PwC is asking its employees to work less time from home. To ensure this, the corporate will log their whereabouts in the long run.
In a memo, the accounting firm informed its 26,000 UK employees that from January they might be expected to spend at the very least three days every week, or 60 percent of their working time, at their desks – or with clients.
Previously, employees were expected to work on-site for 2 to 3 days.
To make sure that its employees aren’t secretly working from home (or on the beach) after they shouldn’t, the corporate also monitors how often they work within the office—the identical way it monitors the variety of billable hours they work.
Every month, employees are sent details about their “individual work location data,” which is even passed on to their internal profession advisors, the ^ “Financial Times”.
An organization spokesman confirmed to Assets that the announcement only affects British staff.
“Face-to-face collaboration is hugely important for a staffing company like ours, and the new policy shifts the focus of our working week to working collaboratively with clients and colleagues,” said Laura Hinton, managing partner at PwC UK, in a press release.
“Given our focus on customer service, coaching, and training, this feels right for our company and our employees,” concluded Hinton, stressing that this doesn’t mean the top of flexible working models in the corporate.
“We continue to offer flexibility through hybrid working.”
Employees fight back against RTO
PwC declined to substantiate whether the brand new measures were introduced to focus on staff who evade existing corporate obligations.
But Hinton’s memo suggests there may be currently inconsistency in how staff interpret company policies. By tracking who falls inside — and who doesn’t — management can ensure policies are applied “fairly and consistently” across the corporate.
“We all benefit from the positive effects of a hybrid approach, but the previous guideline of at least two to three days per week was in need of interpretation,” she wrote within the memo, which the FT.
The recent directive comes as Research shows that London staff are within the office only half the week – lower than in lots of other major cities on this planet.
This is partly because staff are resisting their bosses’ attendance requirements: while employers in London require their employees to work within the office a median of three.1 days every week, they really only show up on 2.7 days.
Although the return to in-person work has been particularly “sluggish” within the UK capital, based on the Centre for Cities report – Toronto is the one major city where it fares worse – employee avoidance of RTO requests has now grow to be a worldwide phenomenon.
Even in Sydney, where staff are subject to the strictest RTO regulations of 4 days per week, they still only go to the office on 2.8 days.
In Singapore, too, employees are asked to work within the office 3.6 days every week – but they only show up on-site for 3.2 days.
RTO measures
Although PwC’s location monitoring measures are unusual, many large employers have begun restricting teleworking after previously failing to influence their employees to spend more time within the office.
Earlier this yr, rival company EY began officially logging data collected via magnetic cards at its turnstiles to find out how often employees entered the offices.
Similarly, Dell is literally throwing red flags at its employees in the event that they don’t show their ID cards often enough. Meanwhile, Amazon is putting an end to “coffee badgeging” by implementing a minimum work hour requirement on days within the office.
For this purpose, TikTok has even launched its own internal app: “MyRTO“, which monitors office attendance and asks employees to elucidate absences.
At the identical time, there may be a growing group of disillusioned CEOs who’re taking the trail of least resistance: Given the negative impact of RTO regulations on worker engagement, retention and acquisition, many are relaxing their stance on working from home.
KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of corporations with at the very least $500 million in revenue and located that only a 3rd of them expect to return to the office full-time in the following three years.
This represents a whole reversal from their stance last yr, when 62% of CEOs surveyed predicted that working from home would end by 2026.