Managing Diversity for Competitive Advantage at Deloitte and Touche

In 1992 Deloitte& Touche was celebrating the tenth year in which approximately 50% of it’s new hires were women. Because it takes nearly ten years to become a partner, The Big Six Accounting firm was now sitting back waiting for all the women in the pipeline to start making bids for partnership.

But something unexpected happened. Instead of seeing an increase in the number of women applying for partnership, Deloitte & Touche saw a decline. Talented women were leaving the firm and this represented a huge drain of capable people. In a knowledge –intensive business such as theirs, this problem went beyond social consciousness. The success of the firm was at stake, they could not lose valued partners.

To address the problem, the company formed the Task Force, on Retention and Advancement of Women to pinpoint the reason women were leaving. The task force conducted a massive information gathering initiative, interviewing women at all levels of the company, even contacting women who had left the firm. The task force uncovered three main areas of compliant:

1. A work environment that limited opportunity for advancement

2. Exclusion from mentoring and networking.

3. Work and family issues.

The networking and mentoring concerns seemed to be the most troublesome. In a male dominated business, men often network, sometimes to the exclusion of women. To tackle this problem, Deloitte & Touche retooled the work environment. It made changes such as a renewed commitment to flexible work arrangements, reduced workload and flexitime. The firm also developed plans for company sponsored networking and formal career planning for women. In addition, the firm’s 5000 partners and managers attended two day workshops called ‘Men and Women as Colleagues’ at a price to the company of approximately $3 million.+

The results have been terrific. Retention of women at all levels has risen, turnover rates for senior managers (just before making partner) have been...