I chatted with Heather Andersen, a managing director at a leading global professional services company, and the Inclusion and Diversity lead for Accenture’s Seattle office. She has worked at Accenture for over 20 years, serving clients across the communications and high tech practice. Heather attended the inaugural FullConTech last year and helped convince her company to sponsor FullConTech 2016 at the Innovator level.

1) You’ve attended FullConTech twice now. Why do you continue to support it?

FullConTech is a very action-oriented conference. People attend to learn and broaden their perspective, network with local leaders and practitioners, and really strive for better solutions. I love the interactive format and the opportunity to bring a diverse set of leaders together to work on a problem as a group in the breakout sessions. We have the opportunity to get to know each other as people and get visibility to a variety of perspectives and experiences.  It’s great to meet so many local leaders coming together to solve a specific challenge… It’s the only way we will be able to solve these problems of talent – by collaborating. I liked the addition of the Flash Talks this year because they were personal stories. I especially enjoyed the “Attracting a Diverse Talent Force” panel. I took three pages of notes. All the speakers on that panel were inspirational and shared tips on how to retain and grow talent.

2) FullConTech 2016’s theme is Talent. Why do your leaders and/or your company care about developing talent?

Accenture’s business is about people – attracting, developing, and retaining talent is critical. And “talent” is a very action-oriented topic. We can collectively, actually do something about it through relationship building, collaboration, and ideation. Accenture wanted to support FullConTech this year because we believe that having a healthy, engaged talent base in Seattle benefits everyone.

3) So, what is Accenture doing to grow, attract, and retain talent at your company?

On attracting talent, we really appreciate employee referrals and our people get very involved in university recruiting. I’m excited that Accenture is a founding hiring partner for Apprenti, the first ever registered tech apprenticeship program in the US. It will help us find and attract diverse talent, further enabling innovative thinking. Secondly, growing people is very important to us. Last year, a number of our employees participated in self-selected training workshops, one of which was “Intention, Energy, & Presence,” led by Anese Cavanaugh. They loved the opportunity to try something they found interesting around personal development. Communication and public speaking workshops like SpeakEasy are also popular. In terms of retaining people, we’re investing in building out our Employee Resource Groups (ERG) like our “fun committee” that organizes interactive events. We also encourage our employees to show their cultures. Just last week, we held a Diwali celebration, where many of our people had the opportunity to share about their culture. Being inclusive and collaborative is key to having happy employees.