CR Strategy

At PwC we commit to do the right thing in our own business and to be a catalyst for change in the world around us.

PwC Celebrates National Philanthropy Day in Canada

PwC Celebrates National Philanthropy Day in Canada

Our commitment to corporate responsibility goes well beyond embedding social, environmental and economic integrity into the fabric of our business.

We aim to leverage our core skills and activities to help our clients address CR issues while acknowledging the need to also address them in our own business.

We want to be part of the global conversation and movement towards responsible business practices that create positive change in the world. We want to be part of the solution.

Our new CR strategy focuses on two key elements:

  • Do the right thing, which means playing our part in promoting responsible business issues that are central to our business – from the quality of our services and building an inclusive workplace, to our engagement with communities and our environmental footprint. 
  • Be a catalyst for change, which is about using our skills, voice, and relationships to work with others and influence activities that make a difference, create change and have a lasting impact on the world around us. Today we’re helping organizations around the world strengthen their own corporate responsibility agendas through the many services we provide every day.

Today we’re helping organizations around the world strengthen their own corporate responsibility agendas through the many services we provide every day.

  • We review, consult and transform thousands of businesses around the globe every year. 
  • We offer services that focus on enhancing trust and transparency between government, business and society. 
  • We contribute to the development of the standards that underpin financial systems and industries. 
  • We’re developing new ways of measuring environmental, social and economic impacts, managing risks and providing assurance to our clients through our Sustainable Business Solutions practice. 
  • We’re managing our own impact, but we’re also uniquely positioned as a professional services firm to help integrate and foster change around corporate responsibility issues in ways that have more widespread effects.

Across our network, PwC firms support these network-wide goals and align with our commitment to do the right thing and be a catalyst for change. To give our global activities further focus, we developed a framework in FY2012 that shows how people across Canada can play their part across the four key areas. We also embedded this framework into PwC Canada’s new vision statement and business strategy, aligning CR with business priorities. The framework provides an effective way to engage in a meaningful dialogue with our people about how corporate responsibility impacts our employees’ day-to-day work. 

We have made significant progress within the people dimension of our CR strategy thanks to the development of a new approach to Diversity and Inclusion. This new strategy includes holistic targets, a workforce census, an equitable leadership assessment tool and the introduction of formal opportunities to engage in dialogue about diversity across the country. By naming a Chief Inclusion Officer and establishing a Diversity and Inclusion Council comprised of senior leadership to oversee these efforts, we have demonstrated to our people and external stakeholders that we are committed to creating more inclusive workplaces.

We also launched a new program called Dare to Doubt. This program is designed to help client facing teams apply professional skepticism on all engagements, highlighting our commitment to transparency and operating with integrity.

The PwC Canada Foundation continued to deepen our firm’s commitments within the community. A definition for ‘skilled volunteering’ was created to help us better manage and measure our volunteer efforts. We began to focus our initiatives in a few key ways: providing financial literacy training, life skills coaching and mentoring to youth. As a result, the number of volunteer activities we engaged in on these fronts jumped from 5 in FY2011 to 46 in FY2012.

We experienced a decline in membership of our environmental committees during FY2012, which resulted in a lower number of hours invested by our people. We also continued to experience a decline in the number of responses to our annual commuter survey. We’re currently investigating the reasons why fewer people took part and are working with our stakeholders to create an action plan, including: communications regarding our enhanced corporate responsibility initiatives; and the opportunites for staff to deliver sustainablity services to our clients.

New to this year’s marketplace dimension is a model outlining the firm’s economic impact on the Canadian economy. This is our first step in quantifying some of the firm’s impacts on the community.

Over the next year, we’ll be talking about our CR work in a different way. We’ll be bringing everything together under the banner of ‘part of it:’, a campaign focused on highlighting the ways our knowledge, services, people and relationships are interconnected and help to build trust and create solutions to society’s challenges.

Our strategy will also keep us focused on our medium and longer term goals: to use our combined skills, voice and relationships to build trust, ethics and integrity within the marketplace, and enhance our impacts associated with measurement frameworks, community education and capacity building initiatives. We will be working with our stakeholders all along the way to illustrate how we’re all part of this important global conversation.