GreenDotLife provides one of the best insights into what it means to work at Deloitte. Most of the content is centred around the consultants and it has a heavy US bias. Even so, I’ve spent a good part of that day trawling through the site, picking up gems along the way. By far and away the most fascinating story is about how the site came into being the second time around. I apologise in advance for ripping an almost entire post but this is a great case study in the way community is built, is sometimes threatened, survives and moves on:
From the beginning, greendotlife was a collaborative effort of several people internal to the company. Due to various reasons, we believe that the firm picked out one or two people whom it guessed was responsible. In our opinion, the Firm did not explicitly ask for the site to be taken down but at that point we felt that the risk/reward equation was no longer justifiable.
When we first shut down the site, we believed that we had at least demonstrated that there was a desire among people in the firm to communicate and build community and we thought that most likely, the Firm would in turn provide an alternate outlet that would make greendotlife obsolete anyway. Our belief was incorrect – we see the Firm as still a largely disjointed network held together only through the quarterly all-hands and Friday chats if you’re lucky enough to be on a 3-4-5 project.
Over time, several “discovered” members of the original founding team left for various reasons. At that point, the remaining founders reconvened and decided to open the doors again because 1) we could again safely operate under the umbrella of relative anonymity 2) nothing technical stopped us from reviving greendotlife in its original form and 3) we simply missed the feeling of community that we feel had developed here.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this site is that it hasn’t become a place where disgruntled employees vent their spleen. There’s plenty in there about how the reward structure operates and it is clear for instance that there is wide salary disparity from one to another country. It is also clear that climbing the greasy pole is far from easy. In a post titled, There is no ‘I’ in performance this person details their struggles through no apparent fault of their own:
This firm is all about perception; nothing else matters
That’s a terrible indictment. Whatever happened to ability or client satisfaction? Sure, those are part of the overall appraisal process but nothing matters more than the impression you create on those with who are your judges.
Note: you can write posts etc on a couple of the forums but most are closed to DT employees. You can still watch the action and catch it all in RSS.
Technorati Tags: Deloitte & Touche, appraisals
