PwC has hit back at comments from Lord Alan Sugar branding its staff “lazy idiots” after the accounting giant said workers could take Friday afternoons off in the summer.
The company made the offer to its 22,000 UK employees last week on condition that they finish their work by lunchtime.
In a tweet, the apprentice landlord and businessman called the move a “joke” and said it would hurt productivity.
But PwC said it worked well in studies.
And individual staffers have criticized Lord Sugar for being “not in touch”.
In his tweet, the businessman who made his fortune selling PCs questioned how hard people work when they’re not in the office.
“The lazy idiots make me sick,” he wrote, referring to PwC’s new policy. “Call me old fashioned but all this work from home is a total joke.”
He added: “There’s no way people work as hard or as productively as when they’ve had to show up at a workplace. The pandemic did [a] long-lasting negative effect.”
Richard Osborne, a senior manager at PwC, wrote on LinkedIn that Lord Sugar’s response was “childish and misunderstood at best.”
“Lord Sugar, your post shows how little you are in touch with the modern world of work and how little knowledge you have of what PwC is doing,” Mr Osborne wrote.
“This isn’t about taking time off to be lazy — it’s about the flexibility to work effectively when we’re doing our best.”
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He added that many employees at PwC are now “far more productive” than before the pandemic.
Another PwC employee, Omair Qureshi, criticized Lord Sugar on LinkedIn, saying he was “not only old-fashioned, but also an ’80s-era leader.”
He added that the shift to more flexible working has improved “employee well-being and productivity.”
PwC said it had decided to extend its summer hours policy after a successful pilot in July and August last year.
A spokesman said BBC staff were “speaking loudly about the merits” and that the policy was “built on mutual flexibility and trust”.
The government stopped advising people to work from home due to Covid in January. However, many companies continue to offer their employees flexible or hybrid working.
A shortage of talent has also meant that companies have tried to compete with each other for workers by offering better wages or perks.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been debate about who wins and who loses when employees work from home.
Advocates say employees can save time and money while achieving a better work-life balance. Employers can also save office space and costs. However, some argue that workers are less productive when unsupervised.
Most recently, Cabinet Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg sparked controversy when he said all civil servants must stop working from home, leaving notes on empty desks that read: “Looking forward to seeing you in the office very soon.” “.
Julia Hobsbawm, author of The Nowhere Office, said the dispute points to a broader “culture war” as companies and employees adapt to new ways of working in the wake of the pandemic.
“You really see a difference between hard-liners of a certain generation like Alan Sugar, who genuinely believe you don’t work when you’re not in the office, and soft-liners like PwC and their chairman Kevin Ellis, who realize it’s a lot more complicated than that. to work productively than to appear for a permanent place.”
But companies embracing flexible working also face challenges, Ms Hobsbawm said.
“Hybrid is proving very complicated as a leadership and management challenge,” she said.
“I would say that given his recent comments, Alan Sugar and indeed Jacob Rees-Mogg are the least likely to solve the problem of how to get people to work productively in whole new ways post-pandemic?”
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