Episode 2: The importance of seeking help during a crisis

Emerge stronger through disruption podcast Podcast, PwC United States September 2020

In times of crisis, it’s important to seek support, from both inside and outside your organisation, to navigate challenges that may be unknown to you but familiar to others. Drawing on the experience and insights of colleagues and peers at the right time can be critical.

In this episode, host Kristin Rivera and PwC's Former Global Markets Leader Richard Oldfield explore PwC's experience tapping into the knowledge of our network, the impact COVID-19 has had on institutional trust, and how businesses have pivoted to solve needs in the global community.

Release date: September 2020

Full transcript

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 from you today from my home office just outside San Francisco, California. In each episode of this series, we'll be talking to global colleagues about the challenges facing business leaders during disruption.

Today's conversation is centered around the role of experts in crisis and I'm joined again by Richard Oldfield. Richard, would you tell me about your role within PwC as well as specifically how you've helped respond to COVID-19?

Richard Oldfield: Thanks, Kristin. I'm delighted to be with you again. I'm the global markets leader for PwC. I'm based in London, currently sat in my kitchen. I'm responsible for leading PwC’s market-facing activities across our network, so everything that touches our clients. Over the last few months, I've been working with a small group of our colleagues in our global roles and the leadership teams in each of the countries we work in to manage the response to the pandemic.

Kristin: Well, thanks for joining us, Richard. One of the things that we've seen really acutely in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic is how companies seek help. In any crisis, the role of experts can be really influential, because companies don't have experience responding to all of the things facing them.

And so seeking help at the right time can be critical. As you know, COVID-19 began as a health crisis and then morphed into an economic crisis with broad geopolitical implications. How did PwC turn to help during the early days of the pandemic, Richard?

Richard: I think this is a really great question, Kristin, because I think it's really easy for leaders to not seek the help that they need.

We're pretty fortunate, because we have a lot of specialists in the organisation and we quickly lean on them for help and advice. So let me give you a couple of examples. We have lots of people consultants getting them to help us think about how we draw people back to the office was really important. And we've continued to use them, by the way, to think about actually how our people will need different workspaces as we go forward in the future — what the workplace might look like as we go through, not just the next few months, but more broadly. We thought really carefully about using our colleagues who are specialists in balance-sheet structuring to help us think about the network’s financial affairs. But the big learning for me actually was how organisations with humility can really learn from themselves.

We had the benefit of having operations in 150 different markets, which meant there was always somebody who was actually going through something for the first time time — be that our colleagues in China, who first had to deal with the shutdown. Actually, our colleagues in South Korea who were the first people that had our colleagues back in the office.

So, sharing actually brought our organisation together, but actually allowed us to build off what was happening in different parts of the world to continuously improve our response to the pandemic.

Kristin: Yeah, I experienced that personally in those early days, you know, going back to January, I can really see the power of our global network. At that time, obviously, China was really the main place that was experiencing COVID-19 and we were able to pull together our leaders from China, but also, you know, business leaders at our clients to really assess what they were experiencing, how they were responding, and to share those lessons learned globally, with business leaders in all other parts of the world.

So leveraging the network in that way, and doing it really rapidly, ended up being really important in helping us to be successful as well as our clients to be successful in those early days of responding.

Richard: Absolutely. And as an organisation, we also looked externally for where we needed help, because we didn't have that expertise in house.

It was really important that we built connections and had briefings from the World Health Organization and our friends of the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Foundation in Europe, to understand more about the virus so that we can plan for our own business. But importantly, we could think about how the demands of our clients might change.

We also took advice from our geopolitical advisors. The world has changed a lot in the last few months, and understanding those changes and the fracturing in the governmental landscape has been really important. And of course the trust I mentioned — that was critical. The other important thing, I think, in getting that external advice is for us to make sure that we were tailoring our response to the right level, because it would have been easy to think about this as a global pandemic and therefore have a one-size-fits-all.

But particularly, for example, when we talk about our community outreach and how we help the community in which we operate, we really needed people to advise us on what was most important at the right time in different places. So it enabled us to tailor that outreach and support. So be that providing PPE in Italy, actually building real field hospitals in Africa, mobilizing our staff with medical expertise to support first responders and the health systems in the US ... we really leaned on other people to tell us what was the right thing at the right time.

Kristin: So that leaning on others is a really important theme in our work with companies in crisis. We find that there's just a very natural tendency to look inward and to sort of assume you have to muddle through alone.

It makes sense — this is the first time you've been going through something, there's sort of a natural assumption that nobody can help, right? You just have to figure it out. And one thing that we see is that if you look, you can find specialists. They might not have experienced that exact situation with every permutation in the exact same way, but there are almost always people out there that have pockets of expertise that you can leverage. And in a rapidly changing environment, like crisis, it’s all the more important to call on those people so that they can guide you in those specific areas. And again, in our Crisis Survey, we see this — leveraging expertise in crisis — as one of the predictors of a company's likelihood to emerge stronger after a crisis.

But I wanted to go back — you mentioned trust, and I think this is a really important concept in the world we live in today. There's no question that we're seeing a trend of an increasing lack of trust in traditional institutions, traditional information sources — this might be governments or companies or news sources. In your view, how has COVID-19 impacted this concept of trust?

Richard: On the positive side, I think it's tremendous how people really have come together to trust the medical profession. No matter which country we live in, the citizens are actually seeing medical professionals in an entirely new light. I think the real downside of the last few months is how the lack of trust of governments has seen poor responses.

I think it's quite sad that the World Health Organization, the very structure that was put there to manage a pandemic like this, really never got into its stride because governments didn't trust it or each other in how they responded. So from a corporate perspective, I think this is a super interesting topic.

So let me take you back to January when the world's business leaders gathered in Davos. So, I'm a huge fan of the Edelman Trust Barometer, which is launched every January, at Davis, and it gave us a story — and doesn't January just feel like such a long time ago? — but in January there was this story that people had started to lose confidence in governments and big employers, big corporations. It was pretty clear in the data. It was universal in almost every country that you looked at. So let's wind forward a few months, and an awful lot has changed in the trust game. People — citizens — needed to trust in somebody in governments to help them get through this.

They needed to trust in their employers in ways they hadn't before, because they needed to hope that there was a job. They needed to trust. They needed to trust doctors because this was a health crisis. And actually, in the markets where Edelman has updated the Trust Barometer, you've seen a huge swing in the results.

And of course, the big question then, Kristin, is: Can that be maintained?

Kristin: Well, I'm a big fan of the old adage: Never let a good crisis go to waste. I think one silver lining of this pandemic, as you say, is that it's created this opportunity for governments to really demonstrate what their role in society is.

And I think that goes for companies, as well. It's given companies a chance to demonstrate that they're more than just profit making machines, that they, too, have a role for good in society.

Richard: So I think this is one of the great bright spots of the pandemic — the number of companies who have really stepped up and realized quite quickly that they needed to show that they were assisting and servicing society more broadly. Some phenomenal examples: international alcoholic beverage companies, switching from distilling vodka, gin, whiskey, whatever, to actually providing hand sanitizer, which was in short supply in many markets. A US tech company who distributed PPE and a Chinese tech company who chose to feed people who couldn’t leave their homes because they had been quarantined. I think there are just so many examples of businesses, big and small, who have really done their part to not just help their organisation, but help society more broadly. And I firmly believe that as we look at the months and years ahead, those organisations will be rewarded.

Kristin: Those are great examples. And they certainly demonstrate this concept of emerging stronger from crisis. What better way to do that than contributing to society and giving back during a crisis. Being purpose-led and values-driven helps define who you are as a company, and crisis presents a unique opportunity to do that.

And we all know that being purpose-led engages your customers and engages your employees. Because at the end of the day, we all want to work for, or do business with an organization that solves important problems. And on that note, I'd like to thank you, Richard, for joining us again today. It has been wonderful to have you, and I look forward to our next discussion about balancing priorities in crisis.

Remember to subscribe to our podcast series so that you don't miss out on future episodes. And you can learn more about PwC’s Global Crisis Centre at pwc.com.

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Dave Stainback

Dave Stainback

Global Crisis & Resilience Co-Leader, PwC United States

Tel: +1 678 419 1355

Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles

Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles

Global Crisis & Resilience Co-Leader, PwC United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)7483 422701