Is Empowerment the Key to a Successful Workforce?

Articles

Published 22 February 2018

Accenture India shares how they motivate their workforce to adopt a mind-set of continuous improvement.

The steps to create an empowered and successful workforce

Accenture believes that the key to building an empowered and successful workforce is to provide a motivating environment for people where expectations are clear, people can focus on their strengths, have sense of belonging and purpose, and continuously learn and grow.

At Accenture we enable this environment by:

Focusing on Performance Achievement: An innovative strength-based continuous review system, focused on frequent coaching and forward-looking conversations. This engenders more freedom and a higher level of trust in employees, facilitating better performance and growth.
Building a Truly Human Experience: Helping our employees bring their whole self to work, being mentally focused, physically energised, and fostering feeling a sense of purpose and belonging.
Prioritising Inclusion & Diversity: Accenture celebrates diversity in all forms – cross-cultural, gender and abilities. We believe that a diverse workforce brings diverse ideas thus enriching the value we create for our clients and drive innovation.
Strengthening our Leadership DNA: We invest in building leaders at all levels, so we can create value in a constantly changing work environment, and lead our diverse and millennial workforce to be successful in the future.
Building a culture of Learning Agility: Learning is not an annual agenda for Accenture, but is a continuous process. We identify next horizon skills to enable our people to stay on top of the curve and invest in cutting edge connected learning infrastructure to deliver learning at scale.
Keeping HR agile: We constantly relook at our policies and workforce models to address the needs and aspirations of our people, and strengthen our technology infrastructure to provide a hyper- personalised experience for our millennial workforce.

Encouraging high performers without discouraging non-high performers

Accenture has moved away from the traditional concept of using a bell curve or pre-set guidelines to determine cut-offs for “high performance” and “non-performance”. Accenture follows a strengths-based approach, which enables every individual to understand their strengths and teach them to apply these at work. The process also provides an opportunity for leaders to strengthen their own coaching skills, as they get involved in regular forward-looking conversations with their people.

What makes a motivated employee

People are truly motivated when they feel their work is important, and their contribution is valued.

We provide a motivating environment for people where expectations are clear, people can focus on their strengths, have a sense of belonging and purpose, and continuously learn and grow.

We are also focused on creating a Truly Human experience for our people, helping them develop a ‘Sense of Purpose’ at work, a ‘Sense of Belonging’ with the team and organisation, while feeling ‘Mentally Focused’ and ‘Physically Energized’ to perform at their best every day.

How to encourage continuous improvement

Accenture does not rank employees or use the traditional concept of bell curve or other pre-set guidelines to label people as high performers and low-performers for performance improvement. We believe that everyone has a unique set of strengths and continuous improvement can be ensured only when employees understand their strengths and can apply them to their work, ad when they get regular coaching to address opportunities for performance improvement. Our performance achievement focus enables this.