Deloitte UK Responsible Business

The Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (DIIE) is an exclusive ten year partnership with the London Business School, which through its research, teaching and outreach activities, will enable our clients, people and wider society to access the latest Insights and tools needed to lead innovation within complex environments.The Deloitte Institute holds an annual programme of executive roundtable events in order to showcase the research arising from the Institute and to disseminate that research and its findings to a high level corporate audience.

An executive roundtable was held on January 30th led by Prof. Ioannis Ioannou and featuring Heather Hancock, Deloitte Managing Partner for Talent and Brand. The event was hosted by Sir Andrew Likierman and was attended by senior executives from major corporations and non-profits. In the video below, Ioannis and Heather summarise the roundtable discussion with Ioannis sharing some of his latest research on the drivers of corporate social innovation.

 “In this project we explore which organizations engage in social innovation and why they do so. Social innovation refers to those product, process or business model innovations that are specifically designed to synergistically generate economic as well as environmental and social good. Social innovation is powerful because it harnesses the full power of profit-seeking businesses to invest in opportunities that tackle the world’s most acute challenges (e.g. climate change and global warming). We hope to provide a better understanding of how social and environmental issues are increasingly becoming embedded in the firms’ business models and the drivers for this trend. We also examine whether, when and how such embeddedness creates economic, social and environmental impact.” Ioannis Ioannou, Assistant Professor, Strategy and Entrepreneurship

Claire Bench
Claire is Head of Community Investment at Deloitte, leading the firm’s major community and volunteering initiatives including our Skills and Education programmes and our support to social enterprise.

What an achievement! Everyone involved should be proud of raising over £1M for the British Paralympic Association (BPA), on a night when we were also celebrating the announcement of Deloitte continuing as title sponsor of our corporate cycling challenge Deloitte Ride Across Britain, and signing on as an official partner of the BPA through to the 2016 Paralympic Games.

On Tuesday I was fortunate enough to be invited to the BPA’s £1m Celebration. It was great speaking to Paralympian Craig McCann who is taking part in Deloitte Ride Across Britain (RAB) 2013 and hearing how the money raised made a difference to ParalympisGB in the London 2012 Games. Since 2006 we have been a dedicated partner of the BPA and through Deloitte RAB we surpassed our aim to raise £1m by 2013 a year early. In fact, over the last three years Deloitte RAB riders have pedalled almost 1,800,000 miles and raised £1,151,689 in total. If every pound equated to a mile, what has been raised would get us to Rio and back 200 times and to the moon and back almost 5 times (at least I was reliably told this fact anyway!).

After our firm’s transformational impact on disability sport in the UK before and during the London 2012 Paralympic Games and the now confirmed extended support, Deloitte is clearly showing our legacy commitment to ensure the disability sport movement in the UK continues to go from strength to strength to see even more medals won in Rio 2016.

From grass roots to gold medals, we’re also proud to be sustaining our backing for the British Paralympic Association, as their Official Partner, on their journey to the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games. This integral support, combined with funds raised through Deloitte RAB, will help the BPA maintain the momentum of ParalympicsGB, who won more medals at the London Games than ever before. We believe that it is the continued success of this team that will inspire the nation to think differently about disability.

Jess Ronan

Jess is a Disability Sport Marketing Executive at Deloitte

Reflecting on the many conversations I’ve had with clients, and others, this week, it’s clear that there is a definite sense of optimism compared to the position at the start of 2012.

The concerns of last year—particularly of a eurozone exit—have receded materially. Despite the continued low growth in Europe there is a definite feeling of greater resilience and a growing confidence that economies are improving, albeit slowly. I’ve also seen much greater recognition of the need for business leaders to have a stronger voice in making the case for responsible business.

Alongside client meetings, Davos has also again provided a good opportunity to engage with the media—with the BBC, the Telegraph and the Times all carrying interviews.

Today’s highlight, however, was the opportunity to join the British business leaders’ lunch. Having heard David Cameron speak yesterday, I was looking forward to Boris Johnson speaking. He delivered a tour de force in setting out an optimistic picture of London and, by extension, the UK’s continued place as a world leader. As you’d expect he didn’t waste the opportunity to make the case for a new airport in London! The accompanying photograph also shows that he became the second major political figure to enjoy our live scribe wall at Davos.

Day two started with a panel on ‘Fostering Entrepreneurial Innovation’ that included Barry Salzberg, Global CEO DTTL. It was a really great session that brought home just how hard it is to embed disruptive innovation into a large organisation.

A lot of the discussion, though, was about product innovation and there was less about service innovation— which I see as key to our future success.

The role of innovation in creating more sustainable growth has been one of the main themes at Davos today. It means our own focus on the role of leaders, the creation of an environment to foster innovation, and the importance of paying attention to the societal benefits of innovation, has been hugely topical.

Deloitte has also opened an online forum at Davos that allows anyone to share their ideas on business, innovation and its impact on society. The best ideas are being transcribed onto a live scribe wall. You should see a picture on the right of both the wall and a very recognisable face. I’ve enjoyed seeing a small slice of our market leading collaboration facility, the iZone, transplanted into the Swiss mountains.  I would encourage you to share your ideas on innovation through this online forum.  

Thankfully the snow in London thawed sufficiently and I was able to fly to Zurich last night for the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos.

I always look forward to Davos. The concentration of CEOs creates a fantastic opportunity to meet and share insights with the leaders of some of our largest clients. Over the next two and a half days I’ll meet with ten CEOs. This is something that you can’t schedule in such a compressed time at any other point in the year. I also find there is a real openness in the sharing of new ideas and challenges which is hugely valuable.

This morning we hosted a UK Futures breakfast for CEOs and CXOs. I was on a panel with leaders from Arup, London Business School, Markit Group and the Saïd Business School. Our point of view is that the UK punches below its weight in growth markets such as China, India and others. At the moment these 20 growth markets account for only 16 per cent of the UK’s trade, while the US and Europe remain its main trading partners.

There is no point in criticising the past. Our proposition is that we are now at an exciting inflection point. With a rapidly developing middle class and widespread urbanisation the needs of these growth economies are moving from transport, heavy industry and infrastructure to looking for skills and expertise in knowledge-intensive industries such as technology, education, and business and professional services. This is an area of real strength for UK plc – previously we have just had the wrong sort of things to export.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the panel session as part of a day-long Social Impact Workshop. It was hosted by Deloitte UK and attended by many of the Deloitte Social Innovation Pioneers—a programme that is working with 30 socially innovative businesses, providing them with a bespoke package of Deloitte support to help them mainstream and become investment-ready.  

During the session, a significant part of the discussion revolved around how social businesses can demonstrate their impact in society with rigour and consistency. Someone from the floor made the very insightful remark that (to paraphrase) 'Surely this impact measurement stuff is only going to work and have real value if all businesses measure their performances in this way, not just ‘social businesses’. He took the words right out of my mouth.

I am part of a DTTL team that, along with clients and partners from other industries and sectors, is trying to ‘reimagine business’ and look again at the purpose of business. Can we recalibrate the contribution that our core business activities make to global society? At its most fundamental, isn’t business, hasn’t it always been, and shouldn’t it always be about building society?

I'm sitting on the train home thinking of the topic I will blog about - diversity networks. What purpose do they really serve and are they worthwhile?  Looking around the carriage, there are so many different people, and I wonder if any of them belong to a diversity network or group?

Working in the City, I believe having diversity networks within the workplace is important, because people should feel a part of or have an affinity to something – whether it’s a shared sense of purpose, or an opportunity to connect with like-minded people.

At Deloitte, where I work, we have nine diversity networks which cover faith, multicultural, lesbian gay bisexual and transgender (LGBT), parents and carers, and disability & mental health. With more than 4,000 members combined, our networks help to build bridges between Deloitte employees and communities outside the firm.  Supported at partner level, each of the networks has a leader, and group who help manage the network, volunteering their spare time to create an inclusive workplace culture.

Having completed sixth form in 2011, my year group was the last class to pay £3k per year to study for a degree. Some may see this as lucky as the unfortunate ones an academic year behind us would be indebting themselves treble that amount. However that wasn’t enough to persuade me to accept the offer and pack my bags for university.

The state of the UK economy has made it very difficult for young people to be able to fund themselves for university and find paid jobs. Having taking that into consideration, I unleashed what I like to call my ‘inner-fearless-risk taker’ and set out on a mission to find myself a full time job. If I wasn’t working for Deloitte today I’d either be piling up the debt of university and drowning in books or struggling to find my feet in the world of work with the 957,000 other 16-24 year olds in the UK who were unemployed in June-August 2012 (source: ONS).

The face of corporate charity partnerships has changed dramatically over the last 10 years.   

Partnerships no longer reflect out-of-tune carol singers knocking doors and expecting cash from disgruntled and semi interested householders, who in turn just want to be seen to be ‘doing the right thing’ by handing over cash. They’re much more about mutual satisfaction - businesses want to support charities to sing in tune, they want to invite them in to practice and they want to support them on the next doorstep when the song being sung for them has finished. Charities want to know what types of songs will open the corporate door and want to still be feeling the effects from the first house when they’re five houses down the street.

But enough analogies for now...

Deloitte is in the process of nominating new charity partners for the next three years. Charities we hope to have a real and lasting impact with – like we have had with our existing partners. For the last three years we have had phenomenal success with our National Charity Partners, Cancer Research UK, Help for Heroes and CHILDREN with CANCER UK. In total, we have raised more than £1.8m, provided more than 3,000 hours of pro-bono support and over 2,000 volunteers have been engaged across a range of projects, activities and initiatives. Whilst these numbers are impressive it’s the stories behind them that show the real impact we have had.        

In October we unveiled our SANE Black Dog statue, to celebrate Deloitte’s commitment and ongoing campaign to support staff mental health and wellbeing. 

We are working with the charity SANE to help reduce stigma around mental health and to encourage our staff to come forward to tame their ‘Black Dog’.  One in four people will be affected by a mental health issue. It is clear from our people at Deloitte that many of our best and brightest could at some point in their career suffer.

We currently have a SANE Black Dog in the reception area for all our people and visitors to see.  Nomi the dog is part of an on-going programme we have created to make mental health in the workplace something staff can discuss openly, and get help for.