Video transcript: Working Together

Transcript

You've got to imagine - you're driving a car down a clear road, you can see through the windscreen, everything makes sense, to all of a sudden, with no warning, the thickest fog you've ever driven through comes up against you. Safety says you have to slow down, but of course, you're now not making the progress on that journey that you were before. It just turns everything on its head. 

That's how most organisations have felt at the start of this pandemic. There's a level of trauma that's felt not only when they're looking into their work responsibilities, but actually at home. What I think clients on the whole expect from PwC right now is to show up with an understanding and an empathy for what's happened and what lies ahead. For some, it is maximising the opportunity in front of them, taking market share, or indeed taking the opportunity to develop new markets that weren't there, pre-pandemic. For others, it's still pure survival. If there's one thing that clients desire, it's the ability to trust you as you help them work through their problem. So as we, PwC descended into this pandemic, we were faced with all the same challenges in the business that all our clients were and all those uncertainties. Now, if you're in retail, that might mean that you're not sure who your customers are now going to be after all of this, because they've switched loyalty either to brand products or even the way that they they buy and receive things. If you are in business, the business, you know, some of your customers may not be in business anymore. They've simply gone away. So there's a lot still to figure out.  

We focussed on, first of all, stabilising our own business, clarifying what we needed to do for our people and for our broader stakeholders, including our clients, and then maintaining a sense of energy and connectivity. As that journey has continued for us, we then move into a phase of prioritising the things we should do above anything else, intensifying our focus around that, and then capitalising on the opportunities for our clients and ourselves that this new normal, as it develops, provides.

We're adapting our services in this new environment by taking what we call an issues-led , and asset-backed approach. Issue-led is about being relevant and being on the things that matter most to our clients at this time, and they expect insight from us as to what those things are as they develop their new thinking for the future. Asset-backed is about bringing to the table all of the breadth of capability and technology-enabled assets that we have in the right configuration to actually solve the problem and get the outcome and the results our client needs to get to be successful the other side of this pandemic. We have repositioned ourselves in the marketplace to express a number of elements of character that we believe speak to what clients are looking for right now.

The first is speed. A client needs to believe that you're willing to move quickly and you understand the imperative for them. Secondly, imagination, because actually in wholly uncertain environments, the way you get from one place to another, the way you find them, the new is to imagine your way out of it. Thirdly, care, because clients need to be sure that your engagement with them is not just about you. By coming to the table with speed, imagination and care we will help our clients get to the outcomes, deliver the results that make the difference to them and the environment they're in.

I do think it will be a long time before everything settles down to a place where everybody will be relaxed. But the resilience that's built in organisations and people through a period like this will be very powerful. And those who survive and have survived and understood how to recycle the learnings will probably do very well. It's a genuine commitment to help them solve their problems and get to a better place.