How PwC India Is Attracting New Talent

Tax and advisory firm PwC, which in 2022 marked its 150th anniversary in India, has been on a drive to expand its business and strengthen its employee experience through a new people experience framework.

“There are things that we are trying do in a new way,” said Shirin Sehgal, chief people officer with PwC India in Gurgaon. 

One new idea: experience portals where employees can get all the information they need in one place, from their salary and benefits to HR and company communication—“everything at the click of a button, which is personalized for you,” Sehgal said.

“It’s also generative artificial intelligence-based, so that it can give you predictive solutions,” Sehgal noted. For instance, if the AI tool sees that the employee hasn’t taken any time off for a long period, it may suggest taking leave.

In a conversation, Sehgal shared PwC India’s vision and what that entails for its people. Here are excerpts, edited for clarity and length.

On PwC’s New People Framework

“PwC has changed the way it has been going to market for the last year or two,” Sehgal said.

“While we were and are still known as tax and auditors, 67 percent of our business comes from advisory, which is tech consulting and other business transformation work.

So, there is a huge variety in the way we do business now versus what it was four years back.

So naturally, the way in which we deal with our people also has gone through a change.

We were less than 10,000 [employees] all these years; now we’re probably close to about 30,000, including our contractors.

Second, employee expectations have changed, beyond compensation.

The benefits, the kind of career progression, the kind of care the employee can get in a firm … are what create a difference.

And the third thing is matching of the employee workforce with the firm’s agenda.

Through this people framework we’re trying to get people to think … about the environment that inspires us, about well-being and care, progression and upskilling, the future, and about the rewards strategy.”

On Going Deeper in Employee Outreach

“We went a little bit more retail in the outreach to our employees,” Sehgal explained.

“We created an insurance policy, which covers about 20 lakh rupees [$24,000] of insurance for each employee and their family members.

We’ve increased the training expenditure that an employee can draw on by about three times.

We’re introducing reward mechanisms, which are over and above our stipulated rewards and recognition.

Our entire effort is to create unification of thought to achieve the firm’s goals. How do we do that? Nothing works better than celebrations together.

Over the last year we have unified events across all offices. If it’s Diwali, it happens everywhere. If it is a health check-up camp, it happens in all offices.

You create moments that matter.”

On Automation to Bring Employees Together

“Automation is something that is key in this journey—so, huge investments in that space,” Sehgal said.

“We recently launched a social platform called Viva Engage. It’s our internal Facebook, where everybody posts their story, makes it public.

Gone are those days when you create an email and then tell everybody, ‘This is where I went for an offsite.’ I think you just post it on Viva Engage. So, the different ways of outreach.”

On Attracting the Modern Workforce

“We’re on that journey,” Sehgal said, noting, “The new generation will not enter a room with an HR person, sit down for 15 minutes and tell you what’s going on. But they don’t mind accessing an application on their phone and answering a couple of questions, like say, how are you feeling today?

So, [among the] ways and means in which we can reach out to the modern workforce, we’re trying to automate. We’re trying to get AI-based tools to assess people and keep asking them questions on how they’re doing.

Second, we’re trying to create things that interest them. The social portal [Viva Engage] that we came up with, was one. They loved it. About 5,000 to 6,000 people on average are going there, which is decent for starters.

The other thing we’re doing is to create experience portals, which are unified one-stop personal pages for people.

We’re also trying to get physical entertainment in through experience zones. A futuristic working zone is coming up in Pune, where we are trying to put video games, digital screens, sleep pods—where you can just work in a different way.

I always say it’s not about having work/life balance, it’s about having work/life harmony. You have to find harmony with your work.”

On Challenges Ahead

“In the last three years, the first two years was the Great Resignation, so the biggest challenge was churn,” Sehgal explained.

“But now the attrition is fairly low. We were in the 20s [percent] two years back, and now we’re at 13 percent to 14 percent, which is fantastic from a technology and from a professional services standpoint.

This year, the challenge is different. It’s about quality deployments in projects.

Let’s say there is this set of people who are doing well, they are getting promoted, they are aging. For them, the quality of deployment and the project work becomes extremely important.

The second challenge is around upskilling. The firm has to invest in me from an upskilling standpoint and make sure that I’m deployed in different projects all the time. That’s what will keep me engrossed, engaged, get me my rewards.

[The] third challenge is the increasing expectations of the employees in terms of ‘what’s next.’

That ‘what next’ could be around careers, alternate career paths. Is there a new domain that I can learn? How am I linked with global assignments? Am I being supported for my technical certifications?”

Focus Areas for 2024

According to Sehgal, “There are three things.

The first one is about upskilling. There’s a huge investment that the firm does from a learning standpoint so whether we aggregate it, whether we make it futuristic, whether we make it a banner under ‘University for PwC.’ I think it’s going to be a big one for us for the coming year.

The second is going to be digitization. There is no other way to operate. We want to do more with less.

The third is around diversity.

We’ve talked so much about just women diversity, whereas we deal with so much other diversity. You know, opening ourselves up to let’s say different sexualities, to disability, to different castes and creed.

All that bundled together comes out as our employee experience proposition. That’s going to be our major agenda for the next couple of years.”

Shefali Anand is a New Delhi-based journalist and former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. You can follow her on X.