PwC implements ‘traffic-light’ monitoring on office hours

PwC is reportedly monitoring swipes of employee work passes, and connections to wifi, to make sure they are working from the office. The Big Four firm’s latest escalation in its war on remote work has prompted privacy concerns among staff.

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. Many companies continued to offer flexible or hybrid working to their staff beyond the lockdown – seeing it as a way to ensure a strong stream of talent, amid a tightening labour market.

Among those was PwC, where the workplace atmosphere was so in favour of hybrid working that staff even engaged in a spat with ‘The Apprentice’ judge Alan Sugar, who had griped that working from home was “lazy” and “a total joke”. But the audit and advisory giant’s good will towards its workforce seems to have evaporated in the years since – amid slow revenue growth, and a tightening bottom-line.

In the autumn of 2024, PwC reportedly informed its staff of strict new rules on hybrid-working. The company emailed 26,000 employees, to let them know that as of January 2025, staff and partners would 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. 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.

Dashboard

Just under a year later, further reports from the UK press have shown that the management’s hard line on remote work has only intensified in the intervening period. According to the Guardian, bosses now deploy a “dashboard” to record attendance and check whether workers are adhering to the company policy of the 60% rule. The traffic-light panel displays staff as “amber” if they fall below that threshold, and “red” if they drop below 40%.

Feeding into this dashboard is data from work pass swipes, and staff’s connection to wifi. This can then be viewed by business unit leaders, as well as PwC’s chief financial, administrative and people officers to make decisions on their next steps – while employees are also able to access their own data.

But the implementation of this digital panopticon has led to privacy concerns from staff. Reports from the Financial Times first suggested that employees’ wifi connections from their laptop were traced by the system to check whether they are working from client sites on the days expected. The increased scrutiny on the attendance of PwC’s workforce (a slimmer 23,000 now), led one senior PwC source to tell the Financial Times that they had “lost count” of the number of colleagues with concerns about the monitoring. Meanwhile, another source reportedly said that workers were pursuing greater transparency from PwC about the tracking.

A spokesperson defended PwC’s position, saying, “We always listen to feedback and are committed to regular, clear and transparent communications about expectations … The dashboard ensures our people have easy access to their attendance data, so they can manage and plan their time in a way that works for them, our teams and our clients.”

The company added that it believed there were “clear benefits to in-person work for both our people and clients” and the approach was “consistent with other businesses” and “recognised and accepted by the vast majority of our people”. This is contrary to multiple studies having found that remote work does not come with the forfeit in productivity many firms feared pre-pandemic, flexible working arrangements are increasingly popular as a method of offering value to employees, with lower direct costs.

Impacts

A recent paper from Gallagher found 89.9% of UK firms currently offered some form of hybrid working, while in the past 12-18 months, 61.3% of companies rolled out flexible working arrangements to support recruitment and retention efforts. At the same time, another paper from recruitment company Hays earlier in the summer highlighted the potentially harmful impacts of ordering staff back into the office along any arbitrary lines.

An 84% majority of employees who work in a hybrid way – splitting their time between the office and a remote location, such as home – said it had a positive effect on their overall wellbeing, including their mental, physical, social and financial wellbeing. Meanwhile, a 38% portion of workers surveyed said recent news stories about companies hardening their stance on office attendance had negatively affected their wellbeing. And doing so might also push back on gender inclusivity gains at a company – as 87% of women (compared to 80% of men) said they believed hybrid working had improved their wellbeing.

At the start of 2025, the Financial Times reported that PwC were on track to miss the year’s targets for female partner representation in the UK, as the company struggled to sufficiently boost the proportion of women in their upper ranks.