The trust journey at PwC Canada

At PwC Canada, trust is a critical business imperative that requires us to embody competence, consistency and integrity in everything we do. This imperative has only grown more important given what’s happening in the world today. A succession of global crises and megatrends, such as social instability, a fracturing world and technological disruption, are creating new challenges for society and businesses, which are facing growing expectations and heightened scrutiny from a widening range of stakeholders.

We at PwC Canada aren’t immune to these forces, which is why we’re proud of the work we’ve undertaken to build trust in recent years. Four years ago, we began reporting on metrics as part of our Trust Roadmap, through which we aimed to go beyond traditional topics such as reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters to address the ways trust in organizations like ours is evolving. While ESG and related topics remain important areas for us to report on, we consider them to be table stakes. That’s why we decided to go further by undertaking a deep analysis of what drives trust in PwC Canada and getting to the emotional core of how our stakeholders feel about our firm and their perceptions of how well our everyday actions and behaviours match our commitments.

To hold ourselves accountable to our stakeholders, we committed, as part of our Trust Roadmap, to setting key performance indicators (KPIs) on a range of trust-related topics and disclosing how well we’re tracking against them through our annual Trust update. It offers a key opportunity for us to not only report on our progress so far but also to reflect on where and how we can improve. We’ve embraced it as a way to go beyond looking back at the past year and as a guide for making conscious decisions about the future.

Driving progress forward

We’re excited to present our latest annual Trust update, which covers our results for our most recent 2024 fiscal year (spanning July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024). We hope you’ll enjoy reading about how we’re addressing our key drivers of trust, including actions and KPIs related to our firm’s culture; workforce representation; diversity, equity and inclusion; ethics, quality and compliance; digital trust; and environmental, social and economic impact. We’re proud of our progress so far, but we also know we have more to do and are committed to remaining focused and showing leadership from the top.

Helping Canadian organizations build trust with their own stakeholders is at the heart of what we do, and we’re proud to share insights and learnings from our journey as part of our annual Trust update. Below are three takeaways from our work on building trust in the last year, which we hope will help other organizations navigating their own journeys:

1. Keeping pace with regulatory changes and enhanced disclosures requires flexible strategies that drive ongoing performance improvement and value creation: Stakeholders expect businesses to continually improve ESG programs and be ready to adapt to changing risks and opportunities in the marketplace. This requires strong governance frameworks with agile implementation plans tied to value creation strategies. Focusing on good governance and embedding accountabilities can also help organizations prepare for upcoming Canadian ESG reporting standards.
2. Building stakeholder trust in how companies communicate requires a personal and organizational sense of humanity: Stakeholders want to engage with organizations that share their values and have shown they’re willing to walk away from those that fall short of their expectations. We’ve learned that when leaders explain the reasons behind decision making, it can help build more meaningful relationships with stakeholders. In doing so, leaders must focus on the facts and be honest about what they don’t know and be clear and consistent in their messaging.
3. Increased stakeholder scrutiny of public commitments requires businesses to connect robust ESG programs to capital allocations, outcome reporting and assurance to strengthen credibility: Companies need to report ESG data that’s of the same quality as their financial information and is independently assured. Regulators and stakeholders are also looking for clear action plans to describe the ways organizations are transforming their operations today and want to see how this is aligned with business investments as well as examples of tangible outcomes. While this has become table stakes for environmental sustainability matters, the focus is now shifting to social impact measurement as stakeholders expect companies to provide specific examples and outcomes.

Building trust to protect and power Canadian businesses

We hope our experiences will serve as encouragement for Canadian organizations and leaders looking at how they can build trust during this period of profound change and uncertainty. We believe that building trust is key to protecting and powering Canadian businesses and is critical to enabling the innovations, using powerful technologies like generative artificial intelligence, needed to reinvent organizations for disruptive times.

To learn more about the actions we’re taking and our progress so far, read our full annual Trust update. You can also view our KPI table for more details about our commitments and targets as well as metrics showing our performance across our top trust drivers. We look forward to making further progress on our journey in the year ahead, continuing to be transparent with our stakeholders about how we’re doing and sharing insights into how organizations can build trust to protect and power their businesses.

If you have comments or questions, please reach out to us. We’ll look forward to discussing our journey and insights with you.