Accenture: driving HR with technology

Ellyn Shook, Global Managing Director, Rewards, Performance and Career Management at Accenture explains how technology is accelerating the HR function at and bringing coherence to the consulting firm’s international workforce.

From a HR perspective, what are the most important components of the culture at Accenture?

Ellyn Shook. The most important components of the culture at Accenture are really several fold.  First, our relentless focus on client service. We are about our clients and serving our clients and being client-centric. Having everyone focused on helping our clients become high-performance businesses is a real central theme about our culture.

Second, I think that one thing that differentiates us is really having teaming and collaboration at the heart of who we are.  Teaming and collaborative behaviors really evidence themselves very clearly as we serve our clients through a global footprint and a global delivery network. We work across virtual environments to serve our clients successfully and having teaming and collaboration at our heart has really helped us be successful and really been an important part of our culture.

What role does technology play in building culture and managing the workforce on a global scale?

ES. Technology is a really important component of managing a global, virtual workforce, and we’re pretty good at it. We have a lot of tools that help our people collaborate. For example, we have real-time video conferencing available to us so we can to meet on a real-time basis, even for very small meetings, so that we can work on any issues.

We also have desk-to-desk video. Instead of picking up the phone and calling somebody, I can literally video into you and we can see each other. When your team is global and you’re dealing with clients that are truly global, you may have never met each other in person. Being able to see your face and see your reactions to the discussion is important.

We also have technologies that allow us to share our desktop. If we’re in a meeting, a virtual meeting with five people, 10 people or 20 people, we can all see the same document and work on it dynamically at the same time. By having those technology tools available to us, it really creates a sense of team in a very virtual network.

Exactly how do you employ technology to reinforce culture among your globally dispersed workforce?

ES. At the heart of our culture are our core values. We’ve defined behaviors and actions that we believe will demonstrate core values and we have some really simple but powerful tools to help us reinforce that.  For example, we have a recognition program called Thank a Colleague and literally instantaneously, if you see someone demonstrating one of the core values or the behaviors that we expect of our leaders at all levels, you can immediately send a thank you card letting them know you’ve seen them demonstrate that behavior on a very real-time basis doing the work that they do every day.  And having simple but powerful tools like that that reinforce what we want to see in our culture really helps us bring that culture to life all around the world.

The beauty of that kind of recognition program really is its simplicity. People get very excited when they get a Thank a Colleague card from somebody that maybe they haven’t even met, but who really helped them deliver value to the client or demonstrated integrity in some way. All of a sudden they get this thank you card at their desktop from someone that said, “Hey, I saw you,” or “I knew you did this.”  It really makes people feel good and connected.

Training is one of the areas where technology is having the largest impact. How is Accenture using technology to help its people develop and grow within the organization?

ES. We’ve certainly adapted our training and we make a huge investment in capability development and training for our people. In fact, last year we spent $800 million on training our people and we really push it on multiple levels. All of our professionals get what we call core training, which is the basics for doing their job, and then we move on to very individualized training depending on the needs or the aspirations of the person. 

We deliver training in a variety of different ways. We have three physical training locations, one in the US, one in the UK and one in Malaysia.  We can physically go and meet as a team and be trained, but we also deliver training through our Accenture training portal called My Learning. We now have our training available to us on our mobile devices. Because we are a culture on the move, I think it’s one of the best things that we’ve done.

The other day, I was headed to the airport to fly to New York and I wanted to take some of my core training. So I pulled out my BlackBerry, accessed and did my training, took my proficiency test and sent it back to central training. I enjoyed doing it and I got it done in a very efficient way.

Having the flexibility to train that way must be really useful, is it something that permeates throughout the organization, not just at executive or management levels?

ES. It really does because at the core of our employee value proposition are opportunities to learn and grow, so we believe ourselves to be a very strong learning culture and as a result, people want to do their training. They want to have access to it. In addition to the classroom learning and the portal and being able to access your training on your mobile device, we deliver it in many other ways, as well.  If you’re someone who likes to listen to your iPod, you can download your training on a podcast.  You can read your training if you don’t want to listen to it.

What we’ve done is we have not build a one-size-fits-all approach. We’ve really tried to connect with people and find out the way they learn best or the way that they need to access our training and capability development. As a result we get very high grades from our people through our employee survey on our training and development.

Speaking of development, do you believe that it’s possible to teach leadership or is it something innate?

ES. I think that you can teach leadership as a science but I don’t think you can teach someone to be a leader. There are things that all of us can learn to be better leaders but I don’t think that all of us can be great leaders. Really I anchor back to three things that our CEO says all the time, competence, confidence, and caring, and it’s really all about that.  It’s really building deep competence in your area of expertise; having the confidence to go out and serve your clients and your people; and really caring, caring about your people, helping them learn and grow, and caring about your shareholders.  So if you really can master the three C’s, I think you can be a great leader.

Finally, what advice would you give to other HR professionals reading if they want to move their careers forward?

ES. If you aspire to be a more senior HR leader in your organization or elsewhere, really going back to those three C’s can help you. So first, of course you have to be a competent HR person.  That’s the basic, but to be a really great HR leader, you have to be as competent in understanding your business as you are in the business of HR.  Because without that, you really aren’t valuable to your CEO and to the most senior leaders in your organization sitting at the table helping to drive business strategy. You need to understand your business in order to do that.  So that’s the first thing.  Know your business, not just HR.

Then you need to have the energy and the courage to really state what you believe, to have a point of view about your work and your world and your business and express it clearly.  And finally, really keep the interests of your people on the table and at the forefront. Especially in a business like Accenture, where our business is our people, our people’s interests really need to be at the top of our mind in order for us to be able to serve our clients.

Beam me up

We’re always innovating around technology that can help us collaborate. A new and interesting thing that we’re working on in the Accenture technology labs is something we’re calling Team Beam.  And what that really is stitching together, all of those technology and collaboration tools that we have to create one integrated set of tools so that we can combine the virtual desktop, the video, the voice together so that we can create truly a team room without it being anywhere physically near each other. The Team Beam is just going to bring all of our tools to the next level so that anywhere you are, whether you’re home or in an office environment or at your client’s site or sitting in an airport lounge, you can really literally connect and feel like you’re sitting in that conference room when you’re really not.

Accenture by numbers

• More than 181,000 employees
• Offices in 200 cities in 52 different countries
• Revenues of $21.58 in 2009