PwC mandates more office time, tracks employee location data

Beginning Jan. 1, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) will require its employees in the United Kingdom to spend at least three days a week with clients or in the office — up from the currently required two to three days per week.

“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,” Laura Hinton, managing partner at PwC UK, said in a statement. “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.”

A memo from one of the world’s “Big Four” accounting firms sent to the company’s 26,000 UK employees and shared with CNN offered more details about how PwC UK plans to implement the new mandate. It suggests, per CNN, that the previous two- to three-day mandate was not universally followed and states that the upcoming move is designed to put “more emphasis on in-person working.”

“[W]e 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,” according to the memo. “This will help to ensure that the new policy is being fairly and consistently applied across our business.”

PwC UK’s move is the latest blow to the work-from-home culture that many companies adopted after the pandemic. Earlier this year, Walmart announced it will bring thousands of remote workers and employees from smaller offices to the retail giant’s corporate hubs — driving one employee to call the new policy “a bunch of bullsh-t.” Workers and managers at such companies as IBM, AT&T, and Amazon also have been required to return to the office.

All of which prompted Entrepreneur.com to ask if workplace trust is dead, citing the potential for such mandates — combined with tracking procedures like PwC UK plans to implement — to “bring down morale and make workers wary of their employers.”

As Entreprenuer.com reports: “Amazon made the term ‘coffee badging’ mainstream earlier this summer when it was reported the company is tracking how often employees swipe and how long they stay in the office. Salesforce is also reportedly tracking swipes.”

Related: Weighing the risks and benefits of enforcing RTO policies

Stanford economist Nick Bloom got blunt with Inc.com. “My interpretation is that [return-to-office] mandates are often a response to poor company performance, perhaps adopted by under-pressure CEOs,” he said. “These RTO mandates upset employees, who do not appear to yield performance benefits in return.”

“It makes good business sense for employees or teams to be together on certain specific days, rather than employers needing everyone in because they don’t trust people to be performing effectively remotely,” added Claire McCartney, policy and practice manager for CIPD, the professional body for the UK’s human resources industry, speaking with CNN.com and citing evidence collected by her organization. “Employers should be seeking to find a balance, where flexibility over where and when people work meets the needs of employees, without compromising the needs of the business.”