PwC’s Workforce podcast: Recent Episodes
PwC Belgium
A series of podcasts tackling the key issues facing organisations today on their most important asset: their workforce. Last year, working remotely became the new standard, putting new challenges on the table for all organisations. From upskilling employees, to defining a suitable reward model, to retaining talent and collaborating in the most efficient way, this series offers practical guidance and solutions. We will also give insights on hot tax and social security topics you need to be aware of as an HR member.
New regulations mandate actionable steps towards gender equality in the workplace, holding organizations accountable for tangible progress. The implementation of the EU Pay Transparency Directive by 2026 may seem distant, but the reality is that organizations need to act now. Pay transparency necessitates reassessing pay philosophy and adjusting decision-making processes, starting from recruitment. Adapting practices and policies to comply with pay transparency requires careful planning and involvement of various stakeholders.
️ Join us in our latest podcast episode as we explore the legal requirements, strategic implications, benefits, and practical challenges of pay transparency. Our expert speakers, Jessica De Bels an employment lawyer from PwC Legal, Aurore Zadeling, a reward specialist, and Eva de Vries, an HR tech specialist, shed light on the upcoming changes mandated by the EU Pay Transparency Directive and how organizations can navigate this game-changing shift.
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
In this episode, Sander Van Laere, Director of People and Transformation, and David Desmet, Director of Deals, delve into the influential role people play in the success of deals. Our seasoned experts offer insights on optimising workforce capabilities and implementing effective change management strategies. Learn how these elements contribute not only to achieving the goals of deals but also to safeguarding and empowering a crucial asset in mergers and acquisitions: the workforce. Join us for this insightful episode as we explore the art of deal-making from a people-centric perspective and understand why individuals are the cornerstone of success in the realm of business negotiations. More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website.
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
Ever since the pandemic hit, remote work has become the new norm. In this podcast, Maxime Duymelinck (PwC), Thierry Janssen (Xwork) and Sandra De Weerd (PwC) are diving deep into the question of how employers can give their employees more freedom when it comes to where they work – whether it's at the office, at home, or in a nearby collaboration hub.
In order to organise workplace flexibility, Xwork offers a platform allowing companies to offer flexible and inspiring workplaces close to the employees' homes, thereby improving their employee engagement and work-life balance. However not every employee can work from home and what fits one company does not necessarily meet the needs of other organisations.
Organisations are challenged to finding a balance between remote working and staying connected within the teams. Solutions for The Fear Of Missing Out and the Distance Bias, must be found in holistic thinking where the entire ecosystem of the employee’s wellbeing is considered.
Join us in this interesting chat where flexibility and staying connected take the spotlight. And guess what? The office scene is shifting gears. The office is no longer just a place ‘to do the work’. It's all about becoming a hub for collaboration and building a sense of community. Let's dive in, you will meet Simon Solitary, Nathalie Nomad, George Greeter and Cindy Collaborator and explore the exciting future of the workplace!
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
Welcome to On the Move: Workforce Mobility Insights, the podcast dedicated to exploring how mobility impacts job satisfaction, work-life balance, and sustainability. In this episode, we discuss the evolving expectations of mobility in the workforce.
Discover the challenges employers face today and how they can adapt to changing mobility preferences while balancing sustainability goals.
Mobility isn't just about getting from one place to another: it's about seizing opportunities in this dynamic landscape. Join us as we navigate the ever-changing terrain of workforce mobility and shape the future together.
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
The war for talent is more present than ever and that means that organisations have to attract employees in new ways. They have to reframe their offer for current and potential employees, and this is captured in a well defined People Value Proposition which outlines the benefit your people gain when they join and stay in your organisation.
This new episode - Empowering the workforce through the People Value Proposition - will give more insight into what People Value Proposition is and how organisations can implement it in their business by telling you:
- How the People Value Proposition can be expressed
- Why it is important for organisations
- What the key components are
- How to make you People Value Proposition in line with the reality of the Workforce
- What the Total Reward Strategy is
- How you can use this to attract candidates
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
The business environment is increasingly turbulent, with inflation rising, and continued shortages in many areas – including top talent. Organisations must focus on containing costs, but also seek to maximise performance, and attract and retain key talent. Competitive reward packages are vital for finding and keeping the pivotal talent that organisations need. However, there is more to gain from focussing on total wellness to enhance and sustain productivity and performance. Our new offering - Rethinking Total Reward to deliver Total Wellness - helps organisations do just that by:
- Utilising the existing Total Reward offering to drive Total Wellness
- Enhancing employee engagement and loyalty
- Driving performance, productivity and positively impacting society
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
Costs proper to the employer, meaning expenses which are incurred by employees in the context of their employment agreement and then reimbursed by the employer, has become a “hot topic” recently due to a legislative change.
In practice, the reimbursement of such costs can be made on the basis of actual expenses or on basis of monthly lump sum allowances that cover these expenses. If settled correctly, this kind of reimbursement is advantageous for both the employee and the employer. For the employee the reimbursment is in principle free of tax and social security contributions. For the employer, as the reimbursement does not qualify as “salary”, no employer social security contributions are due.
Due to the recent legislative change, we can expect more audits (from the tax and the social authorities) of these reimbursement of costs “proper to the employer”. Therefore, it is essential to be prepared in case of an audit and to assess, as an employer, the quality of the internal cost policy.
During this podcast our experts Olivier Chapelle, Ingrid Kinet and Gauthier Vael will tackle the different aspects to be taken into consideration when implementing such a costs reimbursement policy. Indeed, as the social security authorities and the tax authorities sometimes have different positions on the same question, it is essential to adopt a pluridisciplinary approach.
A well-implemented costs reimbursement policy reduces the risk of rejection of reimbursement as “costs proper to the employer”. In case of rejection, the rejected costs have to be considered as salary, with consequences for social security and tax.
Therefore, to prevent this risk, our experts share with you their analysis and recommendations to safeguard your remuneration policy and practice.
More information on this podcast, and others, can be found on our website
The European Unequal Pay Day is set this year on November 15th. As from this day, women will work “for free” in comparison to men until the end of the year. But what are the main challenges if we speak about the gender pay gap and how can companies deal with it?
During this podcast, you can join our experts, Bart Van den Bussche (PwC) and Vera Claes (Zijkant) to learn more about the still relevant issues of Equal Pay. They will discuss the important difference between Pay Inequality and Gender Pay Gap, the factors causing it, the impact of parental responsibilities & gender biases on women's pay, the way companies can prepare for the upcoming directive on pay transparency and how PwC Equal Salary certification can assist with this.
ESG plays a key role in the employee value proposition of companies, to attract talent, and retain employees. In this context, ESG is an important topic for human resources (HR) and reward practitioners to consider.
It also matters because HR and reward directors have a key role to play in successful delivery of a company’s ESG strategy. This can happen in different ways, such as:
- aligning the the overall reward strategy with the business objectives
- deploying the right benefits
- choosing appropriate KPIs
- ensuring that fair pay practices are applied within the organisation but also towards third parties.
Our experts will guide you through the relevance of ESG for HR professionals, through discussing various issues, including: driving the ESG strategy via KPIs in variable pay, investing in fair pay practices in your value chain, implementing new ways of working, and more. Listen to this podcast episode to understand the challenges for HR when dealing with ESG.
The Chamber of Representatives has voted the Belgian government’s 2022 Labour Deal into law: a set of labour market reforms that introduce increased flexibility and redeployment measures. The goal of these reforms is twofold: improve employees’ work-life balance and increase the employment rate in Belgium to 80% by 2030. Listen to our podcast to find out how the Labour Deal takes an employee-centric approach, without losing sight of companies’ organisational needs.
Personal income tax returns for 2022 will see some changes. Listen to our podcast to hear what the most significant changes are compared to 2021 and what remains the same, but shouldn't be forgotten. We’ll also talk about the impact of Covid 19 and hybrid working on tax returns, deadlines and the different ways to file a tax return.
During the past year, most immigration updates were usually linked to the Covid-19 travel restrictions. In this podcast, we try to focus on the recent and upcoming changes in the Belgian and EU landscapes, which are not related to Covid-19.
We have chosen two topics, which we find relevant for Belgian employers and international organizations to know, that will be discussed in this podcast. The first topic is the implementation of the Belgian search year residence card. As a second topic, we have chosen to discuss the Entry and Exit system and the European Travel Information and Authorisation system. These are new systems that will be operational in 2022 and have been introduced in order to strengthen the security checks on people crossing the Schengen borders.
The podcast will allow the listeners to better understand these upcoming changes, and eventually plan and organize their immigration and travel policies accordingly.
The culture and purpose of your organisation can be a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining people. It is important to know that copying a culture from another high performing company simply does not work, every company’s cultural situation is as unique as a fingerprint.
But how can you proceed? There is a way: by building on your own company’s cultural strengths, within its unique cultural situation, and finding the factors that will bolster and draw forth the commitment and emotional energy that employees are willing to give. Start proactively managing culture, which will likely involve building new capabilities to ensure that you’re firing up all the relevant culture enablers — both formal and informal — for your organisation.
Public pressure and changing norms are paving the way for business leaders to be paid based on a new set of criteria. Including ESG metrics in executive pay packages is a tangible way to close the say-do gap for a skeptical audience, but is not without its challenges.
In this podcast Bart and Aurore share some findings based on published research within the broader PwC network as well as input based on their own experience, helping you to find answers whether linking executive pay to ESG should be done, and if so how?
The world of work is developing rapidly. The digital revolution had already increased the pace of change, and the impact of COVID-19 has only added fuel to fire. The pandemic showed us that companies are ready and willing to truly embrace flexible and remote working. Indeed, across industries and geographies, people have proved that we can drastically change the way in which we get work done, irrespective of workplace and time.
This has created an opportunity that should not be wasted. Now is the time to innovate and define a new path. It’s the time to take the decision to experiment and embrace change.
A successful business requires a balance between its triangular ecosystem of workplace, work type and workforce, with the employee experience at the centre. The future way of working will be hybrid, digital, inclusive and fair. The future of work is now. Are you ready?
Sustainable mobility is high on the agenda of governments, employers and employees. Increasingly employers are re-evaluating their approach. How can they change their attitude to mobility, and above all, that of their employees?
An employer’s mobility vision can be a competitive differentiator, and incorporating ESG into a company’s goals is becoming a must for stakeholders. In the war for talent, sustainable mobility is key for positioning a company as a top employer.
Bart Lombaerts & Maxime Duymelinck will offer insights on what they see in the market, what to expect around the upcoming change in regulation in the coming years and what the role of the employer can be in this context.
How H.Essers transformed and digitised their HR operating model successfully globally during a period where we all were impacted by COVID-19. Rather than solely implementing a new cloud HR system, H.Essers decided for a holistic approach where they harmonized HR processes across the globe and enabled these by new cloud technologies, with at its global core Workday.
Three objectives were achieved with this transformation: Standardization and globalization of all HR processes, Simplification and last but not least, insight in HR related data..
Payroll is one of the most critical functions in helping manage and remunerate a workforce. An organisation’s payroll function often manages its largest expense and, with the current COVID-19 situation and the need of organisations to have a good overview of its costs and expenses at fingertips, while ensuring efficiency and robustness, several organisations are seeking for payroll optimisation. There is an increasing need for use of technology to automate, standardize payroll processes along with producing powerful employee/cost insight for management.
At PwC, we have a vision to raise the profile and potential of payroll. We are passionate about payroll and believe that payroll functions have the ability to deliver real value and insight to an organisation, provided the function can get the support to help maximise the effectiveness of their processes and technology.
For more information, stay tuned and listen to our podcast!
brace yourselves, the audits are coming - Podcast with De Cronos Groep
The R&D wage withholding tax incentive is a substantial cash benefit for companies employing R&D staff in Belgium. Although the benefits of this regime are clear, the conditions are not always. Furthermore, very strict tax audits of recent years are picking up again as we speak. Join us in this podcast with De Cronos Groep to discuss the incentive, its conditions, lessons learned from previous audits and how to prepare for audits to come.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced a widespread adoption of remote cross-border working. This fundamentally means allowing employees to work and perform tasks remotely from a location other than where the employer is located or where they usually reside and work. Very often employees and employers needed to “make it happen” and overcome obstacles as they crossed them.
As remote cross-border working is – at least to a certain extent – here to stay, HR departments and Global Mobility teams face the need to structurally create policies and processes to enable this.You first need to be aware though of the potential risks of having someone working in another territory. Once the regulatory tolerances are over, the complex patchwork of personal income tax, employment tax, social security, immigration, labour law and corporate income tax need to be explored.
Based on real-life cases, we will guide you through the tax and legal framework to consider, highlight the opportunities and alert you the areas where you should be vigilant.
Interested? Listen to our podcast!
Many employers are looking for cost savings in compensation and benefits packages as a result of budgetary pressures due to the impact of COVID-19. At a time like this, it is particularly important for employers to offer reward programmes that meet the needs of all employees, during prosperity and hardship.
Bart Van den Bussche and Sandra De Weerd will provide their insights on how employers can leverage employee preference analytics to balance cost-cutting measures, and provide compensation and benefits that meet the needs of a diverse, multigenerational workforce. During this podcast, information will be shared on the Belgian 2020 PwC workforce preference study which specifically sounded the preferences of the generations Y and Z, being the future workforce generation.
COVID-19 has accelerated the remote workforce by forcing individuals to work from home on a full-time and long-term basis.
Although many employees are looking forward to returning to their habitual workplaces, the fast forward button to remote working, which has proven to be efficient in many ways, has been pushed.
The competition for talent was already fierce before COVID-19. As more organisations move towards remote working, which offers employees the benefit of its flexibility, those who do not will find it increasingly difficult to attract new talent, and retain existing talent.
Companies should now reimagine the future of work for a post COVID-19 world.
Do you want to find out more on this hot topic? Listen to our podcast on remote working and cost policies.
About the moderatorAsmaa Cherrak
Senior Manager - People & Organisation with a focus on global mobility
https://www.linkedin.com/in/asmaa-cherrak-364bb263/
About the speakersSandra De Weerd
Senior Tax Manager at PwC
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-de-weerd-61962a11/
Jessica De Bels
Managing Associate, PwC Legal
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-de-bels-a558292b/