People Weigh In on PwC U.K.’s Plan to Track Employees’ Work Location

In a memo sent to staff on Thursday, seen by the Financial Times, managing partner Laura Hinton said that the firm would begin sending staff their working location data every month, adding that employees must now spend “a minimum of three days a week” in the office or at client sites.

The location data will also be sent to employees’ career coaches at PwC, said one person familiar with the details. The new policy will take effect from January.

“We 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,” Hinton wrote in the memo. “This will help to ensure that the new policy is being fairly and consistently applied across our business.”

She added: “We all benefit from the positive impact of a hybrid approach, but the previous guidance of at least two to three days a week was open to interpretation.”

Hinton added that PwC “thrives on strong relationships—and those are almost always more easily built and sustained face-to-face,” according to the Financial Times. She also said, “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.”

“Lazy substitute for real leadership”

But Matt Wurst, chief marketing officer of Genuin, a video community platform, said in a recent post on LinkedIn that tracking employees “is a lazy substitute for real leadership” and this thinking “will do more harm than good.”

“The message here I think is clear: ‘We don’t really trust you, so we’re going to track your every move,’” Wurst said in a video. “But I’ll tell you something I’ve learned in my 25 years of professional experience—tracking employees like this does more harm than good. People are smart. They’ll figure out how to game the system. You’re not fostering better teamwork or creativity by making everyone sit at a desk for three arbitrary days a week. You’re forcing compliance. It’s like saying, ‘Hey, you’re an adult but we’re going to treat you like a child because a memo said so.’ Look, there’s value in face-to-face interactions, but that doesn’t mean every company’s solution should be to get back into the office three or four days a week, or else. It’s lazy management to think that the only way to foster creativity and culture is to have butts in seats. It’s also just incredibly short-sighted for PwC to overlook the productivity gains and employee satisfaction that flexible work has brought. I get it, timesheets and client billability are also important. You need to know when your team is working on billable tasks, but tracking people to enforce attendance is just a slippery slope to a culture of distrust and micromanagement.”

“Misguided approach to boosting productivity”

Berne Omolafe, founder and CEO of Pryntd.xyz, a London-based extended reality platform, wrote on LinkedIn that PwC’s employee tracking policy is missing the forest for the trees.

“Focusing solely on where employees sit three days a week is a misguided approach to boosting productivity,” he wrote. “Comparing 2024’s output to pre-pandemic levels ignores many factors that have profoundly impacted the workplace. The global economic climate is fraught with uncertainty. Mental health challenges and burnout are widespread. Many industries face skill gaps and talent shortages. Technology continues to disrupt traditional workflows, requiring constant adaptation. Poor management practices persist, hindering engagement and motivation.

“Tracking employees is more than just invasive; it’s counterproductive. It creates a culture of distrust and erodes the autonomy that often fuels creativity and innovation,” he continued. “Instead of focusing on surveillance, organizations should prioritize fostering an environment where employees feel valued, supported, and empowered. This means offering flexible work arrangements that cater to individual needs, investing in employee well-being initiatives, providing opportunities for upskilling and professional development, and cultivating strong leadership that inspires and motivates.

“The future of work demands a new paradigm that prioritizes trust, adaptability, and a commitment to employee growth,” Omolafe concluded. “It’s time for organizations to abandon outdated, top-down approaches and embrace a more human-centric approach.”

“Where is the data coming from?”

Articles published on what PwC U.K. is planning to do, like the one from the Financial Times, haven’t fully explained how the accounting firm is planning to track its employees’ locations, something that Matthew Helminiak, SPHR, founder of Culture Diagnostics, wants to know.

“‘Individual working location data’ makes it sound like they already have the data, and the only change is they are now going to start sharing the data in a report. Where is the data coming from? GPS location data for company laptops or tablets? GPS location data for company phones? Company vehicles?” he wrote on LinkedIn last week.

He also noted published reports last week that PwC would be laying off roughly 1,800 employees—or 2.5% of its workforce—in the U.S. to address declining business in its advisory practice.

“So for all of those PwC U.K. employees that are thinking about objecting to being location tracked—you’re expendable to PwC,” Helminiak wrote.

Michael Przytula, who leads the workplace technology practice in North America for consulting giant Accenture, wrote on LinkedIn that “you can’t build relationships and trust online the way you can in a room together.” However, he said, “I challenge any organization’s ability to track all their employees to the level [PwC U.K. is] talking about here. This is especially true of a consulting organization!”

“Here’s some challenges I believe they’ll face in executing this: tracking where people are when NOT IN a PwC office or ON a PwC device; dealing with the long, long list of valid reasons why someone wouldn’t be on one of these; and managing all this to a level of accuracy they could action an outcome,” Przytula wrote.

In a post on Fishbowl about the PwC U.K. plan, one person wrote “[PwC] can track your location already anytime your laptop connects to a network.”

“Chasing short-term profits; ignoring long-term impacts”

In a post on the PwC U.K. plan on r/accounting, one person commented that the firm “is chasing short-term profits while ignoring long-term impacts” while also mentioning the impact of firms outsourcing accounting work to India.

“How do associates and seniors learn the skills and technical knowledge they need if their job is to send the majority of an audit to India, and just compare the current year to prior year workpapers? How do managers and above learn more skills? The current crop of managers up through partners all started as staff that did the majority of work themselves, not send it to the offshore team,” this person wrote.

“And this explains why college students avoid the profession. The younger group of accountants entering the industry today worry they’ll be replaced by a remote team; and as they get older, they have to worry about AI taking their jobs in 5-10 years (I think most people know it won’t happen anytime soon, but after developing the technology for 5-10 years, who knows what kind of advancements will be made?),” the post continued. “Then staff see the two-faced nature of partners. With examples like this: why do we need to be in the office if the work is being done a literal ocean away (and maybe half a continent) away? Starting staff salaries haven’t kept pace with inflation, and they wonder why people aren’t picking the profession. They refuse to properly staff projects and expect a team to pick up the slack when burned out staff quit in the middle of a project. So the partners of today are willingly damaging the reputation and long-term viability of the profession, all in the name of a bigger payday for themselves.

Another commenter, who said they used to be a senior manager at EY, defended return-to-office policies, writing that work quality is way better when people are face to face, at least in audit.

“This is particularly true at the staff level(s). Seniors have kind of been there and done that, so the difference isn’t that significant. And it’s largely down to whether they’re still brought in on the engagement and the team. Managers stay managering, generally. But the difference in staff is night and day,” the person wrote.

Could this create new metrics for employee productivity/output?

Jake Tuber, PhD, a principal at Ticonderoga Advisory and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology at the City College of New York, said in a video on LinkedIn that the far more interesting conversation on this issue is that “it’s incredibly hard to measure the productivity and/or output of an employee in a very novel knowledge work environment.”

“We are still utilizing the only metrics we have available to us such as being there as a proxy for producing great output,” he said. “Prior to the knowledge work era for the almost entirety of humanity, a lot of what we did was correlated pretty directly to how much time we spent. So if you were on the job for more hours and you had a discrete, identifiable task, it lined up that you would produce greater output or better results just spending more time. But knowledge work is much more complicated than that, and measuring the relationship between hours spent and ultimate results is much murkier. But we simply don’t yet have that many great tools to measure this. So firms are utilizing anything at their disposal they can to try to increase that ultimate output and production of value.

“It strikes me as reasonable to think that, generally speaking, you would expect employees to be maybe a bit more collaborative, a bit more creative, a bit more productive if they had to be in the office more,” he continued. “Whether or not that’s worth the trade-off of what you’re asking employees to do and what other firms could potentially offer those folks is a different question, but it is interesting that no one yet seems to have announced, you know what, we’ve cracked the code. We have a better mechanism for measuring output for a lot of very knowledge work roles, especially in the professional services space where a lot of times you as the consultant at PwC or elsewhere are essentially the product or service. So I do think that this is going to be an interesting area for us to keep in mind.

“I’m curious what AI will be able to do in terms of measuring what work is getting done, how quickly it’s getting done, the nuances of those things, and potentially creating new metrics for us to understand the relationship between knowledge work that gets done and the output of the institutions responsible for it,” Tuber added.