Staff and partners at PwC UK were informed today that they are expected to work in the office or at a client site a minimum of three days a week, reports Bloomberg. Former senior partner Kevin Ellis, who retired in June after 40 years at the firm, tried the RTO carrot many times over the past several years, suggesting that if people want to get ahead they’ll want to show their faces at the office lest they be replaced by AI. Well, now the firm is going for the stick.
“Face-to-face working is hugely important to a people business like ours, and the new policy tips the balance of our working week into being located alongside clients and colleagues,” said PwC UK managing partner Laura Hinton in a statement to Bberg.
Anyone at PwC UK who’s angrily polishing up their resume this afternoon after receiving this news should read this: Survey Confirms What We Already Knew: RTO Mandates Were Intended to Get People to Quit.
In July, Financial Times broke the news that raises and bonuses were stingy at the King’s PwC this year, too. At least for some teams/service lines. They also axed the popular half-day summer Fridays, actions that when considered in the aggregate would compel a reasonable person to assume they really do hate you and want you to leave. See also: Comp Season PSA: If You’re Disappointed, It Might Be Because They Want You to Quit
Attrition must still be too high. Much like PIP distribution. Almost as if all these things are connected…
PwC UK, perhaps more so than other Big 4 firms or maybe it only appears that way because they keep getting stories about it in the news, is highly motivated to maintain an appearance of business as usual despite challenging market conditions. When they did a round of voluntary separations in June, the firm told staff to fib about their departure even though people talk and news of silent layoffs had been hanging in the air for weeks by the time people started abruptly disappearing.
Getting a bunch of people to leave because they don’t want to be in the office for at least 60% of the week is far cleaner than having to quietly usher another batch of people out of the back door before anyone notices.
Update: Financial Times followed up on this RTO news with a bit more info: the firm let everyone know they’ll be tracking them like cattle to ensure compliance with the new policy and that location data will be sent to staff career coaches.
In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, seen by the Financial Times, managing partner Laura Hinton said that the firm would begin sending staff their working location data every month, adding that employees must now spend “a minimum of three days a week” in the office or at client sites.
“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,” Hinton wrote in the memo. “This will help to ensure that the new policy is being fairly and consistently applied across our business.”
This applies to 26,000 people working at PwC UK.
Big Four Accounting Firm PwC UK Orders Staff Back to the Office [Bloomberg]
When I started out in public accounting, the firms would regularly do “layoffs”, and they’d take all sorts of shit in the media for it. But at some point, the ghouls running the firms realized that there are other ways to get to the same end result without calling it “layoffs”. And the media and public largely lets them get away with it.
The truth is, almost 100% of the time that a company chooses to reduce its workforce, it is due to poor management that made poor business decisions. And the people who made those decisions are almost never held accountable.
You might be right, but making the right decisions is one of the hardest things in life, both at work and in personal matters. If leadership is held accountable for every mistake they make, good people will refrain from holding top positions, which will then be occupied by opportunists.
This dichotomy of bad leaders and good staff is misleading—there are decent and not-so-decent people on both sides. Many managers would love to see their people working without close supervision or micromanagement, but the sad reality is that only a small fraction of employees have the inner discipline, strong ethics, and common sense to perform when not under the lash. The larger an organization, the harder it is to trust that people will do what they are told or expected to do.