Talent Management - December 2008 - (Page 49)

the programs. We listen to our people that are here, to people that have left, to recruits and to people in our potential recruiting pools. We have found that the work people do and the development of their skills, for the people we hire, that is the No. 2 distinction. We don’t ignore the other things, but we focus on that career experience, the types of work they do, the opportunities for growth and development, the kinds of roles we give people that are more junior, how we challenge and stretch them. Those are the things we strive to maintain as we go to the market. We start building those leadership behaviors from day one through a variety of learning initiatives. We have leadership training throughout your career, specially focused programs for our senior managers, senior executives, cultural leadership programs in different geographies and a program on leading a diverse workforce. It’s one of the things that differentiates us. TM: Smart: How does Accenture develop organizational culture and employee attitudes? We have six core values, and some of our core values are so embedded, so penetrated and pervasive. For example, my favorite core value is stewardship. It’s your job to leave Accenture a better place than when you came into it. Most of it comes from example: Your leaders teach you. But we do some more proactive things. For example, every person belongs to a community. They’re usually around 100 people, and they’re local. I belong to a community in Chicago, and we have quarterly meetings to talk about a variety of strategic initiatives in the ﬁrm. We talk about where we might be headed. We do civic and philanthropic activities together. We make it so that while you’re out there traveling in airports and at client sites being part of their teams, you come back home to this community. Those have proven to be very valuable. We also do a lot of blogging, podcasts, town-hall calls and webcasts. The touch and feel remains important to maintain that culture. It starts with objectives. Every person gets objectives set that cascade down from our strategy. But for every role, we have performance factors. Those reﬂect the job responsibilities and challenges they face, the behaviors they’re required to have. The performance factors and the objectives are used at the end of our ﬁscal year to evaluate you. Every one of our 180,000 people has a career counselor. That person is responsible for helping you manage and navigate your career. That person might or might not be your boss. That career counselor stays with you — some people have the same one their whole career — and looks at the feedback from the different projects you worked on, or they gather feedback from all the people you worked with. You’re evaluated on did you meet or exceed those objectives and how you measure up to those performance factors. TM: Smart: How does Accenture measure workforce performance? We have the Accenture career experience. Because our talent is our product, we can’t waver here. It isn’t me coming up with TM: Smart: What programs does Accenture have to attract, recruit and retain the best talent? We go back to the drawing board each year to make sure we’re on top of market relevancy. That’s base pay, performance pay, company and individual performance, equity opportunities, beneﬁts. That varies by your skill base and by geography. We also have special programs. For example, we have the ﬂexibility to respond to new market conditions with our hot skills payment. If SAP software skills is hot in most countries or is in short supply, we may institute a hot skills payment for that. TM: Smart: What compensation and incentive practices do you use to manage talent? December 2008 Insight continued on page 53 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com 49 http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - December 2008

Talent Management - December 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Foundations Recruitment & Retention Assessment & Evaluation Compensation & Benefits Performance Management Learning & Development Succession Planning Insight Dashboard Application Advertiser's Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - December 2008

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