One of the world’s biggest consulting and accounting firms plans to monitor its employees’ locations to make sure they comply with the firm’s more stringent return-to-office mandate.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC, said that its United Kingdom-based operations will be “placing more emphasis on in-person working” beginning next year, when it will transition from requiring workers to report to the office at least two days per week to one that will obligate staffers to be at their desk at least three out five days.
PwC sent an email to workers telling them it would be sharing their location data with them on a monthly basis, a spokesperson told Fox Business.
“The new policy tips the balance of our working week into being located alongside clients and colleagues,” PwC UK Managing Partner Laura Hinton said, adding that “this feels right for our business and right for our people, given our focus on client service, coaching, and learning and development.”
PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG, employs around 328,000 people globally. Its UK workforce numbers around 26,000 employees.
The policy takes effect in January, which PwC says will give staff time to “plan for these arrangements.”
A spokesperson for PwC confirmed the new policy in a statement to The Post.
“Our business thrives on strong relationships — and those are almost always more easily built and sustained face-to-face,” the company told its UK-base employees in a memo.
“By being physically together, we can offer our clients a differentiated experience and create the positive learning and coaching environment that is key to our success.”
When asked what would happen if an employee is found to have skirted the return-to-office mandate, a PwC spokesperson said that “we’d first want to understand the reasons why.”
Deloitte doesn’t have a mandatory return-to-office policy, though this may vary from team to team. KPMG allows its workers to adhere to a hybrid model.
EY has also started to monitor employee compliance with return-to-office mandates. Employees at the firm were required to show up at least two days a week — but half of them failed to adhere to the rule, according to Financial Times.
There has been a wave of companies that have required employees to come back to the office more frequently as the pandemic subsided.
Last month, office visits in the US reached 68.8% of August 2019 levels, a slight drop from the 72.2% figure recorded in July, according to the data analytics firm Placer.ai.
In August of last year, office visits nationwide reached 67.6% — a significant jump from the 55.9% recovery rate from the same month in 2022.
The rate at which workers returned to the office in August 2021 was just 39.1%, according to Placer.ai.
The latest data shows that Miami, New York, Atlanta and Dallas outperformed the the rest of the nation.
Office visits in New York and Miami reached 85% and 90%, respectively, while Atlanta saw 75.6% of its workers return in August.