Deloitte: New Hire Resource Center (NHRC) for Tax Professionals
Every year, Deloitte Tax welcomes more than 2,000 new hires to both its U.S. and U.S.-India practices. Some come directly from college and others bring years of experience. Deloitte Tax Talent Development believes robust onboarding is a key enabler for success —both preparing new hires for their first client projects and positioning them for their careers.
In 2016, Deloitte Tax Talent Development launched the NHRC for Deloitte’s Tax professionals. The NHRC offers a “high-tech” onboarding experience that complements Deloitte’s “high-touch” new hire programs. This combined “high-tech/high-touch” approach is more efficient and effective than traditional onboarding programs.
Program Details
Personalized, comprehensive, and available 24/7, the NHRC empowers Tax new hires to become self-sufficient from Day One.
The NHRC’s resources cover the gamut of topics—from Deloitte’s strategy to day-to-day work processes and tools. The NHRC personalizes these resources based on each new hire’s profile, so new hires easily find the content most relevant to their specific needs.
The site has two views—a Category View and a Timeline View—both of which offer the same resources, just organized differently. Users can switch between the two views at any time.
New hires can “Favorite” resources to keep them top of mind. In addition, they can “Like” or “Share” resources— these social elements benefit all.
The NHRC helps Tax new hires more quickly be able to:
- Apply knowledge of Deloitte Tax strategy and solutions to serve clients
- Employ the Tax processes, tools, and technology for their applicable service line
- Effectively perform client engagement job responsibilities and daily tasks
- Build a strong internal network of coaches, peers, and team members
- Leverage leading practices to cultivate and maintain strong client relationships
- Proactively manage their career development and performance
- Connect and collaborate with fellow practitioners
The NHRC is an integral part of the Tax360° Talent Development Center. Tax360° is the central hub that reflects Deloitte’s holistic approach to development. It offers opportunities along the entire spectrum from on-the-job performance support to formal learning programs.
Application of the NHRC content to impact performance is reinforced in three ways:
- Bi-weekly check-ins w ith team leaders: These checkins feature developmentally focused performance conversations, including how the new hires have applied what they learned and how they can develop further.
- Curriculum reinforcement: The NHRC was built as the foundation for practitioner development, as all learning solutions use onboarding as their first step in the curriculum scaffold. All other development offerings beyond the NHRC onboarding experience serve to reinforce the learning.
- NHRC as ongoing knowledge management tool: The NHRC is available to all Deloitte Tax professionals, whether a new hire or an experienced practitioner. While the primary focus is to support new hires in their first months, any Deloitte Tax professional can refer to the NHRC at any time during their tenure at the firm.
Results
While the NHRC has only been recently deployed, Deloitte has seen an impact in two key areas:
- Enhanced new hire onboarding experience: The NHRC has replaced the proverbial “fire hose” of information. Giving new hires on-demand access to the NHRC resources has allowed them to onboard at a more manageable pace to optimize application and performance.
- Increased practitioner capabilities and near-term performance: With on-demand access and greater self-sufficiency, Tax new hires are “clientready” sooner and to a greater degree than before. This has enhanced the level of service Deloitte provides to its clients, improved how it runs its projects, and increased both individual and team engagement and performance.
PwC: New Manager Experience
Developing “leaders who build the future” represents an integral component of the PwC talent strategy. PwC is focused on equipping leaders at every level with the skills to deliver on the firm’s purpose of building trust in society and solving important problems, while executing the firm’s strategy now and into the future. To enhance people’s readiness to meet these challenges, PwC transformed its annual U.S. new client service manager training to accelerate the development of these key leadership skills.
Continuing goals include:
- Recognize the significance of this career milestone achievement
- Empower new client service managers to deliver highquality work while also coaching and developing others and assuming increased responsibility to help drive the firm’s strategy.
Building upon these goals, PwC’s enhanced learning experience equips new managers to:
- Quickly build high-trust relationships
- Navigate difficult interactions
- Inspire confidence to effectively lead across organizational, cultural, economic, environmental, and technological differences
Program Details
The New Manager Experience (NME) delivery model has been transformed from a two-day, in-person, instructor-led training to a 100 percent virtual experience that blends one-to-one leadership coaching, peer-driven dialogue, and streamlined content that addresses frequent challenges new managers encounter. The U.S. firm’s Leadership Coaching Center of Excellence (LC CoE), which acts as a key enabler of PwC’s talent strategy, was responsible for delivering the program for last year’s promotion class of 2,000 new client service managers, and helped design and pilot the enhanced program. The LC CoE consists of 24 professional coaches who collectively completed thousands of hours of leadership coaching and rigorous coach training accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF).
The new design features 90 minutes of one-to-one leadership coaching for each participant, a psychometric assessment debrief, and six hours of small group coaching sessions live through Web Ex technology.
- Each of the 24 leadership coaches in PwC’s LC CoE facilitates and coaches up to eight cohorts (up to 120 new managers) over two eight-week periods.
- Each session includes interactive dialogue and meaningful exercises, such as suggested reading and workplace activities to apply learnings. The LC CoE coach guides the conversation to create opportunities for role-play, peer/group coaching, and/or facilitated conversation.
- As part of PwC’s culture of applying real-time feedback, each session is followed by a participant survey. Rather than waiting for a post-program evaluation, each LC CoE coach incorporates relevant feedback into the following sessions. Each session evolves with the feedback, further customizing and enhancing each group experience.
- Once participants complete the experience, they are offered the support of a “ Mobile Coach,” which provides a customized, virtual coaching extension to help reinforce and apply key takeaways. Through these dynamic conversations, Mobile Coach engages managers with content, supportive reminders, and accountability triggers that help them take action on their commitments.
All LC CoE coaches completed a three-day certification training for the psychometric assessment debrief readiness and approximately 20 hours of virtual train-the-trainer sessions. The sessions resulted in readiness for content delivery, virtual presence, and various technology platforms to access resources and tools. In addition, each LC CoE coach was required to practice coaching and facilitation delivery through live role-play simulations, receiving real-time feedback based on a coach readiness assessment rubric. New managers also were involved in the pilot experience and train-the-trainer to provide real-time feedback on content relevance and delivery impact.
Results
NME is currently in its second wave of delivery. Both quantitative and qualitative data have been gathered from new managers through impact surveys:
- 90 percent of the learners gained something they considered useful from the session.
- More than 90 percent of the learners are applying elements of what they learned on the job.
- Greater than 85 percent of the learners look forward to each session.
As for the business impact, PwC has seen:
- More than $1.4 million budget leverage due to virtual delivery (vs. in person) and by deploying internal leadership coaches (vs. external contract facilitators). The LC CoE is utilized across multiple platforms, effectively leveraging the group from both a cost and hours perspective.
- More rapid, more intentional development in less time. Each new manager is spending 7.5 hours in this experience vs. the previous year’s investment of 18.5 hours per new manager, giving them more time to serve their clients and teams, while still benefiting from thoughtful and intentional development.
- Anticipated future time savings. PwC forecasts saving more than 2,400 hours (a combination of human capital support and client service support hours) due to new manager readiness to deal with a broader range of issues in their first year.
