PwC’s dedication to corporate responsibility is demonstrated through the actions we take at work, in the marketplace and in our community every day

At PwC, corporate responsibility (CR) is about integrating social, environmental and economic integrity into our values, culture, decision-making and operations in an accountable and transparent manner. Put simply, we aspire to be aCR leader.

To achieve this goal, our global network developed a Global Corporate Responsibility Strategy and framework that focuses our commitments and actions into four quadrants: community, environment, people and marketplace. By considering the wider impacts of our conduct and decisions across these four areas, we’re better able to embed CR in all our organizational planning and business processes. We set goals for each of these quadrants and developed a strategy to achieve them.

Our firm approaches CR from four perspectives

1. Community – We are committed to helping build and empower community leadership. We will do this by sharing our time, knowledge and resources, as well as by harnessing the dedication and capabilities of our people.
2. Environment – We respect the environment. And we are committed to taking the necessary and measurable steps to reduce the environmental impact of our business operations.
3. People – We are committed to creating a culture of success for our people by engaging and motivating them to do their best and supporting them to reach both their personal and professional goals. We’re focused on developing responsible leaders who can build trust-based relationships with each other and with our clients and stakeholders.
4. Marketplace – Our goal is to take a leadership role in bringing about positive change and improvements in our profession and the marketplace. We do this first by practising responsible, sustainable business practices, corporate citizenship and good governance. Second, by promoting these among our clients, vendors and other organizations. And third, we take an active role in contributing to the debate on issues impacting our marketplace.

This website demonstrates PwC’s commitment to CR through our discussion of work carried out under these quadrants.

PwC’s CR Strategy

In FY2011, we completed the final phase of our existing CR strategy by continuing to strengthen and develop the priorities identified in each of the four quadrants. We made significant progress, specifically with the development of our community engagement strategies and our approach to setting up models to measure our impacts. We also saw considerable success from strengthening our coaching, learning and development programs through enhanced working practices. Our progress was slower than planned in some of our priorities within the people, environment and marketplace quadrants. This was in part due to lack of resources within our functional teams. We addressed some of those performance concerns by allocating new internal resources to help manage our CR projects and refocusing our efforts to key areas where we feel we can have the biggest impact.

We will draft a new three-year strategic plan in FY2012 to guide our actions in this next phase of our CR program and we will report back on our progress against this plan in next year’s CR publication. The current economic environment continues to present increased risk for many of our stakeholder groups. This includes increased attention and public debate on issues related to the role of business in society. The audit profession, as with every part of the financial system, has to learn lessons from the recent financial crisis. Professional services firms must continue to evolve to meet the changing needs of capital markets and to be transparent and accountable. This is an important debate. We’ll continue to help the market strengthen standards that underpin trust in business. We will also work hard to provide leadership in the dialogue that will help shape our future. Developing responsible leaders will remain a critical component of our firm’s overall approach in this area.

Our CR scorecard presents our progress against priorities identified in our Highlights 2011 document and defines our key priorities moving forward.