Jimmy Etheredge, CEO of Accenture: Why companies need to 'earn the commute' By Andy Medici, Playbook, Jun 17, 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed millions of people to work from home, and the future of the office will never look the same, according to Accenture PLC’s North American CEO Jimmy Etheredge.
In an interview with The Playbook, Etheredge said executives he talked to were stunned by how productive remote workers ended up being during the pandemic, clearing away a lot of preconceived misconceptions about how productive workers can be from home.
But now that some executives want workers back in the office, they are encountering problems. We have detailed some of those return-to-office struggles here.
“It's been a little bit of a challenge to get people back to the office. You’ve got to earn the commute,” Etheredge said. “They are trying to create (fear of missing out) with the office. That could be accessibility to executives and beyond the normal perks like coffee and snacks.”
He said the future is what Accenture, an Ireland-based professional services company with nearly 700,000 employees across the globe and around 65,000 in the United States, has called an “omni-connected” experience in which some people will work remotely, some will work in the office and some will be switching between the two, and companies need to adapt to ensure their own experience caters to all those groups.
He said company executives that still believe workers need to come in at 8 a.m and work until 5 or 6 p.m. come off as paranoid In this new world.
“But everyone is going to be in this environment where some people are going to be working remotely, some people are going to be in the office and someone is going to be in a different location and you want to create positive experiences no matter where people will be on that day,” Etheredge said. “I think what they’ve recognized is that remote work is here to stay and, 'How do I create the culture, the stickiness and the things that make people feel engaged?”
One way to get workers back to the office is to set times and days to offer face time with executives, such as open hours on Fridays for coffee. That allows them to connect and to be seen by company leaders.
“They want to feel like the leaders that they work for care about their physical heath, their mental health, their financial health,” Etheredge said. “They want to feel a sense of belonging. And with that belonging, connection.”
But companies might also want to build in flexibility during the workday. Are there ways for people to come in to the office later than the traditional commute times? Can companies add in spaces to the office that can help with stress? Etheredge suggested a “stretch lab” where employees can physically move and not sit all day.
You also don’t want to encourage the office return in such a way that it devalues remote work, Etheredge stressed.
“You don’t want to make people feel like they are not going to be successful when they are working remotely. You just want them to have a reason to come into the office on occasion,” he said.
Companies looking to attract and retain talent should embrace employee desires around flexibility.
“I think this is a big opportunity for large companies to continue to attract more diverse talent. When you think about it, the traditional Monday-Friday 9-to-5 model that was created 75 years ago — it was not a very inclusive time and it's not the most inclusive model,” Etheredge said. “If I want to attract caregivers, caregivers can’t always do their caregiving after 5 p.m.and before 9 a.m. in the morning.”
Etheredge said all of Accenture's roles are capable of being done with some amount of remote work, and it has evaluated how much time its own employees need to spend in the offices of clients, especially clients who are also now embracing remote work.
“I believe that our industry will never go back to the way it was before,” Etheredge said.
He said one way to attract and retain workers during a labor shortage that isn’t tied to remote work is to focus on skills and not educational qualifications. Accenture spends a billion dollars a year on skills and training, and it also partners with local nonprofits on apprenticeship programs where younger workers learn the skills they need on the job while getting paid a wage.
Those workers get jobs in Accenture and then stick around, Etheredge said. He stressed that 45% of Accenture’s entry-level positions do not have a degree requirement — they have skills requirements.
“This has been exponentially growing year by year. I have been surprised at how successful from a performance perspective these individuals have been,” he said. “The retention has been through the roof.”
Accenture's apprenticeships are typically 12 months. Since the program's inception in 2016, Accenture has hired more than 1,200 apprentices and about 80% of those did not have a four-year college degree. The company intends on expanding its apprenticeship program to 20% of entry-level roles.












