Crowdsourcing Innovation from Within: How Deloitte’s 2020 Audit & Assurance Innovation Challenge is Helping Drive New Talent Models and Inclusivity

COVID-19 has upended just about every part of business as we know it, especially with regards to how it is affecting the future of work. Many organizations, having realized that the impacts of the pandemic are here to stay, are now focused on more than just supporting their employees in a virtual environment, and more broadly tackling how they can evolve their talent models to adapt to long-term shifts in how we work.

Enabling our professionals to succeed, both now and in the future, has been an ongoing strategic focus for Deloitte’s Audit & Assurance business, although it is something that has taken on urgent importance as a result of the pandemic. As such, our people strategy is evolving rapidly to support our professionals, driven by new and creative approaches that are helping us innovate a profession that by and large has followed the same tried and true processes for many years.

Despite the comfort we may find in traditional standby approaches, as a profession we are always looking to innovate. Since 2014, Deloitte has hosted an internal crowdsourcing competition for its audit and assurance professionals, called our Audit & Assurance Innovation Challenge. Prior year challenges have focused on identifying innovative tools and techniques to apply to the audit and sharing innovative ideas for new assurance service offerings, but this year’s was focused on how we can innovative the professional experience for our people—a rather fitting theme for the unusual year we are all experiencing, as well as an important opportunity to identify new ideas that can have a real and meaningful impact on our peoples’ lives and career development.

More specifically, this year’s challenge statement was as follows: How can we use innovation to be better, bolder, and more inclusive—so that we are catalysts of positive change for the evolving personal and professional needs of our people, so we can better serve the needs of our clients and communities?

To me, this year’s challenge is about two things. First, it’s about creating an opportunity to source new and creative ideas from our people that can further our business goals, evolve our talent model, and support our business strategy. It is also about taking time to reflect on what our professionals want in order to create a better experience for themselves at Deloitte, which is important considering that we implement the winning idea each year.

I have two observations from this year’s competition, which took place virtually – a first that I am very proud of.

First is that this year’s talent-focused ideas are going to be significant in helping us evolve Deloitte’s talent model for a post-COVID world. This year’s competition featured a wide range of ideas, including using AI to help recruit the most desirable job applicants and using AI enabled technology to allow professionals to self-navigate career opportunities and better match work experiences, skillsets, and areas of interest with job assignments.

It’s clear from this year’s submissions that technology is being embraced as a powerful differentiator that can contribute significantly to professional development, especially in terms of helping our people self-direct skills enhancement and overall have more control over how they navigate their career at Deloitte. It’s important that we continue to provide a platform like this for people to share their innovative ideas—ideas that will help shape the future of our business and the profession.

My second observation is that the virtual event format we used this year enabled us to hold a truly inclusive competition that valued all employees’ input. Traditionally, we hold the finalist event at Deloitte University and had planned for that again this year before COVID unexpectantly arrived. As a result, we pivoted to a virtual experience.

For the first time in the history of the competition, not only were we able to crowdsource the short-list of finalists by allowing our professionals to see all the bright ideas offered by their colleagues and have a hand in moving the best ones forward, but we also hosted the final presentations virtually so that everyone in the Audit & Assurance business could tune in to hear each of the finalist teams’ ideas and vote for the team that delivered the “Best Presentation”.

Moving to a virtual format for this year’s competition helped get us out of the consistent routine we had followed since our inaugural competition in 2014 by challenging us to think about things differently and ultimately provide a better experience for our people. This is something that we hope to carry through in future iterations of the event, as well other initiatives we are pushing forward.

Of course, our Audit & Assurance Innovation Challenge is just one lever we are pulling to help Deloitte evolve its talent approach for the future. Regardless of which company you work for or industry you work in, it’s important that we all take the time to gather input from our colleagues and think about how we can advance our talent models going forward, especially in a year that’s been very difficult and which requires us to come up with creative solutions to navigate the workforce and talent needs of tomorrow.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte & Touche LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of our legal structure. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

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Erin Shannon is Strategic Initiatives Leader at Deloitte.