Working flexibly and logically at PwC

PwC’s new initiative allows potential employees to list their skills and favoured work pattern during their application. PwC then determines based on your chosen working schedule whether they can accommodate these needs within the business.

We spoke with Helen Hopkin, head of workplace strategy, about why this particular scheme has been introduced, what flexible working looks like at PwC currently and the quickly disappearing talent pools that companies will only have access to if they do not embrace more flexible ways to work.

What was the key turning point for PwC to change their approach to work?

This was unearthed in a couple of different areas. Firstly, PwC did a piece of external research and the feedback from this research was that 50% of the respondents wanted flexibility in the way in they worked. It was a key driver in whether or not they worked for a particular organisation – which was particularly poignant in our research in terms of feedback.

Also, internally our people have been feeding back through our engagement survey that’s it’s important they have a level of flexibility within their roles. Therefore, we’ve introduced something internally called ‘everyday flexibility’ encouraging people to speak to their line manager and apply for flexible working arrangements.

The third area is that we felt we were missing out on top talent because the perspective in the market was that we didn’t necessarily work flexibly and that when you’re working for a large organisation such as ours you have to work nine to five. I think the reason we’ve actively raised awareness around this was to bust some of those myths.

Can you give me an overview of this new working structure?

“We’ve introduced something internally called ‘everyday flexibility’ encouraging people to speak to their line manager and apply for flexible working arrangements.”

Essentially what we’ve done is asked people to resister and to give us an indication in their application in terms of what ideally what works for them. There’s a whole range of options coming back and we’ve been quite overwhelmed with the amount of applications.

 

To read the whole interview, visit HRD Connect here

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