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The system, which went live for supervisors in April, is designed to enforce the organisation’s hybrid working policy. This policy requires staff to be in the office or at a client site for at least three days a week. According to company guidance, employees who fall below 60% attendance are flagged as “amber”, while those below 40% are marked as “red”, Financial Times reports.

Failure to comply can result in formal sanctions, potentially affecting performance evaluations and bonuses. Data from the dashboard is accessible to business unit leaders and senior executives, and is cross-referenced with information from the HR platform Workday and employee timesheets.

The heightened scrutiny has caused concern, with one senior employee noting they had “lost count” of colleagues who had raised issues. In a video to staff, PwC UK’s chief people officer, Phillippa O’Connor, acknowledged the tension between the monitoring and the company’s ethos of “trust” and “empowerment”. She stated the system aims to address “persistent and deliberate non-compliance” rather than penalising those with legitimate reasons for absence, such as sickness or family issues, for which allowances can be made.

PwC maintains that the “clear benefits to in-person work” have been proven since it adjusted its hybrid working model. The firm stated its approach is “recognised and accepted by the vast majority of our people” and is consistent with practices at other businesses, such as rival EY, which began using swipe card data to monitor attendance last year.

PwC added that it remains “committed to flexibility” and that the dashboard gives staff “easy access to their attendance data, so they can manage and plan their time”.