Travel defined management consulting. A new definition could be a boon for women

This edition of Working Together comes as a part of the launch of LinkedIn Top Companies, a look at the best places to work right now. Check out the full list here. 

Prior to the pandemic, Katie Dye was traveling for work. A lot. 

As a senior manager for Deloitte’s consulting business, Dye was on the road most weeks meeting with clients. If she had a client in the Midwest, she would often take a day trip to and from her home in Austin, Texas for a single meeting. Earlier in her career while living in Los Angeles, she was flying to the East Coast practically every week.  

Then the crisis hit and she — like millions in her industry — did something that would have been virtually unheard of in the demanding and in-person world of management consulting: She stopped traveling entirely. 

While working from home and caring for her two children under the age of seven, Dye also transitioned into her new role as principal, a partner-level position that roughly only 20% of women hold across the industry. 

“This snap into 100 percent virtual is an interesting way to go the polar opposite direction of where we were,” said Dye, who has now worked at Deloitte for more than 11 years. “Now, we can add back the travel that is most impactful and give everyone more flexibility into what works the best for them.”

Companies like Goldman Sachs have been criticized for their unwillingness to change working styles in response to the pandemic, but others have embraced the shift to in-home and flexible work wholeheartedly. 

For consulting, the transition to remote work has been especially meaningful. Pre-pandemic, many consultants were expected to spend 60 to 80 percent of their time traveling for work. The shift could be a boon for the many women, particularly women with children, who considered exiting the industry altogether because of its travel demands.

Consulting’s business travel rethink is a glimmer of hope for female workers, who in many cases had to sacrifice career gains to take care of their families during the pandemic.

“Our women were making choices to have a career that doesn’t include travel and going forward, the expectation of traveling most of the time will be a thing of the past,” said Sandy Torchia, a National Managing Partner at KPMG. “It is going to level the playing field and show our women they can balance work and life.” 

LinkedIn’s Top Companies list, which published this week, is in part a reflection of how well consulting firms have adapted during the pandemic. Two of the top ten companies on this year’s list have management consulting practices, and consulting accounts for 10 percent of this year’s overall list of 50 companies. And these companies are elevating women at a rapid clip. Management consulting firms in the U.S. overall are promoting women at the highest rate than they ever had in the last five years, according to LinkedIn data. 

Interviews with leaders at management consulting firms on this year’s Top Companies list — Deloitte (No. 7), PwC (No. 17) and KPMG (No. 26) — paint a hopeful portrait of an industry giving women a path to rise.

“Before the pandemic, there was a certain culture that if you’re not in a certain office or on-site with the client, you’re not in the crowd,” said Josh Bersin, an industry analyst and former principal at Deloitte. “That is gone now. Now everyone is a part of every office.” 

‘So many more archetypes of work’

Of course, the pandemic wasn’t the first time consulting firms started to rethink business travel. For decades, firms have instituted flexible work plans that would allow consultants to opt out of travel and work from home. But the COVID-19 crisis normalized such offsite work. What at one point may have been a handful of requests to travel less — perhaps mostly from parents with young children — became the expectation for everyone. And as a result, it leveled the playing field. 

“The pandemic has accelerated dramatically our progress on flexibility,” said PwC Chief People Officer Michael Fenlon. “It has shattered assumptions across the board that there are certain ways that you can’t work.”

Bersin — who joined Deloitte in 2013 — remembers a time not long ago when “flexible” would be the last word you would use to describe the management consulting industry. Known as a high-paying and demanding profession for people who wanted to learn a lot about business, he said management consultants were expected to always be on and always be on site.  

But when the pandemic brought business travel to a halt, consulting firms did something truly surprising: They challenged the assumption that in-person is necessary for most projects.

“The first couple of months, I bet they were really scratching their heads on how they were going to do this remotely,” Bersin said. “It used to be the only way to get a client’s attention was to show up. Now, they know they can show up online and they know it will be a useful meeting.” 

None of the industry leaders who spoke with LinkedIn imagine a post-pandemic world where consultants work entirely from home. But executives like Dan Helfrich, CEO of Deloitte Consulting, are already envisioning how a hybrid model could lead to a more diverse workforce. 

To Helfrich, the future of work is about choice and transparency: More choice for employees to decide how and where they work met with clear transparency around the demands of a specific job and how a team will function together.

“We could end up with so many more archetypes of work and therefore more types of people,” he said. “There will be more variety in the experience. More variety because clients will want to work in different ways and our people want to work in different ways.” 

‘A massive talent advantage’ 

So, what are consulting firms doing to make room for the variety of work experiences that Helfrich and others envision? Most are cagey on specific plans or proposals, but restructuring how teams communicate will be key. Even while working from home, the demands of the job are still intense, and sometimes they’ve been exacerbated. This has forced companies to think critically about the work from home experience. 

KPMG has told employees to try to avoid scheduling meetings during conventional meal times. Partners are also encouraged to have conversations with their teams to set boundaries for what their work day will look like. For managing partner Sandy Torchia, that means telling her team she prefers not to have meetings before 8:30 so she can exercise. She also delays the send times on emails after hours and on weekends, modeling email etiquette.

Deloitte is experimenting with similar communication exercises. Teams are now getting together before starting a new project and communicating their work needs rather than assuming everyone can make a meeting at any hour. And at PwC, employees participate in “energy audits” where they share with their team how they balance their needs outside of work with the demands of the role.

“People were afraid that if they talk about this stuff, they’ll be viewed as less committed or people will think of them as less hardworking,” said Fenlon from PwC. “For organizations who pull this off, it will be a massive talent advantage in terms of attracting top talent and retaining them.”

Success will depend on how long these practices last, said Lori Lepler, president and CEO of BRANDspeak and a researcher of gender-based career gaps. As more offices reopen, Lepler is concerned that women will opt in to the flexible practices brought on by the pandemic at a higher rate than their male peers. And if that happens, will any semblance of a level playing field disappear?

“I worry if it becomes that you are not traveling or you are not in person, you won’t be the person to advance,” she said. “You need to say when kicking off a project, ‘What is the model and the norms for the experience of work?’ Not just, ‘How are we getting the work done?’” 

For Deloitte’s Dye, working from home with her two young kids means jam-packing her schedule early on in the day so she can hop off early to tend to them. She also has check-ins at the start of each project to share her boundaries with her schedule with her team.

Dye maintains hope that management consulting will become one of the most flexible industries to work in, a prediction that may not have been possible before the pandemic.

“We’re now able to get the work done where it needs to get done,” she said. “It is hard work, but it is hard work that is exciting and interesting.”

Jordyn Dahl contributed reporting to this piece