The consultancy PwC has told its employees it is going to begin tracking their working locations to ensure all workers spend “a minimum of three days a week” in the office or at client sites.
In a memo sent to its 26,000 UK employees, the big four accounting firm announced that it will start monitoring how often employees work from home in the same way it monitors how many chargeable hours they work.
The clampdown on remote working will take effect from January, with PwC describing its new policy requiring partners and staff to spend 60% of their time with clients or in the office as a “shift” from a “hybrid working balance” towards “more in-person work”.
Each worker will be sent information about their “individual working location data” every month and this data will also be shared with employees’ career coaches at PwC, according to the Financial Times.
“We will start sharing your individual working location data with you on a monthly basis from January as we do with other data such as chargeable hours,” managing partner Laura Hinton informed the employees in the memo. “This will help to ensure that the new policy is being fairly and consistently applied across our business.”
She added: “We all benefit from the positive impact of a hybrid approach, but the previous guidance of at least two to three days a week was open to interpretation.”
Previously staff were expected to spend two to three days in the office or with clients.
In a statement to the Guardian, Hinton said: “Face-to-face working is hugely important to a people business like ours, and the new policy tips the balance of our working week into being located alongside clients and colleagues.”
She added: “At the same time, we continue to offer flexibility through hybrid working.”
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Employees who breach the three-day policy will be asked to explain why. “We’d hope to be able to reach a resolution informally before going down any disciplinary route,” a spokesperson for PwC said.
Earlier this year, rival firm EY began reviewing the swipecard entry data collected by its turnstiles to track how often employees come into the office.
Londoners now work just 2.7 days a week in the office on average and have been slower to return to the office than those in other global cities such as Paris, Singapore and New York, research by the Centre for Cities thinktank revealed earlier this week.