ACCENTURE CASE STUDY

It’s 5:00 in the morning, time to rustle out of bed to catch your flight from Atlanta to San Francisco. You’ll be in the City by the Bay for the next four days, helping a major retailing client implement a new information technology system. Then you’ll fly back to Atlanta on Thursday, working from home on Friday. You’ll need to do it all again next week, and the week after that, and the week after that. That’s the schedule for Keyur Patel, a consultant at Accenture—the New York-based consulting firm that stands 97th among Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Accenture’s 150 offices can be found in 53 different countries, on six different continents. Although Patel’s current assignment is stateside, he works virtually with team members in Manila and Bangalore. This sort of arrangement is typical at Accenture, with the firm’s 178,000 employees needing to be able to work from anywhere, depending upon the needs of their clients.

Accenture hires 60,000 employees a year, many of them straight out of college. That may seem like a lot of new hires, given the company’s size. The key to understanding that number lies in the turnover rate for the consulting industry. On average, consulting firms lose 15–20 percent of their workforce each year. The career path for consultants is often summarized as “up or out,” with employees either being promoted after putting in some time or voluntarily turning over to pursue a job with less travel and more stable hours. The most recent estimates put Accenture’s own attrition rate at 15 percent, down from 18 percent two years prior. The challenge for firms like Accenture is keeping employees committed to an organization that they rarely see. After all, consultants like Patel are scattered around the world, rarely coming face-to-face with their manager, and often lacking a true headquarters.