Week 1 & 2 at PwC: Organizational Culture

Friday July 2nd concluded my second week of onboarding for PwC as a Transfer Pricing Intern in their Tax line of service. Because I was mainly doing onboarding modules on my own time, I lumped my two onboarding weeks together into one blog post.

PwC is in the middle of a company-wide restructuring, which they refer to as “The New Equation” and went into effect on July 1st. Instead of operating with three lines of service (Assurance, Tax, and Advisory), this restructure creates just two lines of service (Trust Solutions and Consulting Solutions). This is designed to better fit their mission statement of generating trust and transparency with their clients while innovative-ly solving problems and reimagining what is possible. These ideas of trust, transparency, and problem solving were really key points that they hammered home during onboarding. With the idea of trust comes some norms of the company, namely in how they communicate with one another.

Pw is a “G-Suite” company so they use all Google applications. The most commonly used is probably Google Chat which functions like a text messaging system. That is most people’s preferred method of communication because it is quick and efficient and cuts the niceties and bottleneck that email can be. As a young college student, a text-like format is one that I am very familiar with and feels very comfortable to me.

Another norm of communication that is less familiar to me is using shared Google calendars. All levels of the company — intern to manager to partner — must keep their Google calendars up to date because others can simply create group or one-on-one meetings on their calendar. I am more familiar with connecting with someone first and asking permission to take some of their time, especially with a superior, because I don’t want to be disrespectful or wasteful of their availability. However, at PwC, I am expected to seek out my superiors for advice, work, and feedback on projects. Up until now, feedback has always come to me, and if I wanted more, I could seek it out, but always by asking permission instead of claiming 20 minutes on a calendar. While this style of communication is not super comfortable or natural to me, I believe that sitting behind a computer and sending a chat message or setting up a calendar invite will be easier than strolling into a director’s office because it allows a little confidence by separation.

This style of communication fits with their values of trust and efficiency because higher levels on the chain of command trust that those below them will be respectful of their time while also being more efficient by skipping the email chain of introductions and scheduling.

After training, I am looking forward to beginning more intense work!