immediate team
leader. The new approach led Deloitte to recognize the strengths of each employee in terms

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of engagement and performance. However, one issue was still pertinent that what effective
approach they use to best evaluate it.
With many years of research, Deloitte also comes up with uncovered elements and theories in
terms of employee engagement and with these, several strategies are also being evolved.
Some of them are – making of work meaningful, development of great management,
establishment of flexible and inclusive workforce, generating sufficient opportunities for
growth, making transparency in leadership, and engaging employees in the team making.
In short, the best way to improve rate of employee engagement may very well be to engage
employees.
Recommendations
Several recommendations are mentioned below for all the three initiatives taken by the
company in order to improve overall performance of the business –
 In the performance related initiatives, one of the major initiative taken by Deloitte was
increasing the capability of employee to make them passionate towards the work.
Passion is important for organization but the employer or team leader also need to
motivate the workforce so as to create the climate of great offer, self-development,
learning, and collaboration. The company also need to incorporate policy where
employee can get help via supportive colleagues and this will also help in decreasing
obsessive passion.
 The company also took one culture related initiative based on five fundamental
principles. However, every culture in an organization is made of employee
relationships, value, trust and openness. In addition, strong relationships in the
workplace lead to a rise in effective communication and this is one of the most
significant aspects of any successful team. Also, an organization can invest more in
employee perks so that the employee gets individually involved in meeting the
organization goals effectively. These employee benefits can be any like company
happy hour, wellness programme or free snacks.
 For increasing the rate of employee engagement, the company has adopted a new
approach where the performance management system of the company is modified
from the old 360-degree feedback. One of the aspects is frequency, where the optimal
frequency of these new performance reviews should be weekly. Moreover, the best

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way to ensure frequency is to have consistent check-ins in relation with near-time
work originated by groups and team members. The company can also invest more in
technology as this will make employee tend to be interested in themselves – their
individual perceptions, attainments and effect.

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Conclusion
In conclusion, the performance management system that the organizations are looking to
implement will enable in satisfying the expectations of the employees and stakeholders in the
long period of time. The firm needs to follow and engage with all those initiatives in aligns to
the long-term vision of the business firm. More importantly, some new HR strategies were
also suggested so as to improve decision making process and enable employees to develop
their professional's skills in the long run.
At present, the company initiatives are well aligned with the dynamic and changing work
environment, however, in future, the company need to take various consideration for the
successful implementation and achievement of organization goals and mission.

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References
Brudan, A. (2010) Rediscovering performance management: systems, learning and
integration. Measuring Business Excellence, 14(1), pp.109-123.
Buckingham, M. and Goodall, A. (2015) Reinventing Performance Management [ONLINE]
Available from: https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management [Accessed
06/12/2018].
Cappelli, P. and Tavis, A. (2016) The performance management revolution. Harvard
Business Review, 94(10), pp.58-67.
Deloitte. (2017) Building a culture of continuous improvement in an age of disruption
[ONLINE] Available from:
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-
cons-continuous-improvement-052714.pdf [Accessed 05/12/2018].
Deloitte. (2018) Corporate Culture [ONLINE] Available from:
https://www2.deloitte.com/ch/en/pages/careers/articles/corporate-culture.html [Accessed
06/12/2018].
Hagel, J., Brown, S. J., Wooll, M. and Ranjan, A. (2017) If you love them, set them free
[ONLINE] Available from: https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/topics/talent/future-
workforce-engagement-in-the-workplace.html [Accessed 05/12/2018].
McCabe, S. (2018) Deloitte named to Fortune's 2018 'Change the World' list [ONLINE]
Available from: https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/deloitte-named-to-fortunes-2018-
change-the-world-list [Accessed 06/12/2018].
Peterson, J. (2018) Auditor Independence: Does the Gate-Keeper Function Retain Its
Value?. Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 37(1), pp.45-66.
Verschoor, C.C. (2007) Work-life balance, superior's actions strongly influence ethical
culture. Strategic Finance, 88(12), p.13.