The purpose of this case analysis is going to discuss the PwC company case in how diversity influence PwC. In presenting our discussions, we will follow three steps: importance, methods and challenges. PwC is a successful service company and its key to success is their diversity management. PwC start their diversity management at the top and their top team members are from different countries. Then they appoint chief diversity officer and rotate this position every 2 years. Moreover, they use diverse talent employees and perform mentoring program.
These measures help PwC develop their diversity management. Firstly, why does diversity management have great importance in PwC? As we all know, external environment has a close relationship with organizations, and globalization is a big trend in external environment. If organizations can not adapt to it, they will be weed out. One big challenge in globalization is the crash of different cultures. In order to adapt different cultures, PwC hire managers from different countries so that they will have different perspectives when solving one problem which can make manager’s decisions more creative.
Moreover, because PwC already know the similarity and difference between different cultures and the uncertainty of facing a new environment decrease, they can adapt to the changing external environment better. Additionally, Let’s compare traditional method and MBO. MBO has an advantage that every employee can participate in and this is what PwC do to diversify their human talent. Unlike some manufacturing enterprises whose key of success is technology, professional service companies, like PwC, success or fail is because of their human talent.
The diversity commitment that PwC makes to talent development can not only motivate employees and increase productivity but also strengthen PwC’s core competitiveness. In the meanwhile, population trend has a big influence on PwC because human talent is its core competitiveness. They will lose human resource greatly which will reduce their productivity directly. In our opinion, what we can do to adapt it is offering employees an enviable array of benefits to attract them which will be discussed in following part or follow the population trend and open a subsidiary in another place.
In order to develop diversity management, PwC uses three useful methods including rotating chief diversity officer, talent development and mentoring program. PwC’s “rotating” chief diversity officer (CDO) is one of unusual and useful approaches in their diversity management. By definition, the chief diversity officer is “an organization’s executive level diversity and inclusion strategist”. In particular, in PwC, partners are rotated in and out of the role every two years. Hence, what advantages and drawbacks do they have in such an arrangement?
As we mentioned before, because of globalization and other factors, PwC hire people from different countries. Therefore, their workers and managers will have variety of perspectives when facing one problem. Chief diversity officers, as managers in an organization, have responsibilities to direct the activities of others. On account of age, gender, race and ethnicity, religion, GLBT, ability and disability, CDO is supposed to be thoughtful and take many factors into consideration.
PwC’s “rotating” CDO is unusual because it creates an opportunity for managers to solve problems from different points of view, and make this position more credibility, importantly, and accountability. CDO is also helpful to deal with the relationships between different employees. They will understand each other, and respect each other behaviors towards things. What’s more, it helped a lot when creating organization’s culture. However, on the other hand, PwC’s “rotating” chief diversity officer strategy also has drawbacks.
First, the demand of CDO’s ability of planning, organizing, leading and controlling is quite high. And CDO’s abilities influence the whole organization a lot. What’s more, there are too many unpredictable factors during two years. So, it will cause some problems if the rotating CDO strategy operates in a poor way. With the rapid increasing number of graduates, PwC might face a problem that pool of college graduates will apply for jobs. From an objective perspective, the increasing number of graduates is not a blessing.
Because graduates start entering into the society life period, they are lack of working experience, company will invest amount of time, capital, human resource to train the fresh graduates. It will cost years to get satisfactory consequence. Furthermore, the fresh graduates whose capacity is not strong enough to handle stress and deal with the intensive work. Last but not least, the great fluidity of fresh graduates is another challenge for the company to deal. In order to solve the challenge mentioned formerly, the second way of diverse management in PwC is talent development.
To survive and compete in today’s global economy; the diverse talents in such professional service company like PwC plays a vital role in company’s prosper or fail. According to the PwC website, “the talent development program is a specially designed three-year program to develop student talents who have the interest and passion to pursue a meaningful professional career in PwC upon graduation. ” This program will help PwC find the possible employees from excellent college graduates and cultivate possible employees from undergraduates.
It perfectly handles the former challenges and makes it a priority to get best, suitable employees. Due to the arduous and demanding work in the PwC Company, the company offer employees humanistic service like childcare assistance and paid paternity leave to make sure that their employees will focus on work and devote themselves into working. This action reflects PwC Company attach importance to people, they concentrate on employees’ happiness. It’s a strong culture which reinforces the cohesiveness of the company and enhances the loyalty of their employees.
Except the talent development and employee benefit PwC Company implement, the mentor program is another project that PwC Company carry out. Mentoring program is one of the methods the PWC adopts to have the diversity management. Mentoring program is a method, in which the senior employee sponsors and supports the less-experienced employee. However, this mentoring program may cause both advantages and drawbacks on the less-experienced employee, the senior employee and the whole company. There are many benefits the less-experienced employees can get from this mentoring program. Firstly, they can establish the specific career plannings.
Instead of only telling the less-experienced workers how to do the specific work well, the senior employees also share their experiences with them. Such valued experience can show less-experienced workers the career development of the senior workers. The less-experienced employees can learn a lot from the career development. Secondly, the less-experienced workers can realize the organization’s culture deeply and entirely while communicating with the senior employees. In order to adjust themselves to fit the work, knowing the company’s culture is the most essential thing they should do.
While interacting with the senior employees, the less-experiences workers can contact culture through both their words and actions. However, the mentoring program can also bring the less-experienced workers drawbacks. The fresh workers may have difficulty finding the plannings and suggestions, which fit themselves. As we all know, individual difference exists. Nevertheless, the less-experienced employees may not notice this point and always follow what the senior employees have done, which even don’t suit them. Not only the less- experienced employees, but also the senior employees can benefit from this mentoring program.
Firstly, the senior employees can review their knowledge and experience. It can help them find the advantage and disadvantage of themselves. Secondly, they can improve their communication skills and leadership skills during this program. It will help them to prepare for the high-level positions. The drawbacks for the senior employees are also obvious. They must to devote a huge amount of time to program. As for the whole company, it can also benefit from this program. It can get more experienced workers as soon as possible. Nevertheless, it must spend a lot for this program.
And they may face the huge problem that how to retain these trained workers. Although there are several drawbacks of this mentoring program, it’s useful for the whole company to adopt this program. Additionally, companies have to face both external and internal problems during implementing diverse management. For instance, the work at a professional service organization like PwC, the employees are arduous and demanding. It’s much more intelligent than other kind of service. So the employees are relatively precious to the organization. How to keep those talent employees is an important internal problem.
First, organization should know what the employees need and in that case, the organization could take measures to make the demand and supply meet. PwC could solve the problem in two ways. First, it could provide several projects like talent development and some benefits like childcare. This kind of project will make employees feel they are exactly the member of the organization rather than the machine that helps the organization make profit. The organization takes their personal schedule and further development into consideration. This could give them flexibility and also foster the employees’ loyalty to the organization.
The second way is to make connection to their own countries. Because of “cultural capital”, no one knows much better than the one from that particular country. So as the organization, it could fully utilize “cultural capital”. For example, it may do global business and extend their services to the different countries via employees. This will also foster the employees’ loyalty because in this case, they feel they are needed for the prosper of the organization. In conclusion, the key to keep the talent employees is foster loyalty and giving them flexibility.
Once loyalty is established, employees will probably not leave the organization. Some external problems are also in organization’s consideration like population trends. It will affect the recruitment of the organization. As the chairman of PwC says, if foreigners are not treated well, they will get a different perspective. As a professional organization like PwC, more and more foreigners are coming in. So when dealing with some foreign applicant, PwC may face the challenge of cultural stereotype because some countries are indeed kind of remote.
If they don’t know them well, they may miss some talent employees. Generally speaking, we discuss the case from the perspective of workforce diversity. We analysis from both external and internal side through this case. PwC implements some successful projects like talent development and rotate CDO. However, it also faces some challenges like population trends. As we all know, innovation is a big weapon for any organizations. In order to adapting the challenging environment, PwC need to improve diversity management and perform other innovative programs.
