3.

3 Deloitte Human Capital Trends

Apart from the extensive research into PMM from academia, private businesses including those
in the consulting industry are also putting forth their ideas. At Deloitte, Buckingham and Goodall
(2015) argued that increasingly, companies’ current process of evaluating employee performance
that involved training, promoting and paying is out of sync with objectives, including those at
Deloitte. Deloitte’s public survey revealed 58% of executives believe their current performance
management approaches are failing to achieve employee engagement or high performance.

Accenture (2011) proposed that in the age of corporate sustainability, chief financial officers
place greater emphasis on a longer-term view of their role among others, investment appraisal of
climate change initiatives, performance management of environmental and social KPIs, and
sustainability reporting.

Deloitte’s mea culpa (Buckingham and Goodall 2015) led to changes in their performance
management system. 360-degree-feedback tools were dropped and instead a very different and
simpler tool was arrived at in managing performance. Capelli & Tavis (2016) argued 360
feedback is prone to gaming by employees to help or hurt colleagues especially in a cut-throat
corporate environment as it became a tool to push up or press down other employees.

Deloitte recognised their old PMM system consumed almost two-million man-hours across the
firm and decided ‘it didn’t fit their needs anymore’ (Capelli and Tavis 2016)

The defining features of Deloitte’s new system are speed, agility, one-size-fits-one, and constant
learning. Supporting these new hallmarks at Deloitte is a system for collecting reliable
performance data. Walsh & Volini (2017) outlined 10 human capital trends which stated
performance management (trend 5) is emerging from the experimentation stage from year-end
batch appraisal to continuous feedback.