PwC to keep track of how many hours people spend in office
Professional services giant PwC has informed its staff that it will begin tracking their working locations. As the firm looks to place greater emphasis on in-person work, requiring three days a-week on-site, it is unclear how staff will be impacted if they fail to comply.
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a workplace revolution that led to many companies around the world adopting a hybrid approach, allowing employees to balance office-based work with home life. While the UK government stopped advising people to work from home due to Covid-19 in January 2022, many companies continued to offer flexible or hybrid working to their staff – seeing it as a way to ensure a strong stream of talent – as opposed to improved pay or perks – amid a tightening labour market.
However, the labour market has levelled out, and the brief boom in business that consulting firms enjoyed post-lockdown has dissipated. In this context, suddenly, many firms have conspicuously re-evaluated their previously generous stance on working from home.
Two years ago, senior PwC staff in the UK responded angrily to suggestions from ‘The Apprentice’ judge Alan Sugar that working from home was “lazy” and “a total joke”. But that resolute defence of its worker’s rights to stay home on the job is clearly a distant memory now – with the Big Four firm having reportedly informed its staff of strict new rules on hybrid-working.
According to The Guardian, PwC has emailed 26,000 employees, to let them know that as of January 2025, staff and partners will now be expected to spend three days, or 60% of their working time, in the office – up from the two days in the office or with clients. But more ominously, it added that to enforce this, it will begin monitoring how frequently employees work from home – mirroring the manner in which it records how many chargeable hours they work.
In a press statement, Laura Hinton, managing director at PwC, commented, “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. This feels right for our business and right for our people, given our focus on client service, coaching and learning and development. At the same time, we continue to offer flexibility through hybrid working.”
An additional report from The Financial Times suggested that each employee will receive information about their "individual working location data" every month – and that this will be shared with PwC's career advisers. It is not clear how staff will be impacted by this, however. When a spokesperson was asked by CNN what would happen to staff who do not fully comply, they responded coyly that the firm would want to “understand the reasons why” before acting.
PwC is not the first company to push staff back towards the office more regularly and monitor their compliance after shifting to hybrid working during the pandemic. Earlier in 2024, as a result of a lack of compliance with its hybrid working guidelines, rival Big Four firm EY began monitoring its employees’ office attendance through swipe card entry. Meanwhile, IBM also told its US-based managers they had to work in the office at least three days a week, or leave their positions. Other companies outside the consulting sector to have taken similar steps include UPS, Amazon, Meta and even Zoom, which ironically played a large part in the work-from-home movement during lockdown.
