CEO for the U.S. and Senior Managing Director for North America Jorge Benitez, on the role an inclusive culture plays in enabling Accenture to attract and retain diverse talent worldwide.
Jorge Benitez
At Accenture, embracing inclusion and diversity in the widest possible sense—beyond gender, ethnicity, or religion—is part of our recipe for success. Our ability to harness the rich diversity of our people—their unique mix of capabilities, expertise, and their commitment—allows us to truly understand and be relevant to our clients. It makes us stronger, smarter, more innovative, and a better-performing company across all dimensions.
We recognize that each person has unique strengths and that by embracing those strengths, we achieve success, foster innovation, and deliver high performance. We invest in the professional development of our employees—directing more than US$875 millionannually to employee training, including customized inclusion and diversity programs.
Both our global and local inclusion and diversity initiatives underpin our focus on building a dynamic workforce equipped with the skills, passion, and energy to deliver high performance to our clients.
Globally, we provide guidance, coordination, and vigilance around our priority initiatives and champion best practices across the organization. Our global strategy sets overarching objectives and outlines key tactics for raising awareness and building diversity into our recruiting efforts and talent supply chain. The strategy also addresses other areas essential to meeting our goals, including promoting a discrimination-free and harassment-free work environment for all Accenture employees around the world.
Employee resource groups (ERGs) help drive our activities, both internally and externally. Based on local demand and interest, these groups differ from location to location. But all of them offer members opportunities to collaborate with colleagues who have similar interests or backgrounds and participate in career development workshops, mentoring, and local recruiting and community service activities.
At the same time, leadership at Accenture takes an active role in championing an inclusive and diverse workplace. From our board of directors to our executive leadership team, and through every facet of our business, our leaders are committed to inclusion and to rewarding our people on the merits of their contributions.
At our locations across the globe, each managing director, in addition to his or her business-facing role, serves as a human capital and diversity lead, helping to implement our Inclusion & Diversity programs. Additionally, the Accenture Diversity Council, which comprises company leaders (including me), sets the strategic direction of our Inclusion & Diversity actions globally, including assessing the issues we might face.
At Accenture, we like to say that our people are the thousands of diverse pieces that complete our mosaic—and I am a part of that. Through championing inclusion and diversity, and the experience of working at Accenture every day, I see that by bringing people together, we unlock the power of an inclusive culture and are able to leverage the power of diversity.
