PwC tracks wi-fi and passes to monitor staff office attendance

Times

3 days ago

PwC, the Big Four accountant, has introduced a 'traffic light' system to ensure staff are meeting a mandate to attend the office at least three days a week.
The dashboard uses pass swipes and wi-fi connections to determine whether workers are 'amber', if their office attendance falls below 60 per cent, or 'red' if it dips under 40 per cent.
The attendance data, which went live for supervisors in April, can be seen by business unit leaders and chief financial, administrative and people officers. Staff can also access their own data.
The firm also traces laptop wi-fi connections and cross references the information with data from the HR platform Workday and employees' time sheets to establish whether staff are working on client's sites.
The policy applies to all 19 offices across the UK and Ireland run by PwC UK, which has about 23,000 employees.
A senior staff member told the Financial Times, which first reported the system, that they had 'lost count' of the number of colleagues who had raised concerns. Staff whose attendance is not up to scratch can face formal sanctions, affecting their performance evaluations and bonuses, PWC confirmed.
Last September, the accounting and consulting firm told staff it required them to work in the office or at a client site at least three days a week, and that they would monitor this in a way akin to billable hours.
A PWC spokeswoman said: 'There are clear benefits to in-person work for both our people and clients, and we have seen these borne out since adjusting our approach to hybrid working at the beginning of this year.
'The dashboard ensures our people have easy access to their attendance data, so they can manage and plan their time in a way that works for them, our teams and our clients. We remain committed to flexibility, including the option for people to condense their usual working hours and finish early on Friday lunchtime for six weeks in the summer.'
PwC said its approach was 'consistent' with other businesses. Rival EY started monitoring office attendance using swipe card data last year.
Deloitte's approach is split between its UK arm, which has no minimum office attendance, and its US arm, which announced in March that swipe card data would be used to determine performance reviews and bonuses.
Phillippa O'Connor, chief people officer at PwC, told the Lords committee on home-based working in April: 'We have not seen any impact on recruitment in the round. It is asked about in recruitment processes, so I think people are very alive to it as part of the contract now.'