Answer

Gap Analysis: Deloitte Limited

Introduction

The increasing competition in the business world demands that organizations establish frameworks that allow sustainability. Evaluations of contemporary markets around the globe suggest that unless organizations develop strategies for identifying gaps and providing prompt solutions, it becomes a challenge to conduct business with a view of gaining a competitive edge. Globalization and increased utilization of technology imply that organizational strategies on human resource management, market penetration, revenue strengthening and expansion and diversification of products and services must align to aspects that meet the demands of a diversified customer base. The priority setting of organizations must focus on how better to align services and products to customer needs, values, and preferences, these elements can be achieved through gap analysis.

Gap Analysis

The bottom line of organizational success is angled on how strategic management can identify gaps and fill them. As such, gap analysis is a multifaceted concept that entails identifying gaps in the market, comparing forecast profits to the desired benefits as part of revealing planning gaps, and analyzing usage gaps. In a broad sense, gap analysis reflects the implementation of measures that allow organizations to compare actual performance with potential or desired performance with a bottom line of establishing what needs to be done to achieve desired performance in sales, financial or human resource performance (Csugány, 2018).

The utilization of gap analysis in organizational human resources is crucial as it provides insights on improvements and resource needs. It is an essential tool of understanding the company through the lens of HR goals, especially by assessing whether systems and practices in place resonate with the path to achieve the overall objectives of HRM. Additionally, the utilization of gap analysis in HR may encompass the assessment of talent perspectives. It aims to establish the existence of discrepancies, if any, between current talent and skills available in a firm’s human resource and required improvement (Csugány, 2018). Strategic HR relies, therefore, on gap analysis to outline talent needs and align them with both near-term and long-term firm goals.

Deloitte Current and Desired State

Gap analysis forms part of the crucial steps towards identifying human resource discrepancies in an organization. According to Deloitte, current practices in HR strategies fall short of attaining the firm’s short- and long-term goals. Deloitte has currently shifted its focus towards re-developing its performance management system, especially after identifying gaps in workforce evaluation, training, promotion, and payment. According to the firm, the HR strategy on assessment, coaching, development, and amount is out of step with overall Deloitte objectives. This issue demands an overhaul of the performance management system.

Deloitte’s current performance management system is associated with various discrepancies. The elements that the firm realizes can be detrimental to how it establishes a reliable and robust human resource strategies implicit in meeting the market demands. The characteristics of the HR performance management system entail objective setting on a collaborative scope, a single-year evaluation of employees based on outcomes of consolidated goals, the evaluation process involves consensus meetings, and discussions are conducted in the view of peers (Buckingham and Goodall, 2015).  Deloitte underlines the current state of performance management system places the firm in a disadvantaged position if considered on the premise of a sustainable competitive edge in the market. The predictability of the process, although regarded as fair, offers limited support to the firm’s emerging needs.

Based on the identification of gaps in its current system, the firm establishes explicit measures that will allow the adoption of HR strategies on performance management that advances real-time determination and evaluation of goals. Once-a-year goals and evaluation process initially in use offers limited capacity to address Deloitte’s emerging needs (Buckingham and Goodall, 2015). The desired approach aims to introduce the mechanism of determining specific goals, real-time, and more personalized employee evaluation. Deloitte’s bottom line of the new performance management system aims at reflecting the constant learning of HR, agility, speed, and collection of reliable performance data. As such, the desired approach will differentiate compensation decisions from daily performance management and assume a more elaborate and insightful mechanism that reviews performance on a quarterly or per-project basis.

The Alternative for Gap Elimination

Deloitte’s business model significantly relies on talent development. Besides the already suggested and perhaps implemented mechanism for gap closing, other measures may prove fundamental in turning the tides of the firm in terms of achieving efficacy in performance management. Achievement of human resource goals relies on management and organizational leadership (Lawton and Pa ́ez, 2014). However, Deloitte’s current performance management system fails to drive employee engagement and high-performance issues that can be addressed through ethical leadership. The firm’s management reputations should, therefore be constructed on high performance, legitimacy, credibility, emphasis on ethics, and the evaluation of ethical implications in decision making in order to support the achievement of organizational emerging needs.

Although Deloitte’s strategic positioning on changing the direction of the current performance management system emphasizes on regular evaluation, it may offer limited impact unless appropriate mechanisms are created for outcome and results discussions. Setting regular meetings with project teams and individual employees will foster the understanding of the required skills and the challenges facing HR in attaining the firm’s goals. The mechanism for regular discussions should emphasize talent recognition and rewarding exceptional work and discussion of work and areas that need work with teams. Further observations suggest that Deloitte can attain the desired approach in performance management by understanding the relationship between high-performance work systems, employee attitudes behavior. As such, Deloitte can improve the current state by adopting HR wellbeing attributions, which have been identified to contribute to high levels of employee commitment and lower levels of job strain (Van De Voorde and Beijer, 2015).

Performance Management Strategies

Performance management strategies drive high performance in organizations by developing a mechanism through which HR strategies are implemented. Performance management strategies that can be used to change the HR strategies of Deloitte must focus on aspects such as planning, periodic rating, expectation setting, rewards and compensation, development, and improvement (DeNisi & Murphy, 2017). Deloitte’s priority setting in the implementation of performance management strategies should identify the goals of HR strategy and how it subsequently generates to influence short-term and long term organizational goals.

Defining expectations forms a critical component of performance management, which entails understanding the organization’s objectives and what employees can offer. Management at Deloitte and the employees must recognize that organizational goals and vision comes first through inspiring connection, the definition of the firm’s present and future (DeNisi & Murphy, 2017). Deloitte can also achieve significant milestones with the strategy that emphasizes regular reviews. Additionally, regular reviews of performance management promote understanding and tracking the direction of the company in terms of goal achievement feasibility. The also create the possibility of keeping track of short-term objectives while also being a fundamental element of running record reviews for employee reward. Through regular reviews, Deloitte management also figures out how to incentivize employees based on performance. Other strategies that remain critical and the disposal of Deloitte in efforts of changing the current state of performance management include linking pay and rewards to employee performance provisions of feedback premised on earlier discussions and offering employees talent development opportunities.

Solution Formulation

Implementation of performance management strategies in an organization relies on the unique emerging needs specific organizations to face. Considering the Deloitte position, one issue that impairs HR performance comes in the form of “batched” review of goals. The firm conducts performance evaluations on a single-year-end rating, which, among the issues, promotes the process’s predictability. This implies that employees can easily predict the requirements pf evaluation processes and expected outcomes, which devalues its essence. With this in mind, stressing on regular and prompt reviews of performance should form the core of performance management at Deloitte.

Implementation steps

• Define the firm’s expectations in terms of vision and goals and link them to different employee expectations.
• Inspire connection and sense of belonging by creating teams through which regular reviews will be conducted.
• Establish the vision and the goals of the reviews in terms of how they will contribute to the overall achievement of short-term and long term organizational goals
• Conduct strategy feasibility in terms of employee and management perceptions and make relevant changes.
• Roll out the regular reviews of employees

Post-implementation metric

• The review must focus on message delivery; employees` positive feedback on the availability of two-way communication.
• Improved process approach, less predictability of reviews.
• Overall improvement in team performances in generating productivity.