In the first rounds of trying to get people back to the office after the pandemic, plenty of companies played hardball. The message was clear: if workers didn’t return to their previous working practices, there would be consequences.
At Facebook, that meant a potential reduction in pay for its American employees if they had moved to a location with cheaper living costs. At Google, it meant plans for salary cuts to reflect the savings employees were making by reducing their travel and commuting costs.
PwC took a different approach.
“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.
This week 26,000 UK workers were issued a notice: from January next year, the firm will start monitoring their working location. The data will be reported back to employees each month.
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.
Go back to 2021, when PwC was refusing to take the tough approach, and you’ll see the goals were the same: the firm wanted to achieve a hybrid working culture, where its employees came into the office for the majority of the week. Three years later, the carrots apparently haven’t worked. Now they are at risk of over-correcting.
It’s clear from the leaked memo to staff that PwC isn’t quite sure how to market its new policy. The location reports will also be fed to employees’ “in-house career coaches”. So it’s really a magnanimous move, the messaging seems to imply: tracking employees to help with their development. Snooping for their own good.
Really it feels like a hop and a skip away from the party-hats and melon parties in the TV drama Severance: no matter the treats or the favours, overreaches into privacy can rarely be dressed up as much else.
Of course, PwC is entitled to ask its employees to work from the office. It’s welcome to take a hardline approach and insist on it. Its workers can decide if this arrangement still suits them: return to the office if it does, look for other, more flexible employment if it doesn’t.
Yet somehow this rather simple and effective definition of “employment” appears increasingly shaky – and PwC’s new policy seems to highlight what, in part, has gone so wrong.
As much as we would like the impact of the pandemic and successive lockdowns to be behind us, there are myriad hangovers that continue to haunt the UK – and the labour market is no exception. With job vacancies still high and an ever-growing worklessness crisis (with 5.8m working-age people on out-of-work benefits), the issues companies face in simply hiring and retaining workers are still as relevant as ever.
But there seems to be an even more fundamental problem: a breakdown of trust between employers and employees.
The pandemic saw the state get far too involved with private arrangements between firms and employees. It is no surprise that, after years of messaging from politicians to “stay home” (and talk of even bringing in a “right” to do so in the future), plenty of workers still feel like this is a national policy, rather than private decision made at company level, and something to be negotiated with an employer.
The fact that some workers simply won’t return has encouraged some invasive business practices: ones in which adults are treated like children, who need oversight and eyes on them at all times.
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.
Despite growing popularity for the idea that remote working has no impact on productivity – or can even enhance it in some cases – was it simply a matter of time before the post-pandemic years revealed that there are longer-term, negative effects to abandoning shared space to communicate ideas?
It’s worth noting that PwC’s new tracking rule only applies to UK employees. It landed the same week that the Centre for Cities revealed that London is lagging behind other major cities in getting workers back to the office: just 2.7 days are spent, on average, in the workplace, compared to New York’s 3.1 days and Paris’s 3.5 days.
This should make not just companies, but the Government, take pause – and consider what kinds of consequences might develop out of new employment rules or instructions.
If one of the Treasury’s main aims really is to tackle the so-called gender pay gap, for example, the fastest way for a company to make its numbers look better on paper is to hire fewer junior women (which is why so much of that reporting is best described as worse-than-useless). If full employment rights come in from day one, the UK’s number of job vacancies could start falling for all the wrong reasons: like if employers pull job offers and make do with fewer staff.
The command to work from home where possible has had lasting effects on businesses and workers and is producing some rather unexpected, rather invasive, responses. It’s well worth considering, then, what might happen next.
Kate Andrews is economics editor at The Spectator
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
