Big (Four) Brother is watching you

If you thought RTO mandates were so 2023, think again.

In a memo to staff, PwC UK announced that, as of January 2025, employees will need to work in the office or with clients “a minimum of three days a week,” multiple news organizations reported. That’s a change from its previous policy, which mandated that staff work onsite or with clients two to three days per week.

And, in a move perhaps appropriate for the country that brought us George Orwell and Black Mirror, PwC will be tracking workers’ location data. The firm will share the data with 26,000 UK-based employees and their career coaches on a monthly basis.

The PwC memo suggests that staff might not have been following the hybrid work policy closely enough for the firm’s liking. “The previous guidance of at least two to three days a week was open to interpretation,” it stated. A PwC spokesperson told the Guardian that if an employee failed to comply with the policy, the firm would “hope to be able to reach a resolution informally before going down any disciplinary route.”

PwC’s not the only major UK firm to start tracking employees’ whereabouts: EY is also using swipe card data to check attendance, the Financial Times reported.

But evidence suggests that stringent return-to-office (RTO) policies can harm morale and lead to turnover. A Gartner survey found that 16% of high performers said they’d be likely to leave companies that made them return to in-person work; another report, from BambooHR, said 28% of employees said RTO mandates would make them want to quit. And an Illinois CPA Society survey found that lack of work-life balance is one of the top three reasons accountants leave their jobs.