Stakeholder engagement

Introduction

Our aspiration is to be a role model for quality, integrity, and positive change. To understand the implications of this aspiration, we interact with our stakeholders to seek their opinions and their expectations. This process allows us to define a timely and adequate response to the issues they deem important for our business and for our ability to make an impact that matters.

We actively seek our stakeholders’ views

We aim to take our stakeholders seriously. To this end, throughout the year, we actively engage in dialogue or seek their opinions in other manners such as through (social) media scanning.

Our engagement in 2020/2021

In 2020/2021, we focused our dialogue on the following stakeholder groups:

• - Clients

• - Employees

• - Deloitte network

• - Regulators

• - Competitors

• - Public opinion

For stakeholder groups that we did not explicitly engage with, we decided to build on the stakeholder insights we obtained over the past reporting years. For the stakeholders mentioned above, we provide an overview of the insights that we gained for updating our materiality matrix.

Clients

Our clients prefer long-term personal relationships and regular contacts with a single main Deloitte contact person to discuss market developments and their most important concerns. The topics client satisfaction, credibility/trust, training & education, profitable growth (continuity) and innovation are linked to this demand.

The need for global cooperation and knowledge exchange continues to be of key importance to international clients. This relates to the topics: internationalisation, quality of services, credibility/trust, training & education, and career development.

Clients expect us to share knowledge and expertise as part of the sparring partner relationship. To this end, training & education, career development and internationalisation are topics that are connected to this expectation.

Finally, especially larger corporate clients and public sector clients require their suppliers, including professional services provider, to contribute to the prevention of CO₂ emissions and to make a be purpose-driven. Climate and CO₂ reductions, corporate citizenship and social impact are topics that relate to this requirement, with particularly CO₂ gaining importance among clients.

Deloitte network

Through the Deloitte network (DTTL), we have a practice of reporting our CO₂ emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). In 2019, Deloitte announced targets for CO₂ reductions to be achieved by all its member firms. In addition, DTTL maintains policies and programmes in place in the area of corporate citizenship (WorldClass). Next to these sustainability related practices, DTTL maintains strict guidance in the areas of quality, ethics & integrity, privacy, data security, and anti-corruption.

In 2020, DTTL launched the WorldClimate programme. Through NSE, Deloitte Netherlands is in the process of implementing and executing this programme. Through a maturity matrix that has been developed on an NSE level, NSE geographies cooperate in achieving the objectives that were defined.

Regulators / public policy

We have formal and informal engagements with our regulators. During the reporting year, the focus of our regulators remained on the following themes:

• Culture of quality

• Structure of accountancy firms

• Workload and stress

• Inclusion & diversity

In addition, we experience an interest in our Future of agenda. These themes related to the following topics: quality of services, credibility/trust, inclusion & diversity, and vitality, social impact.

Competitors

We have benchmarked our material topics and related performance against those of the other Big4 firms. This benchmark shows that to a large extent there is an overlap between the topics that the firms deem material to their business.

Employees

On an annual basis, Deloitte performs quantitative research to track the beliefs and priorities of millennials and Generation Z. The results of the Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020 are relevant to us as most of our employees belong to these age groups. The outcomes of the survey are in line with the conclusions that we draw based on informal conversations with colleagues and members of the general public. For our agenda, the following conclusions are especially important:

• Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Health care / disease prevention is seen as the number one societal challenge (22% of millennials and 30% of GenZ), closely followed by Climate change / protecting the environment (28% of millennials and 29% of GenZ), outranking other societal concerns such as Unemployment, Economic growth, and Income inequality / distribution of wealth;

• Millennials and GenZ are taking action to protect the planet. More than 50% indicate that they have begun or increased efforts to recycle, have taken steps to reduce their use of single use plastics, and have increased their use of public transport / walked or biked more often;

• Millennials and GenZ are appreciative of the efforts their employer makes on topics such as inclusion and diversity, their response to the pandemic and their positive impact on communities. Nonetheless, their appreciation of the positive impact of business on society continues to decline with now only 41% of millennials and 43% of GenZ agreeing to a positive societal impact of business.

The outcome of past and present Deloitte Global Millennial Survey indicate that the following topics are important to the stakeholders that are part of this group: credibility/trust, data security, ethical standards, integrity, anti-corruption, inclusion & diversity, training & education, career development, vitality / well-being, climate and CO₂ emissions, and social impact.

We have experienced increasing expectations and active involvement from employees on wide variety of topics, especially on CO₂, inclusion & diversity, and vitality (a.o. well-being and work-life balance).

Public opinion

We constantly monitor public opinion and actively scan media for emerging topics. Our efforts in 2020/2021 didn’t result in any additional topics being discovered that impact Deloitte’s approach or reporting.

Materiality matrix

Based on the insights mentioned above and using professional judgement, we have plotted strategic and sustainability topics in a draft materiality matrix. The matrix was then sent for discussion and approval to our Executive Board. This matrix is also included in the Deloitte Integrated Annual Report 2020/2021.

Material topics

Based on the materiality matrix above, we have identified the following theses and topics to be material to Deloitte. The table below contains references to the pages where we discuss our response to the issues raised by the various stakeholder groups.

Compared to our previous IAR and in line with both our Connect for Impact strategy and our materiality analysis, we have changed ‘Internationalisation’ to ‘International cooperation’ and relabelled ‘Cost reduction’ to ‘Cost effectiveness’. Furthermore, we have merged ‘Corporate citizenship’ into our ‘Social impact’ topic, and expanded the scope of ‘Climate and CO₂’ so it becomes the broader topic of ‘Environmental sustainability’.