Deloitte

Spotlight on Deloitte
From "Exploring Telework as a Business Continuity Strategy" a research study focusing on the use of telework and remote work as a business continuity strategy. This material is copyrighted (c) 2005 by ITAC and WorldatWork. Reprinted with permission. Stats

• 120,000 employees worldwide
• 90 percent of audit and consulting practices work remotely
• Cost-benefit: hoteling saved company $62M in New York City; $70M in Chicago

Standard Gear

• Everyone in company has a laptop computer
• Mobile equipment includes cell phone, BlackBerry

New York-based Deloitte offers consulting services to clients worldwide. As a client-focused organization, more than 60 percent of employees’ time is spent out in the field working at clients’ offices. So, a few years back, officers at Deloitte decided to take advantage of the empty space by reorganizing workplace design and instituting hoteling. The concept is simple: share workspaces through reservations, similar to reserving a hotel room. The payoff is impressive: when Deloitte renegotiates leases, it saves millions. “We reduced space in Chicago by an entire floor,” says Steve Silverstein, Director of North American Real Estate. “Multiply that by $40 per square foot, times 15 years, times $166 in build-out costs per square foot, and we’re saving $70 million a year in one city alone.”

Learning from Adversity
Deloitte has experienced its share of workplace disruptions. In 1993 it occupied several floors of the World Trade Center when a bomb blew up a major section of the building’s parking garage. Deloitte’s CEO broke the lease and moved the staff to the World Financial Center, one block west. The attack on the towers 8 years later forced over 3,000 Deloitte employees out of their offices. “It took us [several days] just to locate all our people and know if they were alive,” Silverstein explains. “We lost our building, some 600,000 square feet of office space; 3,000 employees were dislocated, one death, several injured, hundreds injured emotionally.”

As a result, many Deloitte employees became full-time teleworkers. “Even our most territorial workers learned that they could get their work done outside of the traditional office. It was an incredible boost to our ability to sell the concept of mobility to our employees and business units.”

Convenient Instructions
“We found that in an urgent emergency, everyone just ran,” Silverstein says. “They didn’t take a purse or briefcase or laptop or anything. So whatever they kept in their pocket or clipped to their clothes was all they had with them.” As a result, the company decided to print its emergency instructions on the back of each employee ID tag. The instructions are very simple: “Report in at once. Call this 800 number.” When employees call, they are asked three questions:

• Are you okay?
• Where are you located?
• What’s your employee ID number?

The answers are immediately typed into a database, which is tabulated, Web-enabled and available to all line managers. The result: instant relief for the management team.