Creating value for our people

CEOs around the world are pulling hard on every business lever within their reach. Productivity, innovation and transformation have evolved from aspirations into a vital agenda for corporate survival. However, there’s another important lever that CEOs must also get to grips with: building and maintaining a truly engaged, flexible and talented workforce.

Silas Yang, PwC China senior partner and member of the Network Leadership Team

“In a climate of growing unemployment in many locations and an increasing pool of highly educated people across the globe, it’s hard to imagine that business leaders are facing a widening ‘talent gap’. But they are. In fact, most CEOs tell us that talent is the most complex and urgent challenge they face today.

“To meet this challenge, business leaders need to get more strategic about how they manage their people. A clear understanding of – and respect for – what employees really value is a vital step towards shaping an organisation that attracts, motivates and retains the best talent, at every level and in every location. Here at PwC we seek to recruit talented people and we know they will work hard to contribute. In return, we offer them the opportunity of a lifetime.”

A clear proposition

At PwC, we know that our people feel engaged if they understand how their efforts create value – not only for them, but also for our clients. And we’ve boiled this requirement down into a single, straightforward proposition for all our employees. With a workforce as diverse as ours, you might not have thought that one proposition could cover everyone at PwC. But we think it does.

What is our proposition? Simply that PwC represents the opportunity of a lifetime. In our view, this proposition is not only simple, but also real. Even more important, our people have responded enthusiastically to this new expression of what it means to be part of PwC.

One sign of this positive response is that our people are reporting rising engagement with PwC as an employer. In our latest global people survey, 72% of PwC people worldwide voiced high levels of personal engagement. What’s more, 85% of the largest PwC firms increased their levels of people engagement in FY 2012, with some increasing their scores by as much as 15 points.

People engagement correlates closely to employee retention – and here we’ve seen further positive signs this year, with a decrease of more than 2% in voluntary turnover. But the benefits of higher engagement go way beyond increased retention, since a deeply engaged workforce also brings strategic advantage. Why? Because, by definition, engaged employees embed the goals and objectives of the business in all the plans they make and decisions they take. This means that, through their combined weight, they pull firmly and consistently in the right direction.

Making it personal

Fundamental to our ability to engage our people is recognising their individual skills, experience and aspirations. Even before they start work, each of the 40,000 people we hire this year will go through an onboarding process that provides them with the opportunity to start to consider their own personal career paths with PwC. Some of these recruits will be experienced professionals, part-way through their careers. But most will be members of the millennial generation, embarking on a new journey.

The millennials come to the job market with particular views about what they want from an employer. For them, prestige, money or job security are not necessarily the most important considerations. Instead, they’re looking for the chance to gain new experiences and be provided with career development and mobility opportunities.

We strive to fulfil these expectations in many ways, just one of which is overseas secondments. Every year, thousands of our people – most of them in the early stages of their career with PwC – take part in long- or short-term assignments.

These secondments give our people unique career experiences, while also providing PwC firms and clients with a sizable group of professionals who are capable and comfortable working across borders. And we keep these increasingly skilled and valuable people engaged, by continuing to offer them new experiences and enabling them to move around between different jobs.

While our workforce includes a high proportion of younger people, our business model is based on deploying in-depth experience and expertise quickly to anywhere in the world. This is why, in addition to recruiting promising junior staff, we also hire and retain highly experienced people, with skills that have been built up and proven over many years. For some in this group, their stage of life – perhaps as parents of young children – means job flexibility may be a priority.

Consequently, providing our people with opportunities to decide where they work, what they work on, and even when they work will be critical for us to build and sustain their engagement, not to mention the opportunities for them to engage in other aspects of the business, such as our community engagement programmes.

We also look to extend our engagement with our people beyond the boundaries of PwC. As their careers develop and their priorities evolve, many PwC people will eventually go on to join other organisations. We believe that the experience and relationships our alumni build at PwC stay with them, wherever their paths lead. That’s why it’s important that we keep in touch with our alumni. Also, a number of our alumni rejoin us each year, making it even more worthwhile to keep the communication channels open.

Realising our potential

Across our large and diverse global workforce, our aim is to provide all our people with specific opportunities that fit their individual strengths, interests and career goals. To do this, we need to understand their personal ambitions and expectations, which can vary significantly according to age, gender, career track and life circumstances.

Getting all of this right in a way that includes everyone is crucial for enabling our people to realise their potential – and thereby enabling us to realise our full potential both for clients and as an organisation.

Another attribute that fosters engagement is being a learning organisation – and at PwC we learn every day. Our combination of learning from doing, learning from others, and learning through formal programmes and solutions means we learn rapidly, continuously and efficiently. To encourage and enable our people to make conscious and well-thought-out career choices, we’ve launched a career development framework that helps guide them through the rich array of career paths PwC offers.

In some firms, this has evolved into the creation of specialist teams that provide our people with ‘career service consultations’ when they feel they’re ready to consider new opportunities inside or outside PwC.

Many organisations claim that their people are their greatest asset. In our case this is demonstrably true. However, as with a portfolio of assets, some investments perform more highly than others – and no organisation can afford to undervalue its highest-performing members.

So we’re also building programmes to support the people who we think have the potential to become future PwC leaders. With this in mind, our plans for the coming year include initiatives to advance PwC’s approach to leadership development, along with further investments in world-class coaching and new technologies to support our people’s learning goals.

By any standards, PwC is an extraordinary organisation, with more than 180,000 talented people across 158 countries. We want to enable each and every one of these valued individuals to explore what is possible at PwC. We want them to realise their true potential and be confident of our support as they do so . . . even if that means that some use the skills, experience and relationships they build up with us to be successful elsewhere.

That’s why we call it the opportunity of a lifetime. And it’s why more and more of our people agree.