Create a good environment
The wants and needs of a good job candidate would seem to follow logic. It’s
what just about every worker wants:
competitive pay, solid benefits, a healthy
work environment, and a chance for raises and promotions.
But the best job candidates look for
something else, and Taylor says it’s the
first thing you should offer them. The
best candidates want assignments and
responsibilities that match their talent
and experience.
As the leader, it’s your responsibility to
find those challenges and keep them
coming.
“You want to match what they can do
but also stretch them,” she says. “That’s
what most people who come to Deloitte
are looking for, but we have to continue
to find those opportunities. It might be
fairly early opportunities to lead teams or
opportunities to look at more than one
client at a time or new industries. That’s
what makes for a great environment.”
Taylor has also emphasized the need to
develop mentoring opportunities for
new employees. At Deloitte, management
tries to custom fit the opportunities at
the financial service firm to the career
path each employee would like to follow.
“Employees are looking for mentoring
and interest in them, interest in their
careers,” Taylor says. “One of the things
we’re focused on is how do we customize what they want from a career
experience to fit their current needs.
Everybody has different phases in both
life and work experience, and we look at
how we can match their energy, interest,
developmental needs and abilities to
what we can offer.”
Deloitte developed the concept on a
large scale in the 1990s with the rollout
of the company’s women’s initiative, a
program that focused on what Deloitte
would need to attract and retain female
employees.
Taylor wasn’t a big fan of the initiative
when it was first introduced in 1993.
“I was already a partner, and my first
reaction was, ‘Oh, please don’t single out
the women,’” she says. “The last thing I
wanted to be was more visible. At the
time, I had twins who were about 2 years
old, so I felt kind of visible already, and I
didn’t want any more highlighting of the
challenges that might be out there. I had
gone to engineering school, so it wasn’t
new to me to be one of the few women.”
But as Taylor and other executives at
Deloitte looked into the subject, they
found the company needed to make
some changes in how it addressed the
needs of female employees.
“We were hiring much like other companies, women at a 50 percent rate of
our total hiring for over 10 years,” she
says. “It’s the same amount of time it
takes to get into the partnership, and
women were less than 5 percent of the
population of partners.
“So I had thought that women hadn’t
been in the work force for as many years
on a consistent basis to advance. But
what we found out was that most
women who left us were not leaving the
work force. There were a lot of myths
about what was happening. The end
result was that there were a lot of programs and initiatives created at that time
that changed our culture and made it a
much better place for both men and
women, more family-friendly and more
flexibility, more focused on personal
choices around career demands.”
The results of the women’s initiative
helped Deloitte’s leaders shape a more
well-rounded approach to meeting
employee needs.
“Our female workers loved serving
clients and the work we did, but we just
didn’t have some of the other things they
were looking for in a work environment,
so they were going other places where
they saw more women advancing.”
