Winning Secrets: A gamified approach to onboarding at Deloitte Singapore keeps things fun and interactive

‘Destination Deloitte’ equips new hires with the knowledge and context required to kickstart their journey, Ong Siok Peng, Deloitte Singapore Talent Leader, shares.

Deloitte provides audit and assurance, tax and legal, consulting, financial advisory, and risk advisory services to Fortune Global 500^® and thousands of private companies. Building on its 175-plus year history, Deloitte spans more than 150 countries and territories with approximately 415,000 people worldwide making an impact that matters.

At the third annual edition of Employee Experience Awards - Singapore in 2023, Deloitte Singapore won the gold award for 'Best Onboarding Experience', and the silver award for ‘Best ESG Programme’.

To celebrate this milestone, we catch up with Ong Siok Peng, Talent Leader, Deloitte Singapore on the ‘Deloitte Experience’, the company’s employee experience strategy, which is executed with the support of talent leaders appointed in each business unit. 

Q How do you ensure your employee experience initiatives are aligned with your business objectives?

At Deloitte, people are our most important asset. We recognise that our people are the key to our success with our clients. As such, our employee experience aligns with our objective to attract and retain the best talent. Our initiatives provide our people opportunities to carve out their own career journey with us and allow them to bring their authentic selves to work. We believe that by cultivating an inclusive work environment where each and every one can thrive, our people will be able to serve our clients with excellence and integrity.

The ‘Deloitte Experience’ is our employee experience strategy, and to help us execute it, we have talent leaders appointed in each of our business units as they would be most aware of the nature of their business and can align their talent needs with the strategy. We hold regular meetings that involve teams from talent experience, talent development, human resources, and the respective talent representatives in the business units so that our entire talent ecosystem is aligned to the Deloitte Experience.

A key focus of the Deloitte Experience is employee wellbeing – when our people are healthy both physically and mentally, the benefits to Deloitte as an organisation go far beyond productivity. We are able to drive business performance by attracting and retaining top talent, by reducing costs (for instance, cost of absenteeism) and by mitigating business risk (for example, managing stress and anxiety can help minimise poor decision making).

Q Can you provide examples of how the organisation has invested in the employee experience?

At Deloitte, we empower our people to create a work experience that is distinct to them while continuing to serve our clients with quality. Founded on the concept of trust and prioritising in-person moments that matter, we will continue to provide a world-class talent experience where everyone can be successful.

We have reframed our ways of working and redefined our talent experience, moving beyond the traditional mindset of work arrangements.

The Deloitte Experience prioritises meaningful connections, fosters collaboration and inclusion, and drives personal accountability. It also enables our people to create an experience distinctive to them and customise their work arrangements depending on what works best for them, while ensuring that client and business needs are met.

We have also redesigned and optimised our office spaces by investing in technology and providing more areas for collaboration. For example, we introduced ‘Onsite’, a workspace booking tool, which enables our people to conveniently book workspaces before coming into the office.

In addition, we take care of our people via our ‘Empowered Wellbeing’ approach – a holistic programme that gives our people the support and flexibility to make choices that enable them to stay energised, confident, and healthy. Recognising that wellbeing extends beyond physical health and includes the mental, financial, and social aspects of our lives, this programme helps our people personalise their experiences in ways that matter most to them in body, mind, and purpose.

To this end, we organise a variety of workshops and programmes for our people under our ‘Wellness Fridays’ initiative. These include mental health webinars, pottery, cooking and baking sessions. In fact, we introduced a new workshop this year that has proven very popular among our people – animal therapy – where we hold art jamming sessions with cats and yoga sessions with dogs to help improve the physiological, physical and emotional health of our people.

We also dedicate time and resources to ensure that our new joiners feel a sense of belonging and are proud to be a part of the Deloitte family through ‘Destination Deloitte’, our onboarding experience. Through a gamified approach designed to be fun and interactive, Destination Deloitte equips our new hires with the knowledge and context required to kickstart their journey with Deloitte. 

Q What are some of the key challenges that you faced in implementing your EX initiatives, and how did you overcome them?

The COVID-19 pandemic (between years 2020 to 2022) was a challenging period for our onboarding programme, Destination Deloitte, in particular. We had to adapt our physical programme into a virtual one, while ensuring that the fun and interactive nature of the programme was not compromised so that our new joiners would have a meaningful experience.

We converted the session from a full-day in-person program into a half-day virtual programme and incorporated virtual games via interactive platforms such as Mentimeter.

On the bright side, due to this experience of pivoting from a physical programme into a virtual one, we were able to quickly pivot back to running physical on-boarding sessions in end-2022. 

Q Do you have processes to measure the effectiveness of your EX initiatives, and what metrics do you use to evaluate success?

At Deloitte, we believe it is important to continuously gather feedback to refine and improve the existing initiatives we have put in place. An internal global talent experience survey is conducted annually and we take the results seriously. We also participate in external surveys run by organisations in the talent/employer branding ecosystem so that we can have a feel of the pulse of our people’s sentiments and expectations. 

Q Finally, what role do leaders and managers play in driving a beautiful employee experience, and how are they held accountable for the success of these initiatives?

Our leaders play a crucial role in driving the Deloitte experience and setting the tone for the rest of our people. It is important for our people to know that their leaders value them and are committed to providing an enriching talent experience for them. One of our shared values, “Take care of each other”, is held closely by our leaders, and they ensure that this is consistent across our programmes and initiatives to support the talent experience of our people.

Read more interviews on why organisations have won trophies for their HR practices - head over to our Winning Secrets' section!

All photos / Provided by Deloitte