The news broke last week that PwC UK would start requiring its people in the office or at a client site for at least three days a week. Shortly after that came the extra detail that to ensure compliance with the policy, PwC would be gathering location data, including it in billable hour stats the firm already provides to its employees and passing this data along to career coaches. Comply or else was the message, even if PwC tried to wrap it up in flowery language about the importance of face-to-face working in “a people business” like theirs.
“We will start sharing your individual working location data with you on a monthly basis from January as we do with other data such as chargeable hours,” wrote PwC UK Managing Partner Laura Hinton in a memo to PwC’s 26,000 people last week. “This will help to ensure that the new policy is being fairly and consistently applied across our business.” Uh huh. We trust you, Laura.
Reaction to this news has been plentiful across the mediasphere. And not particularly positive:
Is Workplace Trust Dead? A ‘Big Four’ Firm Will Soon Use Location Data to Track Employees [Entrepreneur]
PwC is ‘tipping the balance’ of hybrid working and will start tracking its workers’ locations [Fortune]
PwC tells employees it will use location data to police ‘back-to-office’ rule [CNN]
This one from Inc. is especially interesting: Companies Such as PwC Are Now Tracking Employee Location to Enforce RTO, and It Could Backfire
Writes Chris Morris:
Tracking employee location data is a new way of enforcing RTO policies–and it’s not one without some accuracy risks. The trend of coffee badging has been on the rise this year, where employees scan their badge and go into the office, but only stay long enough to grab a cup of coffee and maybe attend one meeting before leaving early.
…
There’s also the very real potential problem of employees resenting being tracked so closely–and so clinically. (Some 28 percent of employees said they would “consider quitting if RTO policies occurred at their company,” according to the report from human resources software company BambooHR.) That could give an advantage to small businesses and startups that offer employees more flexibility, particularly when it comes to hiring.
Chris, we’re going to have to tell you something. PwC wants people to quit. The King’s PwC tried to get as many as 600 people to quit so they wouldn’t have to lay them off late last year and as recently as June it told a group of “voluntarily separated” individuals they should fib in their farewell emails to colleagues to make it sound like it was fully their decision to leave this wonderful firm at which they’ve learned so much and met so many great people.
PwC UK, like Big 4 firms closer to home, is being hit with a trifecta of issues: Overhiring a few years ago when everyone started panicking about shortages, a significant decrease in demand for certain advisory services, and higher-than-expected attrition. That last one is important. The business model has a certain amount of turnover baked in and when not enough people leave, it’s either layoffs (or, in PwC’s case, “voluntary separations” which are just layoffs with a better severance package and without icky headlines about layoffs) or you make people hate their job so much they leave. It is quite clear to us PwC is engaged in the latter. The firm not only couldn’t care less if people leave due to this policy change, they want them to leave.
Anyway, Kate Andrews at The Telegraph covered this issue as well and went so far to say PwC is desperate. In ‘The full costs of telling people to work from home are only now becoming clear’ she writes:
“We’re in a war for talent, because we’re busy,” Kevin Ellis, the then-UK chairman of the “big four” accounting firm, told The Times in the summer 2021. Rather than penalise employees for working from home, PwC would try to avoid the threat of pay cuts other companies were making. “A lot of other businesses with the same skills that we need are busy,” he told the newspaper. “I think that’s not something to consider at this stage.”
That stage in the process has come and gone. Three years later, PwC is not only mandating its staff spend more hours in the office and face-to-face with clients, it plans to keep track of them too.
Even the greatest advocates of office working might find this a bit much. It’s one thing to issue instructions to your workbase. It’s a much bigger, rather Orwellian step to physically track them, seemingly to make sure they’re following orders.
From some angles, this might look like a power move from the firm. But it appears, to me anyway, to be an act of desperation.
She goes on to describe a breakdown of trust, implying that PwC sucks at managing a hybrid workforce (probably at least a little true) and this is how they’re going to manage it.
It seems highly unlikely that PwC’s new policy is going to improve trust and goodwill between the company and its employees, which raises the question – why go ahead with this policy? When PwC took the light-touch approach three years ago, it made a record-breaking profit of £1.2bn, achieved with the vast majority of its staff working from home. Yet last autumn it was reported that PwC’s growth was lagging behind its competitors in the previous financial year.
PwC revenues are due any day now and it’s unclear if partners will once again be taking a hit but we’re going to assume yes given recent decisions, keeping in mind that slower growth is considered a hit. The firm’s 1,000 or so partners took home £906,000 ($1.2 million USD) last year, down from £1 million ($1.3 million) in 2022. In 2019, that number was £765,000 ($999,608). Partners are like vicious dogs with miswired brains, once they taste flesh — in this case, million dollar years — they will crave it. They will do whatever they have to do to get it.
Things have changed since 2021. A lot. Business is slow, people aren’t leaving, and there’s a lot of dead weight sitting on the payroll. RTO mandates are intended to make people quit, RTO mandates with a side of Orwellian tracking will get the job done faster and more effectively.
All without the icky layoff headlines. PwC may or may not be desperate but it’s not for the reason she thinks.
Further reading: