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Lessons learned

We have operated from a distance to our clients and each other for almost the entire year. We have learned that working from home is efficient and effective and – in many cases – enhances work-life balance, while minimising carbon emissions caused by commuting. It has also revealed that actual person-to-person contact, and social cohesion are crucial for Deloitte. It is essential for enhancing our culture, investing in new generations of leaders and in training our talent. We will take these experiences on board as we design our future ways of working and collaboration.

We have learned that working from home is efficient and effective and – in many cases – enhances work-life balance, while minimising carbon emissions caused by commuting.

In a society where the licence to operate of companies and more specifically our role as auditor is more than ever challenged, we have intensified our interactions with stakeholders and actively contribute in innovating the audit profession. The next step in our journey in improving audit quality have been concentrating on building a learning culture with more focus on collaboration. One of constant dilemmas is how to balance between a strong individual accountability of partners for quality of their work and compliance of their files, and at the same time encourage our teams to be open about their learnings and mistakes and invest in the success of the overall team. Our culture programme helps in discussing these dilemma’s and to make further progress.  

The Black Lives Matter movement has opened our eyes for the social inequality that still persists in Dutch society and with that within our firm. We can only truly get rid of inequality if every individual opens up to others without any conscious or subconscious bias, in appreciation of the unique talent that everyone has. It reconfirms our strong commitment to Inclusion and stepped our I&D initiatives.

We are increasingly seeing the results of our focus on member firm consolidation and strong strategic alignment of the past years. It creates more opportunities for the complexity of the engagements we can take upon us, for the investments in new capabilities and for international cross-border teaming by our people. At the same we need to balance this constantly with proximity to Dutch stakeholders and society at large, our clients and the talent in the Dutch market. This “Connected Autonomy” model requires constant fine tuning.