Remaining Competitive for Your Employees

In a large professional service firm, a nudged promotion system focused on an “inclusive culture in action” increased by 25% the proportion of happy and diverse talents. 

Challenge

When an incoming managing partner of a large global professional service firm inherits an organization in great shape with more than 3,000 people, how can he strengthen the company’s position and help it to grow to be even more diverse and inclusive to meet the expectations of its clients and shareholders?

Insights

We partnered with this company to help it retain more diverse and inclusive talents and become an industry leader. An important insight emerged from the analysis carried out: some of the traditional strengths in the organization's culture had been overplayed, and now represented weaknesses in terms of its new strategy. 

To improve talent promotion, delving deeply into the analytics, correlating the number of promotions with career trajectories, metrics and processes used to promote talents across the organization, we used a specific segmentation of the workforce and of the processes to calculate the likelihood that people in each position would “cross the aisle” and be promoted – and to assess what it took to make it happen.

To develop an inclusive leadership, we worked with the client to create and promote a collaborative workplace, by giving priority to actions that required a small amount of practice groups to work together, and then by selecting leaders from other practices group to head each initiative. Beyond the mere goal of the intervention, this further built collaborative and inclusive behaviors into the actual process of change and within the system.

Impact 

As early as after the first year, the number of diverse talents promoted increased by more than 25%, and this increase continued sustainably in the years to follow.

The firm further established a performance culture that enabled it to grow much faster than competitors and to steer a steady course through the talent war. The inclusivity and collaboration nudges that had been central throughout the change program, enabled the professional service to resolve problems that cut across processes and functions.