Workforce

The world of work in New Zealand and globally is changing – fast. Key forces are reshaping the future workplace and impacting your people and organisation, including:

The ongoing race to find and keep the right talent with the right skills

Workforce diversity

The complexities of hybrid workplace models

Disruptive and innovative technology driving greater efficiencies and productivity

Evolving employment legislation and associated risks

The increasing complexity of geopolitics and global trade

Setting up your workplace to thrive in the face of these changes will secure marketplace trust in your organisation.

Our passionate community of solvers combines our breadth of strategic knowledge and hands-on implementation experience to help you harness crucial future opportunities and lead the way in this uncertain world.

Our people advisory offering combines organisational strategists, Human Resource (HR) practitioners, employment lawyers, regulatory, tax, and technology specialists who work together to help you improve organisational performance and employment relations, deliver sustained outcomes for your business and unleash the potential of your people.

Key workforce challenges

What should leaders be doing differently to adapt to new

Why PwC for your most important people issues?

Our people advisory teams help you to realise and discover the potential of your workforce. We do this by providing a fully integrated approach, ranging from payroll and employment taxes, workplace law to HR consulting services, remuneration, employee equity - and all points in-between.

Whether you are a HR leader, tax manager, CFO, CPO, or the head of payroll, our human-led and tech-powered expertise will help you operate at the forefront of change.

Explore our services

Workforce transformation

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Organisation effectiveness

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Human Resource effectiveness

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Employment taxes

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Rewards and benefits

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Employment law and workplace safety

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Workforce transformation

Contact: Claire Barclay, Partner

Does your organisation have the right workforce to meet your immediate and emerging business challenges?

External forces are radically reshaping the workforce. There are new and sustained challenges to be faced as business leaders wrestle with demographic and social changes, disruptive innovations and technological breakthroughs - including the use of automation and artificial intelligence.

Workforce transformation is about having the right workforce to meet immediate and emerging business challenges in a changing world. Organisations need to know what skills they will need to sustain business growth and delivery, and have an understanding of how today’s complex global environment will impact where this talent will come from.

We prepare our clients to take advantage of the rapid changes to their organisation and workforce by planning, designing, and helping them to transition to a future-fit workforce. We use evidence-based analysis in partnering with clients to create and sustain the right workforce, with the right skills and capabilities, at the right time. We help our clients to redefine the way work gets done and create innovative talent ecosystems that build engaged, enabled and agile workforces.

Developing the workforce of the future

How your workforce looks today, how it could look in the future and what to do to have the right people at the right time are fundamental questions that businesses need to be asking themselves to prepare for the future of work. Our service offerings support organisations to answer these questions.

Strategic workforce planning
Skills & competency assessment
Diversity & inclusion
Leadership development
Employee value proposition and employee experience

Strategic workforce planning

Strategic workforce planning is a continuous process of matching workforce requirements to current and future business objectives - it aims to have the right people in the right place at the right time, all the time to achieve successful organisational and/or sector outcomes both now and into the future. PwC can help your business by conducting a Strategic Workforce Plan or by assessing and improving your workforce planning maturity.

Skills & competency assessment

Skills & competency assessment provides a framework which identifies critical core skills and competencies needed within your organisation to deliver business value. We help organisations identify and develop a competency model, leveraging a mix of soft skills and technical competencies and culture as the bedrock of an organisation’s upskilling/reskilling efforts.

Diversity & inclusion

Establishing inclusive workplaces and achieving equality of opportunity for employees is a global business imperative. In times of uncertainty, having a strong focus on D&I and wellbeing is critical to help staff feel safe and engaged, while also helping position the organisation for recovery and growth. Our team supports organisations to identify and disrupt barriers to inclusion and strengthen inclusive leadership capability.

Leadership development

As the world has grown more digital and more complex, so too have the skills necessary to lead in a modern workplace. Leaders who demonstrate high levels of emotional intelligence and self awareness will be able to lead change while dealing with high pressure situations and crises. We can assist your leaders to develop the essential skills needed to implement change, cultivate innovation and drive business strategy.

Employee value proposition and employee experience

As organisations compete for talent and digitise their operations, they are moving away from the transactional nature of work and toward optimising the experiences of employees. Employee experience considers how your people feel and think in relation to their workplace, and is shaped by every encounter they have with an organisation. Providing a strong employee experience improves workforce wellbeing, productivity, and talent retention. We help organisations to understand and improve their employee experience in order to attract and retain the right people, and to minimise costs associated with disengaged employees and high turnover.

Organisation effectiveness

Contact: Claire Barclay, Partner and Orla Gallagher, Associate Director

Does your organisation’s structure and culture effectively enable your business strategy?

In PwC’s Global Culture Survey 2021, 70% of leaders who said that their organisations were able to adapt to pandemic disruptions over the past year also reported that their culture has been a source of competitive advantage. Is yours?

We work with clients to develop, design, and implement organisational transformation to improve their performance and generate lasting growth, by aligning organisation structure and culture to business strategy. With expertise in changing behaviour, engaging employees, managing people risks, and designing organisational structures, we help organisations to achieve business outcomes. We help clients cut costs and unlock performance by transforming their organisation across all dimensions, including structure, process, tools, talent, and culture. Working alongside your leaders, we seek out unique enablers of change and the barriers to it, deploying informal and formal levers to promote key behaviours. The outcomes can shift mind-sets and produce a long-term impact on performance.

Setting up your organisation for success

We work with our clients to reimagine the shape of their organisations and the desired culture that empowers their people to achieve business success.

Organisational design: Organisational design is much more than structure alone - it involves choices about how to get the best value from your organisation's resources. Designing the optimal organisational structure to support the needs of your business should include consideration of the roles and accountabilities of units and their people, the measurement of performance, the definition of how workgroups will operate together, and the mechanisms required to support their effectiveness. Together, we can develop, design, and implement transformation through organisational design. Our expertise will help you improve performance, generate lasting growth, and realise strategy by aligning capabilities, structures, and people.
Organisational culture: A coherent, well-managed culture can be a powerful asset to any organisation, and is more important than ever. We define culture as the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done within a company. Successful culture evolution relies on a coherent set of formal and informal enablers to support desired behaviours, with changes occurring much more slowly than strategies or operations. We provide end-to-end offerings to diagnose a client’s current cultural situation, using the Katzenbach Culture Thumbprint, determine the required ‘critical few behaviours’, design behaviour enablers, roll-out culture alignment initiatives and measure impact. We support clients across the entire process, or via targeted offerings depending on need.

Human Resource effectiveness

Contact: Griere Cox, Partner

Does your HR function support your strategic business objectives?

The nature of work is changing and employees expect organisations to keep up. Strong HR leadership is critical to a company’s ability not just to survive, but to thrive. The right HR support is vital for ensuring engaged and productive employees. Having a healthy and motivated workforce is proven to drive greater productivity in any business, and is essential to minimise the risks associated with employing people.

More than ever, business leaders need HR to be proactive and creative partners, as they work together to address changing business strategies and ways of working in a post-pandemic workplace—a workplace that should enable flexibility and wellbeing while promoting innovation, collaboration and productivity.

PwC’s HR transformation solution focuses on redefining the HR function to best support and deliver on the business strategy by providing innovative, integrated and business-aligned people services and programmes. It best positions HR to build and deliver high-quality talent capabilities aligned to the business strategy, and measures its results to quickly predict and adapt to the changing business environment.

Achieve lasting change through Human Resources technology

We bring our HR operations and HR technology capabilities together to help organisations transform. Drawing on our extensive knowledge of technology platforms, we bring simple and standard processes from the outside in, so your people and organisation can focus on what really makes a difference and work at their peak. We help our clients leverage leading HR technology to align your HR function to your organisation’s strategy and get the best out of your people.

Building a future-fit Human Resources function

We help organisations to both look ahead at the HR organisations they need for the future - and to fix their HR challenges of today.

HR function modernisation: Organisations need to find new and creative ways to attract and retain the best talent in markets that have never been more competitive, while continuing to manage and improve upon fast-evolving hybrid work arrangements. We can help you to build and modernise your HR capabilities to elevate your workforce. Our expertise will help you build flexibility for workers, innovate with key talent and stay on budget while meeting human capital challenges through: process excellence; HR strategy; HR benchmarking; HR organisational structure; HR data & analytics; and HR technology.
HR strategy and vision: Leading organisations recognise that empowering and engaging their workforce are key enablers of strategic growth. Reimagine your strategy with new, flexible ways of working and focus on your employees’ potential. We will help your organisation to create a blueprint for your HR vision and strategy that can transform your people, processes and technology.
HR strategy implementation: We can help your organisation to create capacity for change through both short and long term shifts within the HR function. This will take time and conscious effort by members of the HR team over a sustained period to embed new ways of working. The experts from PwC will guide your organisation on the journey to implement a new HR strategy using tried-and-tested methods and tools, and we will ensure that you can successfully and sustainably implement your envisaged changes.

Employment tax

Contact: Phil Fisher, Partner

Optimise your employment tax obligations with efficient innovative solutions.

Keeping up-to-date with the latest changes in legislation and meeting your employment tax obligations can be a challenge, particularly given the increased audit activities by revenue authorities. Don't rely on your payroll provider to help you manage employment tax for your staff.

At PwC, our national employment taxes practice consists of specialists with the experience and credentials to deliver optimal outcomes for your organisation.

Our services include compliance reviews, preparation of returns, due diligence reviews, tax effective strategies, review of policies and systems, and pre-audit checks. We also manage clients’ tax position agreements or disputes with the Inland Revenue Department.

Reward and benefits

Contact: Griere Cox, Partner and Chris Place, Partner

By creating the right reward plans, you can deliver sustainable value and incentivise outstanding performance.

Our remuneration specialists will partner with your business to review or design remuneration frameworks and short and long-term incentive schemes to ensure your remuneration practices support your business strategy. We partner with our tax, corporate finance and technical accounting colleagues to provide the support you may need in implementing new approaches.

We work closely with New Zealand’s leading private sector businesses - both listed and privately held - to help navigate and resolve the remuneration-related challenges they are facing.

You’ll be able to tap into and stay connected with PwC’s worldwide network of executive reward advisors, including staying abreast of offshore trends which influence local practice.

Creating the right reward plans for your business

The challenges we can help you with include:

assisting boards to develop executive remuneration strategy, ensuring appropriate consideration of governance, stakeholders and the regulatory environment
reviewing and designing short term incentive schemes and performance metrics for executives which drive company performance and motivate individuals
developing a remuneration strategy and policy that is strongly linked to your business objectives and helps you to understand and communicate what you value and want to reward
reviewing and designing long term incentive schemes including their role in the overall remuneration structure, the most appropriate scheme type, performance hurdles and accounting, tax, and valuation considerations
understanding your comparator markets and providing robust market remuneration data to underpin salary decision making for base salary, fixed remuneration and elements of total reward
supporting short and long term incentive scheme implementation, including drafting plan rules, liaison with legal advisers, participant and stakeholder communications, and tax and accounting advice
benchmarking directors’ fees and providing advice on appropriate peer groups and market alignment (annual NZ executive reward report published in July).

Employment Law

Contact: Chris Baldock, Partner

Our employment law specialists can help you harness and protect the most important asset in your business - your people.

Our employment lawyers provide pragmatic and commercial legal advice across the full spectrum of advisory and contentious employment law and workplace safety issues. Our team delivers specialist employment advice that can be seamlessly integrated with other legal and non-legal services across the PwC network.

We work closely with our non-legal colleagues, to form a multidisciplinary offering focused on helping you realise and discover the potential of your people. Through an integrated people consulting and solutions service, we offer a wealth of experience advising a cross section of New Zealand employers in both the public and private sectors.

Supporting your business to navigate legal issues

Working with local and multinational businesses, including listed and privately-owned enterprises, not-for-profit organisations, and public bodies across a broad range of unionised and non-unionised industries and sectors, our services cover the full spectrum of workplace legal issues, including: