Global consulting firm builds compelling Employee Value Proposition with innovative employee discounts offering

The challenge

As a globally recognized consulting firm with over 4,500 employees based around Australia, Accenture is known for attracting and retaining highly-skilled, high-performing people around the world. “When people start their journey with Accenture, we believe they sign up to continually grow and improve, and create the best versions of themselves personally and professionally,” says Randy Wandmacher, HR Director for Australia and New Zealand. “As an HR organization, we promised to take a people-first approach so we can design experiences and create environments where our people are empowered to do those things.”

Historically, offering a variety of rewards and discounts was a core part of Accenture’s attraction and retention strategy. However, Randy’s team needed to change their approach to meet changing employee expectations and the "always on, always connected" attitude of the digital era.

Accenture knew providing its people choice and a wide range of personally relevant and easily accessible discounts was key, and considered the typical employee’s consumer habits and expectations in the digital age when designing their range. Randy says, “It’s less about the same sets of offerings but introducing and acknowledging my hobbies, interests and dreams, and trying to understand the full breadth of what’s important for our people, and how we as an organization can help them.”

"Accenture knew providing its people choice and a wide range of personally relevant and easily accessible discounts was key." 

The approach

To support Accenture’s focus on creating a “Truly Human” employee experience that is both professionally and personally rewarding, Accenture reached out to its people to guide the initiatives. They worked with employees and an external agency to create the acronym “FRESH,” a set of principles that guides Accenture’s discounts strategy. “We want these experiences to be Fun, Relevant, Engaging, Simple and Helpful,” Randy explains. “We use those guiding principles in our discount programs to make them highly accessible and consumable by our people.”

Accenture partnered with Reward Gateway to launch Perks At Work, a component of its discounts suite that provides every employee with 24/7 online access to discounts at over 380 retailers on a customized hub that reflects Accenture’s employer brand.

“The underlying principle for the decision to launch Perks at Work was to really drive financial discounts for our people and give them options in their daily spending routine, and find ways for them to save money,” says Ondrej Lauko, Accenture’s Head of Total of Rewards for Australia and New Zealand. Ondrej explains, “When we were looking at solutions, we listed items that our people purchased on a daily or monthly basis across the whole calendar year, and looked at the savings they’d make on this program – they were substantial amounts. If you were to give every single employee that amount straight from the company, the cost would be multiple times more than what we pay for the platform where our people access those discounts. So it made financial sense to do this.”