Corporate and Social Responsibility: Building Trust Between People and a Brand – Accenture

Harsimrat Singh Sachdeva

Professor Peter M. Burrell

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law

October 7, 2015

Building Trust between People and a Brand – Accenture

        Acting in an ethical way involves distinguishing between “right” and “wrong” and then making the “right” choice. It is easy to identify unethical business practices however it is not so easy to create such hard-and-fast definitions of good business ethics. Company should give competitive returns to its shareholders and at the same time be good to its employees. Company should also minimize any harm to the natural environment and to the communities in which it operates. Ethical behavior brings significant benefits to a business. Some of them are:

• Makes employees more loyal towards the business, therefore ensuring that employees stay for long time with the business and also attracts more employees thus increasing the company’s talent
• Attracts more customers towards the business thus increasing their sales.
• As ethical companies tend to be more stable, it attracts more investors to the company.

I worked for almost 3 years for Accenture and by far I would regard it as most ethical company, I have worked for. When it comes to formal ratings, Accenture has always stayed near the top in the list of world’s most ethical businesses. As per their ethics code, “Operating with integrity every day is the Accenture Way”. Accenture has laid out set of six core values and every employee whether a junior developer or an executive at top position are bound to adhere by these values. These core values are:

1. Client Value Creation
2. One Global Network
3. Respect for Individual
4. Best People
5. Integrity
6. Stewardship

Whether it is employee rights, customer satisfaction or the social responsibility, Accenture does its best in all. Accenture has always ensured that it retains its employees who are the backbone of the company for long. The average employee tenure duration at Accenture is about 4.5 years, which is quite high as compared to other companies in the same industry. The leadership ensures that all the employees are treated as not just employees, but as the owners of the company. Unlike many other companies, even the junior most employees in the team have an equal say in even major decisions. This ensures that employees have a sense of being a very important part of the company which enhances loyalty towards the company in employees. Also there are various facilities or perks that are offered by Accenture to its employees. Accenture has tie ups with the child day care homes, which provides day care facilities for the small children of its employees at subsidized rates. Accenture’s desire for the welfare of its employees can be observed from the fact that when Accenture noticed that many of their female employees were facing an issue with length of Accenture’s paid maternity leave policy and were either quitting jobs or going on without pay leaves, Accenture leadership team decided to double the length of the maternity leave policy throughout its locations around the world. For example in US where the previous length of maternity leave was 8 weeks, it got increased to 16 weeks while in India it got increased from 12 weeks to 22 weeks. Apart from this employees were given an option of permanent work from home for certain time after the paid maternity or paternity leave was over.

Accenture is also regarded as one of the top paying companies in throughout the world especially in IT sector. Average salaries of the employees in Accenture is significantly higher than the average market salary. Apart from salary benefits, employees are offered several monetary awards to its employees in form of performance points which are equivalent to cash.

 When talking about customer satisfaction, Accenture is again a front runner in the field. Most of the company’s clients are long term client and are associated with Accenture since years. Accenture’s inclination towards client satisfaction and quality of work has made them world’s leading consulting company. Accenture’s management ensures that the commitments made to client are always kept and the services offered are within timelines. When it comes to strict deadlines, Accenture is preferred by the businesses over other companies as it is known to meet the quality within given timeline. Managers in Accenture are advised to allocate reserve resources to a project apart from the estimated resources to ensure that no project goes beyond deadline date.

Accenture after sales services are one of the best in industry. Accenture offers free after go live services for certain period of time to its clients for the services it offers in software industry. Also the stress on quality of software ensures that the product offered to client is bug free and satisfies all their needs. To ensure this, before the product goes to client’s QA team, Accenture has set up its own QA team which tests the software from client’s perspective to ensure that product satisfies all the requirements specified by the client. This ensures that not many alterations have to be made to the software after it is delivered to the client.

Today, Accenture’s reputation among its clients has earned it a spot in consulting industry where it can boast of having around 85 of the top 100 companies in fortune 500 list as its clients.

Accenture’s Corporate Citizenship commitments are anchored in their core values, their Code of Business Ethics and, ultimately, reflected in the actions of its people. Accenture and its employees work to make a sustainable and measurable difference to the communities in which they work and live. Accenture, throughout its locations around the world has set up a separate department called Corporate Social Responsibility group. This department is run by Accenture’s regular employees voluntarily as an extra responsibility from their regular duties. This team regularly takes initiatives like organizing various events like charity drives, fund raising within offices, collaborating with several NGO’s, arranging visits to local orphanages and old age homes. Throughout the world, Accenture allocates significant amount of funds to these teams, to give back the society in which they work.