We have a work environment  where we want everyone to feel included, supported and safe. Due to the pandemic, we took a decision, globally, to postpone our annual global people survey for FY20.

We didn’t want to burden our people with an additional request at a time when they were adapting to full remote working and juggling personal and professional responsibilities. We plan to carry out the global survey again in FY21. Instead, we asked our people for their feedback through short pulse surveys since the lockdown started at the end of March 2020. The pulse surveys gave us valuable information about our people working from home, how they are feeling, what they most needed and their perception about our response to the pandemic.

At the end of the financial year;

We continue to invest in programmes to help our people to work flexibly and manage their energy and personal wellbeing so they can be their best selves at home and at work.

Agreeing expectations and managing performance 

At PwC every employee has a team leader and a coach to support them in the delivery of their work, their development needs and wellbeing. All people are expected to set annual goals agreed with their team leader and coach and to obtain continuous feedback on their performance and development areas.

We’ve invested significantly in technology to digitally enable our people to receive real-time feedback that’s focused on improving their skills and performance. Digital tools used for this include Snapshot and Workday.

Developing  and coaching  our people

We develop our people through a combination of on-the-job experience, coaching and formal learning programmes. Each person in PwC has a team leader and a coach. 

Team leaders are responsible to care for and manage between 10 - 15 people. Coaches are responsible for assisting their coachees with career planning, development and the opportunity to learn from others using discussion and exchange. 

As part of our transformation strategy we have launched a talent activation programme designed for high performing ACI talent where participants team up with senior partners to provide additional exposure to business opportunities, mentoring, advocacy and teaming. 125 senior managers and associate directors are currently enrolled.

Our people have access to a number of formal training opportunities which are delivered in different formats including modularised face to face, virtual classroom, elearn and blended learning. Being part of a global network we use a global learning management system, Vantage, which houses all our formal and informal learning. Vantage consists of thousands of curated self-paced learning assets from some of the globe’s top learning institutions including TED and Harvard Business Review, and has collaborative learning functionality which allows our people and their teams to create and share learning that is relevant to them. Our access to high quality global programmes, which we tailor for our specific market, allows our workforce to develop skills that support mobility across Africa as well as the rest of the world.

During the year our firm invested R79.1 million in skills development for all staff. Employees each received an average of 60 training hours per annum. We also invested R17.8 million towards formal education of our workforce in the form of bursaries.

The new world of work will demand the development of new skills. Like many of our clients, we're going through a digital and workforce transformation ourselves to adapt and get ready for the future. By 2022 the skills we need to perform most jobs will have shifted significantly and while the core skills to perform a job may remain the same, proficiency in new technologies and business skills will increase in demand relative to their prominence today. We’ve focused on offering programmes which equip our people with skills for the future.

We have delivered 7 refreshed learning journeys focused on future skills such as creativity and emotional intelligence. We have also continued our digital upskilling journey, offering all our people intermediate level training in data analytics, visualisation, and robotic process automation, as well regular digital events and meetups supplemented by curated learning assets on PwC’s Digital Fitness App and on our Digital Hub. In FY20 5,300 staff members in South Africa completed some form of digital upskilling.  Our staff completed an average of 7 hours of digital training each for the year.

We are particularly proud of our learnership and graduate programs that supported the learning of the 722  graduates who joined us at the beginning of 2020.

Ensuring we have the right people and resourcing  to perform the work we do, at the quality required

The implementation of Talentlink as a scheduling and resource management tool enhanced our ability to plan and monitor the utilisation of our diverse skill sets. The result of these tools were better planning and utilisation of our talent and being able to proactively engage with the Talent Acquisition process. During the financial year, we were able to appoint and onboard over 700 experienced employees to the firm. That process was enhanced with the adoption of LinkedIn licenses that enabled our recruitment team to save more than R30 million in possible agency fees. Our graduate recruitment team appointed 722 trainees in January 2020 to start their journey at PwC. 

We received the following accolades:

Supporting the well-being of our employees to be their whole self

The sudden move to remote working has given us the ability to enhance how we care for our people and look after their well being. We launched our remote working charter for PwC Africa which articulates the 10 promises we make to each other in working remotely. 

We had regular firmwide webcasts with leaders, regular videos by our People Leader and coffee chats with our people - all focused on reassurance, transparency and helping each other through situations that none of us had ever experienced before. We also leveraged our newly introduced Team Leader structure to personally engage with staff, keep them motivated, and demonstrate care, which is one of our core values. Team Leaders personally checked in on employee wellbeing but also ensured that staff maintained a sense of purpose.  Team Leaders also provided guidance to employees who were not allocated to projects, advising them on business development opportunities or relevant virtual training options.  Our Human Capital Business Partners also checked in with individuals and teams to monitor staff morale. 

We had virtual talks by psychologists covering topics arising from the COVID-19 uncertainty such as managing panic, responding reasonably to the pandemic, building virtual relationships and supporting working parents. These sessions were attended by 1 122 of our people over the last 6 months. Other professional talks included a series on surviving and thriving in lockdown, financial management during challenges and mental health awareness and support attended by 1,110 of our people. We introduced virtual gym sessions twice a day, five days a week and about 2,000 of our people attended the PwC virtual gym. 

Our employee assistance programme was also  extended to provide support to our signed students. Through them,  we hosted webinars to assist the students in dealing with uncertainty, adjusting to online learning (mindset),  adjusting to new living conditions, identifying mental triggers and red flags, being calm in the face of uncertainty, facing the academic year with confidence, dealing with stress and remaining focused and motivated. More than 300 signed students attended these wellness workshops offered by PwC.