Our Trust Roadmap: Addressing an urgent issue for Canadian organizations

As PwC Canada’s Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer, I believe trust is critical to the success of organizations and is a key way they can differentiate themselves by focusing on what matters most to their stakeholders. This is why I’m so excited about the launch of our new Trust Roadmap. It’s our north star for making sure our actions and behaviours match our intentions and commitments in every interaction and relationship. Trust is at the heart of what our stakeholders expect and will evolve as their sentiments change over time. And because there’s no end game to trust, we need to develop a better understanding of what drives it and how to adapt.

One of the things that quickly became apparent during our journey was how much the meaning and perceptions of trust are evolving. It was clear that, increasingly, trust is all about our stakeholders’ feelings about our firm since they get to the emotional core of what builds their bond with us and what can erode it in an instant.

Moving beyond table stakes

What does this look like in practice? For starters, the trust agenda requires us to go beyond reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. That’s table stakes. While an ESG lens underpins how an organization is adapting to society’s expectations, we’re going a step further by focusing on how our stakeholders’ perceptions of our actions and behaviours impact our relationships with them.

Do our stakeholders believe we’re willing to own up to our mistakes? Do they perceive us to be transparent about how well we’re doing in the areas that matter most to them? Do they think we’re willing to engage in courageous conversations in the moment, with the right level of integrity, with both our employees and the organizations we serve?

And do our people believe that we not only treat them well but also fairly? While these might sound like similar concepts, they’re distinct and are critical to helping people feel included. Building trust means fostering a greater sense of belonging by closing any gaps between perceptions of fairness and how well we treat our people.

A roadmap for the future

Essentially, our trust agenda goes beyond existing reporting on what happened in the past to bring a greater emphasis on leadership and making sure our stakeholders drive how we act every day. This represents a change from traditional ESG and corporate responsibility reports, which have tended to focus on materiality, successes already achieved and the positive contributions an organization has been making.

These things still matter, but by evolving our focus to our stakeholders’ beliefs about our people and our brand, we can make conscious decisions about the future of our firm and the values we lead with every day. This, in turn, becomes a strategic and business imperative that can also serve as a competitive advantage. 

The path forward for Canadian organizations

We know other organizations are grappling with the concept of trust and understanding which individual and corporate behaviours to focus on to address it. That’s why we’re disclosing our own roadmap to help other organizations in their thinking and journeys.

I invite you to visit our interactive website, where you’ll find a video on trust, an overview of the steps we took as part of our journey and a link to materials detailing our key performance indicators, the five-year targets we’ve set and the actions we’re taking. Stay tuned for our new podcast series, Talking Trust, in which PwC Canada leaders will discuss these issues in further detail.