Diversity & inclusion, flexibility and well-being
Driven by our purpose as a professional community of problem solvers, our people strategy combines human ingenuity, experience and technological innovation to deliver sustained outcomes and build trust within our clients and the community in which we live and work.
Engaging people with a diverse skill set, growing and developing our people and looking after them has always been, and will continue to be, our key priority. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be a reality in our everyday lives we have had to continue to plan and respond appropriately in the changing circumstances, by focussing on:
Extended staff complement as at 30 June 2021
Professional staff - 523
Support staff - 25
Interns - 78
Total - 626
Recruiting quality people with diverse backgrounds and skills
Students
As the world around us changed, we needed to pivot quickly and accelerate our use of technology to make sure we could meet our recruitment needs for experienced professionals and provide our students, the firm’s future, the right setting to start off their careers with PwC.
- Programmes
- Committee
- Sponsorships
Programmes
The past year saw some exciting new changes within this space. Our CareerDeal Programme was revamped into The PwC’s Graduate Programme and offers university students with Accounting, Law, Commerce and STEM backgrounds the opportunity to gain valuable work experience during the summer months.
Elements of digital upskilling and entrepreneurship skills have also been introduced to our student programmes, aiming at developing those necessary skills to meet the needs of a rapidly changing economy. It has been very rewarding to see these efforts and investments attracting high calibre graduates and students from a variety of disciplines.
Committee
A student committee was set up within the firm with the aim of bringing together representatives from our different lines of services to bridge the gap between the understanding of our business needs and our student recruitment strategy. By sharing knowledge and ideas internally, we are able to remain in touch with and closer to the business, whilst also retaining our position as Employer of first Choice in the market.
Sponsorships
Although the pandemic has presented its challenges, in September 2020 the firm embarked on a 3-year sponsorship agreement with Kunsill Studenti Universitarji (KSU). Through this partnership, we are supporting KSU in various initiatives aimed at assisting students throughout their University journey.
PwC recognises the incredible potential that lies within the thousands of students currently enrolled at the University of Malta and as a result of the success of our collaboration with KSU, we have very recently embarked on a sponsorship agreement with ASCS, the organisation representing Commerce students at University, and will extend our sponsorship agreement with S-Cubed for an additional scholastic year.
Through the continuous support we offer to students, and the organisations that represent them, the firm continues to maintain it’s strong presence at the University of Malta.
Expatriates
We needed to, with flexibility and agility, adapt to new circumstances and challenges to recruit people who mirror the quality levels that a firm like ours stands for. It is through the efforts of our leaders and teams that we continue our efforts to bring onboard professionals with different backgrounds, skills and experiences from a variety of different countries. During the year ending 30 June 2020, 20% of our recruits came from territories outside Malta, creating a total headcount that contained 26 different nationalities.
Encouraging flexible, yet sustainable ways of working
During the course of the year, we have confirmed the firm’s commitment to support our people and to respond to changing working patterns that were accelerated by the onset of COVID. Where possible, the changes give the flexibility to our people to work in a hybrid way, balancing working from the office or client premises with working remotely from home.
The future of work is changing at a fast pace, requiring us to adapt how we do things to meet the needs of our people and our clients. Our aim has been, during the past months, to embed a sustainable working model that helps us reach a healthy balance between the benefits of working within a team in-person and the value that our people have given to working flexibly from home. We would like to put into practice new working patterns that outlast the pandemic and through which our people feel trusted and empowered.
Prioritising well-being
Our values of care, working together and reimagining the possible have been brought to life as our people adapted to new ways of working and collaborating over the past year. Mental health and well-being have been a priority for a number of years, with an increase in focus being clearly needed post March 2020 as a result of COVID.
- Be Well, Work Well
- EAP programme
- Walk With Us Challenge
Be Well, Work Well
Be Well, Work Well is PwC’s investment in well-being. By helping our people feel empowered and supported to put their well-being first they can be their best selves at home, at work and everywhere in between. One initiative linked to this was the launch of global sessions on topics such as Parental Well-being, Financial Well-being, Resilience and Performance Recovery, which saw an excellent take up from our people.
Our recently launched habit bank is a resource to encourage our people to find ways of turning these well-being practices into sustainable everyday habits to help them make changes in their everyday lives to renew, recharge and fuel their well-being.
EAP programme
Our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) is an employer-sponsored programme designed to support our people as they adopt and sustain behaviours that improve their quality of life, motivation and personal and workplace effectiveness. Starting in 2020, the initiative was so successful that we confirmed our commitment for 2021. We have partnered with Bloom Psychology Clinic to offer our people professional psychological services.
Walk With Us Challenge
The PwC Walk With Us Challenge proved to be a very popular well-being initiative amongst our people. The aim of this fitness challenge, which was launched in June 2021, was to encourage fitness and a healthy lifestyle at PwC Malta, and aimed to bring different teams across PwC Malta to compete by seeking to achieve the largest average number of steps during the month. Organised by the firm’s Sports Committee, this initiative was a resounding success with 260 participants upping their fitness levels and achieving a total of 62,930,504 steps!
Developing our people
Equipping people with the skills they need to progress while serving our clients remains another key priority.
We have continued to review the performance of our people and to ensure they continue developing and being given opportunities to grow, allowing them to transform their skills into new and different areas. In the majority of instances we have had to reimagine our learning and development content and delivery to prepare our people to be effective in the new virtual world of work and leverage our global online learning platform Vantage.
The imposition of travel and quarantine restrictions across many countries significantly disrupted international mobility. In light of this, the network firms accelerated our efforts to assess the viability of deploying our people’s skills across borders without them needing to physically relocate. This allowed some of our local people the possibility to grow and develop by working with PwC offices such as PwC US, PwC UK and PwC Switzerland, notwithstanding travel restrictions imposed by health authorities.
In FY21, we continued our journey to standardise and streamline our people processes and technologies, thereby benefiting from various technology platforms and tools. This involved building on our implementation of both global systems such as Workday and custom-made ones using API, RPA and data analytics dashboards. This enabled us to create an enhanced and more fully integrated experience for our clients and our people as well as provided the ability for our leaders to make informed decisions through various reports and dashboards.
In addition to transforming our ways of working, our Digitising the Network programme is aimed at equipping our people with the skills, knowledge and digital resources that will help them and PwC be fit for the future. By upskilling our people, we are able to create the next generation of solutions for clients while giving our people the skills needed in today’s world. Our local firm has been part and plans to nominate individuals from our lines of service to be part of PwC’s Digital Accelerator programme. This programme puts groups of PwC people through an immersive training programme that teaches them skills in technology such as automation, machine learning, design thinking and digital storytelling. They become local champions who lead by example and coach their colleagues to bring a digital approach to every client engagement and to our internal ways of working.
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