Company to Track Remote Workers: 'New Policy'

As reported by The Guardian, a letter to all 26,000 PwC employees in the UK said the company would monitor how often they work from home.

A change in approach to remote workwhich assumes that at least 60 percent of working time will take place in offices or on client sites, will come into effect in January. The company describes it as a move to “more on-site work.”

According to the Financial Times, each employee will receive “individual data on their work location” each month, which will also be shared with career coaches at PwC.

“Starting in January, we will begin sharing your work location data on a monthly basis,” managing partner Laura Hinton told employees in a memo. “This will help ensure the new policy is applied fairly and consistently across our firm,” she said.

“We are all benefiting from the positive impact of hybrid approaches to working, but previous guidance of two to three days a week left room for interpretation,” it said.

In a statement to The Guardian, Hinton said: “Face-to-face working is particularly important in a business such as ours that relies on human contact, and our new policy places greater emphasis on working in offices or on client sites. At the same time, we continue to offer the flexibility of hybrid working.”

Employees who break the new rules will be asked to provide an explanation. “We hope that we will be able to work out a solution in such situations informally before we take disciplinary action,” said a representative of PwC's British office.

As The Guardian points out, earlier this year rival firm EY began reviewing swipe data collected at turnstiles to see how often employees were coming into the office.

The British newspaper's website, citing research conducted by the Centre for Cities, reported earlier this week that Londoners now work in the office an average of 2.7 days a week and are slower to return to the office than residents of other cities around the world, such as Paris, Singapore and New York.