The dramatic growth of Accenture’s outsourcing business involved internal cultural issues particularly concerning hiring and training a much more diversified workforce. “We’ve done the right thing by creating separate workforces and trying to engineer each of them differently to recognize and be relevant to the men and women who chose to work here,” Green said. “What’s before us now is how we rationalize that and bring us all together on one common agenda.” Accenture’s leadership focused on making up for ground lost during the recession. “On the one hand we did what we had to do to be good stewards of our business. “But we lost something in the area of skills, by reducing training budgets, and in personal connections and networking.”

New programs

In 2003 we established new budgets for training and fixed those issues. The group’s training budget may have been cut back sharply in 2002, much time was spent that year working on new curricula for Accenture’s leadership and other training programs.

The new courses were part of a concerted effort at Accenture to ensure that all our employees see themselves as being important citizens. It wasn’t the first time the company had made a dramatic shift in its hiring policy that would result in multiple workforces. In 1965, for example, the consulting practice made a dramatic break with tradition when, for the first time as a matter of policy, it recruited new hires without accounting training.

The company also introduced the Partner Career Management and Compensation program, a major change in the way partners managed their careers and how they were compensated. The program was a recognition that different partners have different capabilities and that Accenture needed to strengthen and maximize those different capabilities to achieve greater success for the company. As fiscal 2005 began, the company set the foundation for the Accenture Career Framework, a multiyear program designed to clarify the career paths and professional growth opportunities for all Accenture people, at all levels. The initiative was designed to clearly articulate and document what an employee in each of the workforces could expect in terms of career progression, type of work, rewards and training.

While renowned in the business world for the quality of its entry-level training, Accenture also began focusing on “leaders teaching leaders,” in which experienced partners teach leadership skills to younger partners, expanded in 2004 to include other executive levels. “We were trying to get back to the world in which we used to live of telling stories, because we sort of lost that storytelling mentality, which is crucial to getting the culture and values going.”

Reflecting Accenture’s growth in Asia to date, the company emphasized regional education in that part of the world. “We have to recognize that we have different [ethnicities], cultures and languages within this global company and we’ve got to recognize that more,” explained David Hunter. While English remained the global language of business, and of Accenture, the company realized that it needed to offer basic core training courses in the languages of the local populations it was hiring in Asia.

Diversity

Diversity of all kinds, including racial, gender and ethnic, needed to be promoted at every level within Accenture. The company, in order to continue to attract the best people and win the best clients, had to become as diverse as the global community in which it operated. Employees have expectations for us relative to diversity and inclusion. It’s getting harder and harder to sell work and to grow in an environment where we don’t present the same kind of face to our clients that they have within their organization, be it gender or ethnicity. This drive dovetailed with efforts to encourage and support the hiring and advancement of women at Accenture to open more career paths to women. Accenture also created women’s networks that could deal with the unique issues of women concerning advancement and retention.

While noting that more work needed to be done in this and all aspects of supporting diversity, Forehand said he was honored to accept the 2003 Catalyst Award on behalf of Accenture in recognition of its innovative approaches to recruiting and advancing women. At the start of fiscal 2005 there were 244 women partners, equal to 11 percent of Accenture’s 2,219 partners.