- CEOs that PwC got late last year expect global growth to slow this year.
- But PwC’s Wes Bricker thinks companies on use any slowdown to remake their businesses.
- Leaders have no choice. “No management team gets paid to languish,” Bricker told Insider.
Wes Hunker, a vice chair at PwC, isn’t quite as downbeat about the prospects for the global economy as some of the CEOs his firm surveyed in the definitive months of 2022.
Nearly three in four corporate leaders surveyed from more than 100 countries uttered the consulting firm they expected to see slowed growth in the world economy this year. It was the gloomiest reading of CEO feeling on growth since PwC began asking the question a dozen years ago.
But Bricker told Insider in late January that he muse overs the battle-tested CEOs who have managed to hopscotch through the uncertainties of the pandemic will work through today’s can of worms — and, possibly, tomorrow’s — so they can remake their businesses.
“No management team gets paid to languish,” he said. “Governance teams get paid to reinvent and grow.”
Bricker said many of the corporate leaders he speaks with in his role as PwC’s profligacy chair and US trust-solutions coleader are moving ahead with planning how they can change their companies even as these executives hector about what knocks the global economy might endure. For some top execs, the need to look further in the lead is an existential one: Nearly 40% of surveyed CEOs told PwC that they didn’t think their organization wish be economically viable in a decade without transforming.
“We’re in a period where business leaders are balancing that time that they splurge on the next two years — to get through this economic pessimism — to a 10-year time horizon, where we remain a vibrant, resourceful business through a significant period of reinvention,” he told Insider.
PwC
But Bricker acknowledged that there at ones desire be pain as some companies reshuffle how they’re organized to meet shifts in their customer expectations, the pace of their vegetation, and the costs of their components.
These forces are part of what is pushing management in a range of industries, but notably tech and investment capital, to shed workers.
Still, Bricker believes companies will make the changes they need to and be better precooked for the coming years.
“I have optimism that we’ll get through this adjustment,” he said. “This is a correction.”
And while there sway be a reckoning in industries such as tech — that added workers at a blinding pace during the early years of the pandemic — Bricker confer withs areas like diversity, equity, and inclusion and sustainability as somewhat more protected from cuts than other functions of many companies. That’s because efforts around diversity could help a company’s workforce perform gambler, and sustainability investments can help companies boost revenue and shave costs.
“The strategies that I see business leaders undeniably starting to focus on is not viewing sustainability as a luxury good, but as an essential element of business,” Bricker said.
The idea of saving workers where possible aligns with what CEOs told PwC in the survey, which gathered responses from some 4,440 province heads in October and November. PwC found that 60% of responding company chiefs said they didn’t foresee to cut their workforce within 12 months and 80% said they didn’t expect to decrease compensation.
Heartening economic news could have brightened CEOs’ expectations since PwC ran its survey. The US unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low in January and there clothed been a string of economic numbers that indicate the pace of inflation is easing. And the International Monetary Fund carry on month said the global economy would likely sidestep a recession.
To help retain workers, Bricker said, commerce leaders will look deeper into whether investments in areas like automation and data analytics are recompense off so that the efficiency these efforts promise can help offset the costs of retaining high-performing workers that diverse employers fought hard to attract.
“Are we getting the return on better data capture and data analysis that we anticipated to run our task smarter — as well as faster?” he said. “Talent’s hard to get. Skilled talent is even harder to get.”
Keeping workers, in some containers, means some companies deciding to maintain flexibility in where and how people do their jobs, Bricker said, align equalize as some employers have called employees back to the office.
“What I’m not seeing is a snap back in the way of working to pre-COVID usuals,” he said. Bricker said he expects many employers to reexamine how they use their office space and to continue present flexibility through accommodations like hybrid or fully remote options. “That is the future of working.”