The rules of engagement

Case study on how The Virtual Works Enterprise 2.0 technologies have helped Deloitte Southern Africa overcome the obstacles that typically frustrate employee engagement initiatives and win the battle for the hearts and minds of its people.

The professional services industry is extremely competitive and a firm’s success is highly dependent upon its human capital, its people. This is a reality that Deloitte Southern Africa, a leader in professional services, has always been keenly conscious of.

“We focus on talent attraction and retention,” confirms Deloitte’s chief operating officer, Allen Swiegers, “we don’t manufacture anything, so our people are our main competitive advantage.”

Although Deloitte had already launched a programme to connect employees to the firm’s shared values, the firm decided to look for a fresh way to genuinely involve employees in the strategy and progress of the business. The new programme, entitled “Deloitte Way 2010 - our journey of excellence”, was officially launched in June 2007.

“Through a benchmarking survey, our staff told us they needed to know what was expected of them individually and to feel their feedback was being listened to,” explains Swiegers, “which presented us with our first challenge: how to engage and converse with 3,600 people in 16 offices around Southern Africa in a meaningful, interactive way?”

Asking the tough questions
To overcome this obstacle and ensure the programme engaged employees in a way that was both personal and relevant, the firm appointed innovative community management specialists, The Virtual Works.

“What The Virtual Works did very successfully was to ask the tough questions and find out precisely what staff at every level of the organisation really needed,” clarifies Swiegers. “They then married those needs to their Quotient system - an intelligent suite of Enterprise 2.0, interactive communication tools that uses the internet and cell phones - to connect every employee to our strategy in a personally relevant way.”

Fewer posters, more personalisation
“Personalisation is vital to the success of any employee engagement initiative,” agrees Jonathan Hall, chief executive officer of The Virtual Works. “Because it is human nature to want to know what’s going on and what’s expected of me, the executive strategy needs to cascade down the organisation, sharing the context of the objectives with everyone and linking each employee’s role to the objectives. By making the strategy relevant to every employee and guiding the contribution required from every person, engagement happens.”

Hall argues that common responses like putting up more posters promoting the company’s values and sending out more motivational e-mails from the CEO,  rarely deliver meaningful results because such methods are one-way, top-down communication and are often ignored due to communication familiarity and fatigue.

“Quotient facilitates personal and relevant, two-way communication across large organisations because it can be dynamically customised and localised,” explains Hall. “It is a centralised system that can be fully localised to each country, region, office, team or individual within an organisation.”

Hall uses the example of a company’s values to illustrate his point. “A company may have a great catch phrase like ‘always delivering exceptional service’ as part of its values, but what does that actually mean to me as a filing clerk in a regional office? Quotient allows the translation of that phrase into definite deliverables for that specific role, as well as the actual language of that country or region.”

Private dashboards for every employee
Quotient employs a bundle of Enterprise 2.0 technologies to give every individual within the organisation their own private and unique dashboard, a browser-based interface that displays messages and information, and provides users with a suite of tools to engage with the strategy and leaders.

Another distinguishing feature of the system is its ability to interact precisely with individuals or groups of individuals at high speed. “We have created what we call a ‘hive’ structure within the system,” enthuses Hall, “which allows us to cluster individuals together any way the enterprise needs to. This, coupled with Quotient’s configurable Web 2.0 intelligence, makes it possible to target precise audiences and distribute information to the whole or any part of the community, sending and receiving messages between dashboards, inboxes and cell phones automatically and instantaneously.”

Performance benchmarks
The system provides employees with the tools to measure their own contributions to the strategic drivers relevant to their specific role. These self-regulating metrics then aggregate up through the organisation, allowing staff to benchmark themselves against their team or business unit and management to gauge the organisation’s perception of its own performance. These measurements are then made available via Quotient’s dashboards and give the CEO - as well as leaders and teams throughout the firm - the necessary data/feedback to see how well strategy is being implemented across the business at any time.

“We are also witnessing phenomenal levels of this type of engagement,” notes Swiegers. “Over 2,500 members of staff, nearly 70 percent, have already logged in and begun measuring their performance. Obviously, 100 percent engagement is the goal, but this is a fantastic milestone to reach within four months of launching the system.”

Credibility is critical
Swiegers attributes a large part of the Deloitte Way 2010 programme’s success to the credibility of the system. “Previous programmes were ad hoc and suffered from inconsistent selection criteria,” he explains, “but The Virtual Works helped us engineer a centralised framework that is much more objective, while flexible enough to offer significant customisation of operation at the local level.”

The Virtual Works system allows anyone in Deloitte to nominate a colleague they consider is making a significant contribution and explain why. The nominee then receives an SMS informing them of the nomination and the reasons stated. These nominations are then reviewed by a panel of their peers and, once approved, the system calculates and awards the recipient ‘points’ based on the weighting of their contribution.

Points are the units of measure used to rank employees’ contributions and select top performers monthly, quarterly, half yearly and annually. Employees also receive ‘points’ statements each month so they can personally benchmark their contributions against high, median and low levels.

The system gives every business division in every region complete discretion and flexibility on how to appreciate point earners in their teams.

“It’s already triggering quite a dramatic cultural shift,” observes Swiegers. “Now that we have this channel, we’re seeing leaders visibly acknowledging our people for their efforts and appreciating them. It is releasing a tangible positive impetus and energy.”

The acceptance and approval of the new system is reflected in the number of nominations being received. “It has simply taken straight off,” confirms Swiegers, “in just four months since the system was implemented - over 3,600 nominations had gone through the system.”

A self-stoking cycle
It is still early days, but Hall is confident that the system’s success will continue to grow. “When the right ingredients are in place, the cycle becomes self-stoking,” he explains. “The more previously invisible efforts are recognised, the more staff feel valued and will engage. This, in turn, arms management with more feedback and metrics (for example, the top point earners each month) to act upon and so the momentum grows and the new culture gets inculcated.”

The Deloitte Way 2010 programme is an excellent example of how Enterprise 2.0 technologies can help forward-thinking businesses overcome the obstacles that typically frustrate employee engagement objectives.

“Quotient makes it easy to connect people, share information and communicate backwards, forwards, up, down and around companies at high speed,” concludes Hall, “a benefit that savvy organisations can exploit to gain decisive advantage in the new strategic frontier: the battle to win more of the hearts and minds of the company’s people than competitors.”
 
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