Taking extra care and paying more attention to employee needs helps an auditor to retain workers WHO CAN YOU turn to when Valentine's Day is coming up, but you are tied up with work and your sweetheart has yet to receive your gift? You could entrust your employer to deliver a bouquet of beautifully wrapped flowers that would set the heart of your beloved racing. The role of a boss today is no longer simply to ensure the payroll. It is about having a total human resources solution in place. This is the case at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, which strives to keep its Hong Kong and mainland auditing staff. Auditors account for two-thirds of Deloitte's 6,000 workforce on the mainland. Victor Ng, a Deloitte partner and head of audit in Hong Kong, said that to ensure excellent service delivery to clients, a competitive pay package alone was not enough. He said staff retention involved a two-sided effort. 'To make Deloitte a great place to work for, we place strong emphasis on helping people attain work-life harmony, apart from focusing on their professional training and development. That's why we rolled out the Employee Assistance Programme or EAP in 2004,' Mr Ng said. EAP takes a systematic and organised approach to raise the overall quality of life for employees. It looks at their personal well-being, including health, emotions and interpersonal relations. Such goals mean multidimensional, tailor-made, carefree services for auditing staff ranging from trainees to partners. Staff can meet with health professionals and are kept updated about influenza, hepatitis, bird flu and Sars. The company also offers to send employees' clothes to the dry cleaner, and settle mortgages and other bills, which they can pay for later. Pre-sale shop discounts and favourably priced hotel fitness club passes are available. There are also courses for baking, neuro-linguistic programmes, yoga and tai chi classes for soul soothing and stress reduction, as well as an independent counselling hotline. More initiatives have been launched since Deloitte moved its office to Admiralty in April. Fruit-shaped cue cards are used to remind colleagues to stretch their bodies after working for a long time. Tips for relaxation and enjoying life through e-mails and colourful posters are regularly updated. All these considerate ideas result from the findings of Deloitte's People Commitment Surveys, which are conducted every one or two years to collect staff views on work-life balance, compensation, hiring, retention, training and the company's commitment to its people. The fierce competition for talent has prompted Deloitte to design new initiatives to keep its staff. Rapid economic growth, active IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, exciting enterprise restructuring, the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement and WTO agreements, and changing international accounting standards, have all presented business opportunities, while contributing to a 220,000 shortfall in the 350,000 qualified auditors needed on the mainland. Auditors' schedules are packed throughout the year. They concentrate on recurrent, statutory year-end audit work from January to July. In the remaining year, they engage in non-recurrent, complex transactions - a result of the buoyant market. Such tasks mean there is strong demand for a higher quality of living. Mr Ng said the staff had responded positively to the EAP, which had incorporated a lot of their feedback. Deloitte recorded a staff turnover rate of 17 per cent for 2005-06, an historical low compared with recent years. Work-life harmony Give yourself something to look forward to every day Go home when you are tired Ask yourself why you chose this job. If you have at least one reason then it is good enough for you to go through any hurdles When you are under pressure, listen to the song Slip and Slide by Laura Allan
