
Beyond the public health implications, COVID-19 has triggered significant upheaval in the global economy. In PwC’s Global Crisis Survey 2019, we polled more than 2,000 business leaders about their experience responding to crisis. Our research highlights how critical it is to periodically assess your ability to react and, when necessary, to course-correct, especially when navigating the unknown.
In this episode, host Kristin Rivera and PwC's Former Global Markets Leader Richard Oldfield discuss the importance of self-reflection, how PwC and our clients have responded to the crisis, and immediate next steps for businesses.
Release date: August 2020
Kristin Rivera: Welcome to our podcast series, Emerge stronger through disruption. I'm Kristin Rivera, leader of PwC’s global forensics practice as well as our Global Crisis Centre. And I'm coming to you today from my home office just outside San Francisco, California. In each episode of this series, we’ll be talking to our global colleagues about the challenges and opportunities facing business leaders during crisis.
Today, we'll focus on the importance of pausing and taking stock while we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. And I'm joined by Richard Oldfield. Richard, would you tell me about your role at PwC, generally, as well as how you've helped to respond to COVID-19?
Richard Oldfield: Thanks, Kristin.
And I'm really delighted to be with you today and share some of my reflections. I’m the global markets leader, and I'm based in London. I'm responsible for leading PwC’s market-facing activities across our entire network, so everything that touches our clients. Over the last few months, I have been working with a small number of our global colleagues and the leadership teams and all the countries that we operate in, to manage our response to the pandemic.
Kristin: Well, thanks for chatting with me today, Richard. For the first part of this year, most parts of the world have had some involvement in responding to COVID-19. Obviously the pandemic is impacting different countries in different ways and at different times, but one thing is universal in that we're all finding ourselves needing to respond. And as we do that as business leaders, it's really important to take time to reflect on where you've been and what might be coming in the future. Doing this gives business leaders the chance to really appreciate what they did well, and also what they could do better. Our Global Crisis Centre conducted a large survey two years ago called the Global Crisis Survey.
And in doing that, we polled thousands of business leaders about their experience in responding to crisis. And that research shows just how important it is to pause and take stock while responding to a crisis. And this is even more important if it's a matter that you as a business have never navigated before — like a global pandemic. And this can be done in lots of different ways. It can be informal or formal, and we'll talk about that a bit later. But Richard, I'm curious to hear, I know you were part of PwC’s global response to the pandemic, and I'm curious what you learned and what you found our PwC network did well, and also what we could've done differently.
Richard: Kristin, I'm sure, just like any organization, there were things that we're pretty proud of. There are also some things which I would classify as a learning moment. So let me start by thinking about things I think we did a great job on.
The first thing was, right from the get go, we focused on our people — making sure they felt secure and actually protecting jobs was the number one priority.
But also this was a health crisis in some ways. So the pandemic really gave us the opportunity to think about their well being physically, but also mentally. It's been really important to us as our people have faced new, challenging times, more isolation, that we really help them from a mental health perspective as well.
So I'm pretty proud of the fact that the last few months we've been running people surveys, just to check the health and well being of our people across our network. Our people engagement scores, our people satisfaction scores are the highest that we have ever had. So I'm delighted that we got that thing right.
The second area, as you'd expect for a lot of accountants, is we were pretty good at getting to grips with our finances. Very quickly, we had a good picture of the financial health of all of our businesses across the world. Where we have liquidity hotspots, we secured new liquidity quite quickly, and we became very confident early in the pandemic that we could manage our way through this from a financial perspective. And finally, operational resilience.
Over the last few years we've invested really heavily in moving ourselves to the cloud and that financial — and so that technology really helped us to be operationally resilient. We moved on average 40,000 people a day working out of the office almost overnight to 250,000 people — and we really didn't skip a beat in terms of servicing our clients.
Kristin: So it's interesting that all three of the areas you mentioned are things that, you know, they certainly challenged us, but they were areas that were our core competencies coming into this crisis. And this isn’t unusual; we often see companies excelling in those areas that are really natural to them and where they had built muscle before the crisis.
So for that reason, it's always also important to talk about those areas that maybe weren't in your core competency. Where would you say PwC could have done better in our response?
Richard: Well, we didn't practice. So we had plans that thought about many things that could happen to our business.
They were all along bits of paper in nice binders. But we hadn't sat there and thought through actually, what would we do? Did we simulate that? So there wasn't a practice and forethought into what might happen.
Kristin: That's an interesting point right there. Again, going back to our crisis survey, one of the attributes that we see of companies who came out of a crisis better than they were going in, is that they had practiced in advance.
So having those plans on paper is wonderful, but it's even better to take the time to do a dry run of crisis. Even if it's a simple tabletop exercise — it doesn't have to be a full-blown simulation. But getting the team together and practicing is definitely an indicator of success if and when a crisis occurs.
Richard: Kristin, you mentioned the word muscle a little bit earlier. And for me, the practicing actually is about building muscle memory. So when we started this out, we spent too much time actually thinking about what were the things that we needed to do and putting them into practice rather than almost being an automatic reflex.
So I think it's about building muscle memory, on reflection. I think the other thing our planning did was think about issues that could hit our business — but nowhere near the size and scale of what's happened. So we thought about what might happen if we had to close an office or there was a business disruption maybe to a country, but actually we'd never in any of our plans thought about something that would cause many parts of our network to be incapacitated at the same time.
But the interesting business challenge I think we've also been thinking through is how we build relationships with new clients. We've done a phenomenal job, I think, of really helping all of the clients that we've got and we continue to help them with new challenges in the last few months. But for much of the last 160 years, we've won new clients by building relationships, physically going to meet people in their offices.
And all of a sudden we've been thrown into this entirely virtual world where building those relationships is different. So we've got a hugely innovative group of people working for PwC, but we really hadn't thought about how we make that shift to a virtual world.
Kristin: Yeah, that one's really interesting to me personally, just being based in Silicon Valley, because over the last five years, more and more I've found that my clients aren't always local, and they expect to use technology.
So I think maybe I experienced that sooner than others or people in other parts of the world, which tells me this is an issue that probably has been bubbling beneath the surface for some time. And we just never really had to tackle it head on. In some ways, this pandemic sort of sped up a trend, perhaps, that would have played out eventually.
And in some ways maybe it's giving us a competitive advantage to really have to deal with it at scale globally, and come up with new solutions that will help us be successful in this new environment going forward.
So, Richard, it sounds like you've done a fair amount of reflection, personally, about our response. I'm curious if PwC has done a more formal assessment of our response to date.
Richard: Well, you will be very pleased to hear, Kristin, that we have a very active global board at PwC, and they asked the global issue team to reflect on how the first few months of the pandemic had gone on and what we had learned. So we had a long global board meeting in June where we had taken the time to go through the last few months, and as you say, really think about those things that went quite well, but importantly, the areas that we could learn from. And the really useful part of this exercise was actually not stopping there, but applying those learnings to other things that we could see on the risk radar. And they've been changing in the last few months — and there are some things that now we worry about more than we would have done before, but actually standing back and saying, “How did we do in the last few months, and how do we take those learnings into those other areas?” was a really important thing for us. I can remember when our board chairman asked for this post-mortem I thought, “What on earth is he talking about? We're in the early stages, candidly, of a pandemic that's going to last for months.
You know, of all the things we need to deal with, this is not one of them. Actually with hindsight, he was absolutely right. And we've got a huge amount of value from the exercise.
Kristin: Yeah, we hear that a lot, Richard. You know, companies often say, “Why would we stop now?” And especially, you know, we're recording this in the late summer of 2020, and a lot of countries are seeing a resurgence — or have never even seen a dip. So it feels like we're very much in the midst of it — and we are. All the more reason to take that time. Again, our Global Crisis Survey really reinforces the importance of doing this, but one of the really surprising outcomes was the positive impact that stopping and taking stock and reflecting can have on the team morale.
What we find with companies is that when they do take time to reflect, they see, and I think this is consistent with what you've shared. They see a lot of positives. They see a lot of things that they're really proud of. And it can be that sort of shot in the arm to recharge the battery.
The reality is we all need that right now. We're several months into responding to this. I think there's a certain amount of very natural fatigue that's setting in. I'm sure that it would be hard to find a business leader that\ doesn't wish they'd never heard the word “COVID-19.” But the reality is, you know, taking that time to reflect not only will give you valuable lessons learned about how to do better as we continue to navigate this, but also to pat ourselves on the back for what we have done well, and to take a few minutes just to celebrate, you know, what we've accomplished so far.
Richard, thank you for joining us today. I have really enjoyed hearing your personal reflections and also learning more about how PwC has navigated COVID-19 so far. It was great having you and I look forward to our next discussion on the importance of seeking help and listening to specialists when navigating crisis.
Remember to subscribe to our podcast series so you don't miss out on future episodes.