Our stakeholders and their expectations
Sustainable organisations cannot operate in isolation and we take accountability for meeting and managing our stakeholders' expectations and needs.
Purpose driven
We know that no sustainable organisation can operate in isolation and are aware of our responsibility to meet and manage stakeholders’ expectations and needs. This awareness, supported by our proactive approach, is underpinned by our purpose and strategic focus areas.
The year in review heralded unprecedented challenges ― not least because of the COVID-19 pandemic ― for everyone in South Africa, including our key stakeholders:
- Our people
- Our clients
- Society (including regulators and government)
Being there for our people Our people are the heart of our organisation, and we invest significant resources in making PwC a great place to work and supporting our people in realising their full potential. This year, the focus of our efforts centred on the safety and well-being of our staff in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the firm’s digital transformation programme already being well advanced, and a flexible workplace culture, which we have been developing over a number of years, we were able to transition easily to work from home at the beginning of the lockdown period. Using online and collaborative tools, we have continued to successfully engage with staff, help them with work and personal problems and continue our development and training programmes to prepare them for the digital world of tomorrow. Find out more about how we inspire our people.
Helping our clients to solve their important problems
Businesses, like society as a whole, have faced a year of previously inconceivable challenges. We are working with our broad range of clients to help them solve their most pressing problems and reimagine what is possible for their businesses in the wake of COVID-19.
The call to ‘build back better’ to ensure a sustainable, resilient recovery after the pandemic is leading many businesses to reevaluate what they do and how they do it. Our CFO pulse survey revealed how companies were investing in their tomorrow through new technologies focused on growth, cost reduction and compliance. We’re helping them by sharing the depth of our local knowledge and expertise together with the resources of the entire global PwC network.
When our clients succeed, we succeed. So, now more than ever, we’re adapting our services to ensure their sustainability, and ours. Whether they are multinationals, entities in the public sector or family businesses, our clients are looking for more value and higher quality, technology-enabled solutions, with cost always an important consideration.
More broadly, we continue to focus on what’s relevant to our clients and their industries, while concentrating internally on operating as a single, unified ‘One Africa’ firm with an integrated approach to service delivery. This applies across South Africa, other African countries where we have a presence, and all lines of service.
By drawing on our skills, technology, global network and alliance partners, we’ve also adapted and delivered existing work, from multiple audits to tech-enabled transformation projects, under exceptional circumstances. Our involvement across industries has allowed us to share insight and responses from one sector into others, such as with our cyber security expertise.
Throughout 2020, we created and protected deal value, helped organisations turn risk into competitive advantage, supported many clients as they refreshed strategies and transformed operations, progressed our commitments to consistently high-quality audits, and contributed to the effective running of tax and reporting systems.
Find out more about our approach to delivering quality.
“While working remotely under exceptional circumstances, we’ve delivered multiple audits, large-scale tech-enabled transformation projects, other consulting and tax projects and strategic workforce initiatives.”
The Great Reset — Tomorrow starts today
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on all parts of society. As most territories begin to emerge from the worst of the crisis, governments, industries, organisations and individuals will be re-evaluating their priorities and reconfiguring themselves so as to manage the economic and social impact of the virus.
The World Economic Forum has put forward the idea that, due to the pandemic, the world has a ‘window of opportunity’ to correct its social and economic systems and has started ‘The Great Reset’ initiative to lead this effort. In support of this, PwC has developed a framework to help clients adapt and address multiple issues in parallel with an iterative process. This framework is an acceleration of our ADAPT framework which supports clients to analyse and think about key issues and complexities in a way that allows them to take positive action.
It’s clear there is more uncertainty ahead, but we’re proud to be working alongside some of the most exciting and impactful private and public organisations to solve complex problems and help South Africa to build back better, greener, and fairer.
Society Society at large demands that we stay true to our core values, to serve the public interest and to contribute towards the growth and development of our country and continent. For many years, South Africa was ranked as the world’s leading nation when it comes to auditing and corporate reporting standards. This reputation has been tarnished by a string of recent corporate scandals, with auditors standing accused of failing to expose financial irregularities in the companies they audit. We know that the profession has work to do in rebuilding and regaining lost trust. Regulators and other state and professional institutions set the rules by which we have to operate. PwC South Africa is a member of The South African Auditing Profession Trust Initiative, or SAAPTI, a voluntary committee established by the audit profession in South Africa. The committee’s members include CEOs of both the larger, medium and emerging audit firms. SAAPTI’s mandate is to identify proactive responses to the concerns prevalent in the financial markets and, importantly, the role that the audit profession has to play in adding value to such markets. Find out more about SAAPTI. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in us facing a number of new challenges in our audits. We actively participated in a number of COVID-19 forums, including a task force of our regulator, the IRBA. To read more about our COVID-19 efforts to ensure audit quality, please read our Transparency Report.
Explore our Integrated Report 2020
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