Pwc employees forced back to the office in 2023

Tim Ryan held a webcast in the first week of may 2023 to let employees know that they would have to start working from the office again.

People have to remember that the covid-19 pandemic created a whole work from home culture. Many high level service jobs were ablet to work from home. The big 4 accounting firms were able to take advantage of this culture as the big 4 were already not big on office culture. Many auditors don’t go into the big 4 offices because they are at client sites.

This became more and more true for tax folks as well. When people were not working at client sites they didn’t always go back to the office. Many would work from home a couple days a week or at least on Friday.

PwC used the covid-19 work-from-home trend and decided to try and use it for a publicity stunt. They did this in October of 2021. We’ve linked to an article from cnbc that explains this initiative because pwc already scrubbed it from their website.

A quote from that article said that PwC can work virtually from anywhere. PwC will go back and say that they didn’t actually mean this, but the article really highlights that pwc was already contemplating a hybrid model. Instead they chose to be cool and choose the work from anywhere model. They said the whole reason they did this was to maybe get more diverse talent and have equitable pay. Well I guess they don’t care about getting better talent and no longer care about equitable pay.

The new PwC hybrid model

The new hybrid model will make employees return to the office starting July 1, 2023.

Employees that opted into the work from anywhere model might be screwed by this policy. If PwC actually enforces this model, then people that opted to work from anywhere might be negatively impacted in performance reviews. Right now redditors say that it the PwC hybrid work model won’t be enforced. That may be for year 1, but what about future years?

PwC updated their work from anywhere webpage to be a how we work page where they already updated the policy.

PwC’s working policy is now

  1. You can live anwhere in the continental United States as long as you get approval.
  2. You must spend 50% of your time in the office or at a client site.

There is a whole bunch of other public relations garbage on that webpage to justify PwC moving to this model, but most of it is irrelevant.

During this call PwC also said that they will still have bonuses and raises for the FY23 year end. We will know if PwC keeps their word if they keep to the bonuses and raises.