Big Four accountancy group PwC is monitoring staff attendance at its Irish offices, according to current and former staff.
It comes in the wake of reports that the firm’s UK office uses a traffic-light system to monitor staff compliance with an instruction to work from the office or client sites three days every week. Staff who slip below 60 per cent of required days are flagged as orange. They are moved to red if they attend for fewer than 40 per cent of mandated days.
Staff who breach the policy can face formal sanctions, with their performance evaluations and bonuses potentially affected, according to guidance for staff seen by the Financial Times, which said some staff had expressed unease about the approach.
PwC’s Dublin staff say a similar regime operates in the Irish offices. People were required to reach their quota of in-office days each week, they said, and are not allowed flexibility to average the three days a week over, say, a month-long period.
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Staff living far from Dublin under previous hybrid work arrangements were told they had no choice but to make themselves available in the office three times a week.
“It’s here around a year now and is tracked incredibly closely,” said a former staff member.
One current staff member confirmed the monitoring scheme was in place in the office but was observed with differing levels of diligence by different teams.
A spokeswoman for PwC noted that “working together three days a week (in the office or at a client site) has been the position for a long time”. She added: “Coming out of last summer (2024), we did set this as an expectation for all groups. We do ask all our teams to comply with this.”
The firm operates a swipe-card system, allowing it to monitor office presence. However, it was not prepared to discuss how it kept track of people using the prescribed three days a week to visit clients.
The UK firm traces laptop wifi connections to check whether employees are working at client sites on the days they say they are, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.
The battle over office attendance in Ireland is heating up. AIB met significant staff opposition in July when it altered hybrid working arrangements. And the Financial Services Union earlier this month instructed its members in Bank of Ireland to ignore any instruction from bank bosses to increase office attendance until agreement was reached with the union.
