Key takeaways | Accenture South Africa Best Practices

Top Employers Connect Best Practice Webinar in association with Accenture South Africa.

This informative session, held on 5 May 2021, was hosted by Billy Elliot, Regional Manager Africa, Top Employers Institute Africa, with guest speakers Keshnie Martin, HR Director and Caron Olivier, HR Service Delivery Lead, from Accenture Africa. The session highlighted how Accenture’s Talent Leaders focussed their strategy, approach and best practices in performance management. Being at the forefront of change and innovation, Accenture has moved away from the term Performance Management and changed the narrative to better connect with their employees using the term Performance Achievement.  

To watch the full webinar, fill in the form (on the right-hand side). Below are some key takeaways from the event:  

#Takeaway 1

How do we help the people of Accenture achieve their best performance?

With continuous research, experiment and enablement, Accenture’s Performance Experience journey is built in a way that reflects modern day HR. Following the roadmap from as early as 2014 which involved a 12-week research sprint, followed by early adoption in 2015, Accenture held 16 000 talent discussions and 4500 team experiments. Through this journey they shifted their focus and prioritised feedback and engagement from their employees.

#Takeaway 2

How does it work?

Accenture’s Leadership team continues to clearly define their business strategy, team purpose and goals, which were strongly aligned with their employees’ individual purpose and goals. Priorities, feedback and talent discussions were the focal points used to drive the Performance Achievement programme. Through continued efforts of collaboration, they were able to determine what action was needed for growth and how achieving them would translate into a healthy reward system.

#Takeaway 3

The importance of integrating technology.

Being at the frontier of innovation and building a high performing organisation, Accenture identified the importance of clearly defined HR best practices and driving a culture where employees become more proactive in setting up performance and development conversations with their managers. Accenture Leadership started having more meaningful conversations at regular intervals throughout the year, supporting their employees in achieving great performance. This was done using their technology which enabled their employee experience and made it easier for their employees.

#Takeaway 4

Why focus on strength?

With Accenture having built a strong foundation on leading a Top Employer organisation to work for, they can demonstrate the power of knowing their teams’ strengths and how investing in those skills helps amplify it. This has allowed Accenture to successfully build high-performing teams.

#Takeaway 5

The power of one, the power of many

With Accenture fully immersing themselves in delivering best practices within HR alongside their formula of priorities, strengths and engagement, makes their employees feel valued and proud to be part of high-performing teams. Accenture has recognised that acquiring the Top Employers Certification, is not about raising the numbers, but more about what the numbers raise.