There’s a certain perversity when I see that PWC has so far earned a partner pocket bulging £154 million from its work re: Lehmans while at the same time forcing its 650 consultants in Romania to take 15 days unpaid leave between now and June 2010. Let’s just parse the two events. According to Payscale, the median salary for consultants is somewhere around $30,000 a year. That’s about £19K pa. Based on the 3 week unpaid break, that means each employee is losing something around £1,100 or 5.8%.
If PWC had any sense, it would pay those same employees at a total cost of around £715,000 asking them to run a personal project that might add value to what PWC already offers. Why not make it a team event and so add even more value. Hey – go the extra few paces, set up 13 teams of 50 all using SocialText for collaboration at zero cost to PWC if they play their cards right and great PR for all concerned. On the final day hold a bake off. That can’t cost more than $2,000 to put on in total even if events are staggered over the remaining 9 months. That way the firm gets value while employees are kept sweet. Given that total cost amounts to 0.46% of the Lehmans bonanza, the cost to PWC partners isn’t even a rounding error.
What better way to treat employees who no doubt work themselves hard during the remainder of the year?
But then that would require something creative from PWC – like the ability to understand cost/benefit and value. Or the ability to plan into the future. Or the ability to learn from Google’s employee paid ‘time out’ model.
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