At PwC Canada, trust is core to our mission and is key to our ability to be more resilient and accountable and offer sustainable impact for our stakeholders. But we know that for us to help organizations build trust, we need to be trusted and accountable ourselves. And while we do have a long-standing reputation for trust through our financial reporting and compliance work, we know we need to do more. Like all organizations, we need to stay ahead of rising expectations around issues like transparency and community impact as well as key global trends—such as increased skepticism and declining confidence in institutions—that are making trust a critical business imperative.
To hold ourselves accountable, we set out to learn everything we could about the tangible and intangible factors that contribute to trust. From there, we created a framework that identifies what drives trust in our organization, the situations where trust matters most and the metrics we can use to ensure we’re living up to our purpose and values. We’re outlining our journey below as part of our efforts to further build trust and are encouraging other organizations to do the same by applying this process to themselves.
Key steps in our trust journey
Step 1: Understanding trust in relation to PwC Canada
We know that trust is a nebulous entity. It takes time to build and can be lost in an instant. And it’s not static as trust goes up and down with every action, interaction and output. With this complexity in mind, we set out to research everything we could about why people put their trust in us so we can make changes to ensure positive impacts and change behaviours where our actions could be eroding trust.
The first stage of our research was to develop a better understanding of our stakeholder landscape. By examining current marketplace expectations and reviewing best practices for stakeholder identification, we could see how society’s changing expectations are transforming who we need to engage with to earn trust. Our findings revealed a diverse range of stakeholders, including our clients, educational institutions, governments, the investment community, marginalized communities, the media and our people.
Once we had identified our stakeholders, we undertook a materiality assessment on trust agenda topics, which helped us tailor our primary research to capture sentiment in key areas. We then commissioned a series of surveys with the public, clients and our people to understand their views on trust in our brand and the work we do every day.
One of the key findings from engaging with our stakeholders was how personal trust is for them. The discussions revealed that trust is measured by individual and collective thoughts and feelings about our intentions and is calculated against how well we embody competence (the quality of our actions and behaviours), consistency (actions that match our intentions) and integrity (behaviours that match our commitments) in everything we do, especially when things go wrong. This is one of the reasons why our trust journey goes beyond reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters to ask stakeholders how well our everyday actions and behaviours match our commitments.
Step 2: Using data to identify key trust drivers
Building on these overall findings about our stakeholders and their sentiments about us, we delved further into the data to pinpoint the top drivers of trust in our firm. This required us to work with our advanced analytics team to analyze sentiment across 45 different trust drivers to identify the issues that matter most to our stakeholders and assess how we perform against them. This gave us a list of drivers with a confirmed impact on trust.
We also looked at how our competitors and the marketplace are performing relative to our firm on the specific trust drivers we identified. This helped us identify any areas where we lagged our competition, needed to protect an existing competitive advantage or may be vulnerable to others surpassing us with relative ease.
We then assessed how our various trust drivers relate to each other, which was key to uncovering opportunities to maximize the efficiency of our trust-building efforts and impacts. This helped us prioritize one potential driver over another since any improvements would have impacts in related areas as well.
The ultimate result of this analysis was our top trust drivers and disclosures, which we’ve divided into three categories (prioritize, building momentum and table stakes) below:
1. Prioritize: Addressing blind spots that erode trust and require consistency and integrity in our actions
- Engaging in courageous conversations in the moment: We need to engage with stakeholders in an open, direct and prompt way, especially when taking action on issues that could negatively affect them. This also means pushing back on clients when needed to reduce the potential for errors.
- Showing how decisions are made and actions are taken: This is about disclosing more information about how decisions are made inside and outside our firm to provide greater transparency about what is and isn’t going well, especially when it comes to the issues our stakeholders care most about.
- Treating stakeholders fairly and well: These are different but connected concepts that reflect the importance of treating our people and clients fairly and in a way that helps them feel included in a constructive process when things go wrong.
- Fostering a sense of connection to PwC Canada through approachable leadership and a broader sense of community: Humanizing the ways we lead and looking to the right role models can help us be more intentional about how we build a sense of community and make our leaders more approachable.
2. Building momentum: Maintaining trust around our core competencies
- Adapting our services as ethical business practices evolve to earn the right to lead our industry: We need to operate in a way that’s consistent with our values, even though this can lead to tough choices about which services we offer and who we do business with and why.
- Ensuring the quality products and services our stakeholders expect: Our commitment to high quality requires us to continue focusing on ethics, data security, privacy and timely disclosure of important information affecting the marketplace.
- Clearly articulating what we stand for and ensuring we act on our values and deliver against our promises: We’re committing to boldly lead with our values through open and transparent communication about the state of our business and taking a stand on issues that matter most to society, even when it means greater risk.
3. Table stakes: Disclosing our progress on the issues our stakeholders care about most
- ESG reporting topics: Reporting on our progress on important ESG matters like environmental sustainability, investing in communities and how we run our business is an industry standard.
- Fair pay for fair work (and with pay equity): Embedding an equity lens into our compensation practices, offering training and growth opportunities and being transparent about how we make decisions are critical for our business.
- Sustainable and profitable growth: Transforming our business to be more technology enabled, creating more jobs and treating our people well are all marketplace expectations. We need to build on our investments.
Step 3: Identifying tools, measurement and accountability frameworks
To provide a framework for trust and hold ourselves accountable, we’re focusing on key performance indicators that assess how well we’re doing across our top trust drivers:
Addressing potential blind spots
- People trust index
- This measures employee sentiment on the most important elements identified in our trust survey.
- Fairness versus wellness gap
- This shows the gap revealed by our people trust survey responses on employees’ feelings about how we treat them based on our values versus their perception of how fair we are in making decisions that affect them. We want to close this gap every year.
- Client relationship management
- Our client net promoter score reflects responses from an annual survey and measures the willingness of clients to recommend our services to others. This helps us to continually improve our relationships and the quality and impact of our interactions every day.
- Workforce representation
- This shows the percentage of staff and partners who identify as women, visible minorities, Indigenous and persons with a disability according to self-reported data in our human capital systems. We plan to do more to recruit, retain and promote underrepresented communities and will disclose results and targets based on this information in future reports.
Building momentum
- Speak-up index
- Our speak-up Index reflects responses to our people trust survey to assess how safe people feel raising issues that matter to them. It will include industry-standard elements for measuring their knowledge, comfort and level of support around raising ethical issues.
- Engagement compliance and quality reviews
- We undertake several review processes during the year. These include client engagement compliance and reviews focused on business units to assess the general risk culture and quality environment of the firm. We disclose the time spent on and findings of these reviews and plan to enhance this disclosure in the coming years to provide more insights into the depth of our processes and the outcomes of our efforts.
- Personal independence
- As auditors of financial statements and providers of other types of services, partners and staff are subject to personal independence compliance testing on a random basis. We disclose the percentage of compliance tests identifying regulatory exceptions as part of our commitment to objectivity, integrity and professional behaviour.
Table-stakes disclosures
- Community impact
- We’re aiming to make a positive impact on our community through initiatives like our New world. New skills. commitment to help digitally upskill Canadians. It includes a five-year goal to meet or impact 2 million people and organizations across Canada.
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- We’ve joined PwC’s global network of firms in a commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This commitment includes a science-based target to reduce absolute emissions by 50% against a 2019 baseline.
- Pay equity reporting
- Consistent with the upcoming federal Pay Equity Act, we’ll be proactively disclosing our pre-existing data related to equal compensation for work of equal value, while taking into account the diverse needs of our people.
- Fair share of tax
- As a partnership, income is taxed in the hands of the partners, each of whom pays income tax in the provinces which we operate. As part of our efforts to be transparent about our contribution, we disclose the average range for partner statutory tax rates based on income from the firm.
- Economic contribution
- PwC Canada plays an important role in building a more resilient society, and our business generates significant social and economic benefits. To demonstrate this, we’re disclosing our direct, indirect and induced economic impacts in areas including jobs, gross domestic product, government tax revenue and labour income.
By using these KPIs to identify areas where we're doing well and where we need to do better, we’ll have deeper insights into how we can make further progress across our top trust drivers. We’re also committing to an ongoing process of evaluating and measuring trust and plan to reassess what’s really important to you—our stakeholders—on a regular basis. It’s all part of our focus on continuously improving our actions and interactions at every level of our business.
