In conversation with Susan Armour of Oxford University Press

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Welcome the latest episode of our business in focus podcast. I am Teresa Owusu-Adjei, and I am a partner in PwC Financial Services Tax Team, and I am your host for today. We are really excited to bring to you today the first of our ‘in conversation with’ episode . These will feature discussions between our people and our clients about the impact of COVID 19 on their organisations. Together, we will explore what we’ve learned from the events of 2020 and how we can take those lessons forward to help us navigate future challenges. We will also discuss how PwC has been working with clients with speed, imagination, and care to deliver results that really make a difference.

Joining me today in our virtual studio are Susan Armour and Sam Samaratunga. Susan is the group ethics and compliance officer at Oxford University Press, and Sam is PwC’s EMEA and UK risk assurance leader. Welcome Susan and Sam.

Susan Armour:

Thanks Teresa, it's lovely to be with you and Sam.

Sam Samaratunga:

Indeed, delighted to be here, Teresa.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Brilliant, thank you for joining me, both of you.

Susan, I introduced you as the group ethics and compliance officer at OUP, can you tell us a little bit more about your role?

Susan Armour:

Sure Teresa, my title really gives it away. I am responsible for OUP’s corporate ethics and compliance program, and day-to-day that effectively means I spend a lot of time thinking about risks, and culture, and overall program management. We are probably like a lot of other organisations in the way we are structured and how we manage ethics and compliance risks. We take a proportionate approach, and we consider core risk areas, like those related to bribery, fraud, and corruption, we also consider those related to our business partners, plus we have to think about modern slavery in our supply chain, sanctions, the facilitation of tax evasion, even money laundering. I am also responsible for health, safety and security, which is not obvious from my title, and it was in this role that I assumed responsibility for coordinating OUP’s global response to COVID. As you can imagine, nothing prepares you for that role.

I report directly to the CEO and I manage a team of approximately 40 people based in 12 countries.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

There’s so many things you mentioned in there about your role, it's so wide ranging, and then as you just said right at the end that you also then took on responsibility for coordinating the organisation's response to COVID. I can just imagine, just how challenging that must have been. It would be great to hear a little bit about the impact that the pandemic has had on the OUP.

Susan Armour:

Sure, I am happy to go into more detail. It's fair to say though that COVID has impacted everyone and everything, and on top of it, for many of us, our home and work life have blurred in ways that we’ve never imagined or experienced. In terms of the way we’ve handled the press, perhaps the easiest way to think about it is to talk about it in three different pillars. First, our mission; second, our response externally; and lastly, our response internally.

If I start with our mission, in really unexpected ways it has served as our beacon of light, somehow knowing that we’ve been around for 500 years and survived, puts COVID in a really unique perspective. I am just thinking back, a colleague once said to me that he considered himself a custodian, and I paused when I heard that the first time. What he really meant was that the press has been around for 500 years, it will likely be around another 500 years, and it's certainly going to outlast all of us. Our job is really to do our best work while we have the opportunity. That advice resonated with me then, and it continues to resonate with me now.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

That’s such great advice, and that also resonates with me. Taking that as one of the things that was guiding the press, what did that mean in practice in terms of the response?

Susan Armour:

We wanted to make sure we were serving our customers and markets and helping in the communities that are so important to our work. One of the first things that we did back in January 2020, was to create a publicly available hub, really putting all our resources related to the outbreak on this platform and sharing the research findings and data quickly and openly with the world. Researchers and academics made great use of this material. Then for teachers and students, who are impacted by school closures globally, we provided online learning resources to support all of the learning at home that was suddenly happening. In the UK, back with that first school closure in late March of 2020, we reached out to teachers and provided professional development support as well as teaching and learning resources. Even for parents, we made available activities, E-books and videos to help children learn at home, across the globe we took, and we continue to take similar steps. It's been hugely rewarding. Now here we are in January 2021, and I have to admit the pride in working at OUP is only amplified by the incredible work our colleagues at the university have done in developing the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

I have to say, listening to you just then, both as a parent of two young children, and someone who hopefully will be getting the vaccine in a few months’ time. I can only say huge thank you both to OUP and also to your colleagues at the University for such a wide ranging and just really impactful response to the pandemic.

What was interesting was that you talked about three pillars and that was just the first pillar. I wanted to understand a little bit more about the external response, you mentioned that as the second pillar, how do you manage the disruption to, for example, your supplies and the supply chain, as I know that this has been a critical issue for so many organisations?

Susan Armour:

Well, we’ve navigated through it and before I get to that, I just want to say thank you, it's great to hear that our work has impacted you personally as a parent, and absolutely we are all looking forward to receiving that vaccine. But in terms of responding to your question, really our external response is wrapped up and continues to be guided by our mission. If we set aside our customers and markets, for just a minute and focussed, as you mentioned on our suppliers and supply chain. Our response was pretty simple, we started by prioritising good communication and good data collection. We found that it was critical to have reliable information if we are going to develop financial models and scenario planning. Given our reach, as I mentioned, that takes a real effort in organisation. Being so close to our response as well, made me appreciate how fast moving the pandemic was. It was new to all of us, governments were taking different approaches, and so we had to rely upon our teams working cross functionally and communicating as quickly, and frequently, and efficiently as possible. No doubt people went above and beyond and continue to do so.

In terms of our products though, what we learned was really interesting. The difference between print and digital came to light. For example, if the printer or warehouse had to shut down, we simply could not move our books. So, with digital products, we didn’t have these issues, and those digital products demonstrated their resilience in a distinguishing way.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Everything you’ve said is really inciteful, and particularly about the last point about the digitalization of your products and how they are making you actually more resilient as a business. I would like to explore the final of your three pillars of the press’s response to the pandemic, and that’s the internal response you referenced earlier. I would love to get some insight into how you supported your five-and-a-half thousand people through the challenges that were created by the pandemic?

Susan Armour:

Sure, I am happy to elaborate on that. I wonder, we probably have more similarities than differences when you think about how you responded within PwC. For ourselves, our internal response covered every aspect of our business, and that meant it touched on technology, operations, publishing, editorials, sales, marketing, really every aspect. We started back in February 2020 by forming a small core working group, just five of us, colleagues from health and safety, communications, and HR and we coordinated our global approach to COVID. There were business continuity planning teams in each of our global offices, who managed the local response, and we provided central support. We set up right away some principles, and those have served us well. They continue to guide us even now as we find ourselves in this latest national lockdown in the UK.

Just briefly, and it probably sounds obvious in hindsight, but we took an evidence-based approach to inform our decisions. We created a pretty extensive communications plan. We made sure that we were providing and continue to provide regular clear communication updates to employees across the globe. We created a central page on our company intranet with the latest information updates, guidance, and other resources. We set up a dedicated email inbox, where we managed specific questions or concerns, but above all, we highlighted our principle that the health and safety of our staff is paramount. I jokingly said then, and I even continue now to say that, my second title is chief repetition officer, it's just because I find myself repeating the same messages over and over again. That’s almost to be expected, because people are working under incredible circumstances, dealing with shifting priorities, and really just managing a myriad of issues and new risks. I don’t expect everyone to read and digest our communications as we intend, what we really tried to do is, just keep our messages clear, accessible and timely, and then reach out to our employees in a variety of ways. I have to also give credit to our HR team. They recognized the challenges of the extended and unexpected remote working life and issued a wellbeing charter. Similarly, our technology team did truly heroic work in accelerating our roadmap to give us the tools to work successfully from home.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

That’s a great answer, Susan, and you said at the beginning that there were a lot of similarities with our two organisations, and everything you said just then just completely resonated with me. I really think that this pandemic has put organisational ethics into the spotlight, and people have had to really reflect on their response. You mentioned earlier about the mission and how that’s guided your response, from the PwC perspective, our purpose also guided our response as well.

Can you tell me a little bit more in terms of your mission forming the basis of your response, what that looks like in practice?

Susan Armour:

Absolutely, as you know there was no guidebook for us for COVID. We really had to pull together and start brainstorming and putting together our response. With my senior leadership team, we challenged ourselves to think about the new risks in this environment. We then shared with our employees, and we also brought to the forefront the difference between ethics and compliance, and this gave us a platform to do that. One of my favourite examples, which I use over and over again is this. A compliant person asks, what is required of me; an ethical leader will ask, what is the right thing to do, naturally we expect all of our employees to be ethical leaders.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

I love that idea of requiring all your and expecting all your employees to be ethical leaders.

Sam, I just want to bring you in, because I am sure that everything Susan just said resonates as much with you as it is with me, but is there something that you’ve also seen, our other clients grappling with as well.

Sam Samaratunga:

Yeah, that’s absolutely right Teresa, exactly what we’ve seen of other clients. If I can reflect on PwC and talk about what we see at our other clients, at the heart of our strategy is being purpose led and PwC’s purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. As we’ve been navigating uncertainty, our purpose has become a really important anchor for the decisions we take as a firm, and it will continue to play a really important role in motivating and inspiring us. It informs everything we do, and more so in times of change and uncertainty. Our culture, which is supported by our values, as you said, that drives the how we deliver our purpose and strategy. It sets the tone for how we interact and how we work together, and to make sure we deliver the outcomes that make a difference for our client, our people and our communities. That’s exactly the approach that Susan has articulated, that we’ve seen over the course of the last year, working with a range of clients, to help them to navigate the pandemic, what we’ve seen the way they have approached as well, with a much greater focus from businesses in the area of ethical behaviours as well as from the stakeholders, holding our client’s executives to account as well.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Picking up on that Sam, we’ve just done such a wide range of things for clients over the last year, whether it's been helping them reduce their cash flow, to helping them protect their employee’s mental health. What’s the approach that we’ve taken towards this huge challenge over the last 12 months?

Sam Samaratunga:

It has been exceptional, hasn’t it, and at PwC, a number of the challenges that we faced are very much the same challenges that our clients are facing, and actually Susan brought the types of things that we’ve faced to life in her description. The thing we did right at the outset of the pandemic, was to focus on making sure that our own business was stabilised, whilst also making sure we continue to support our clients. To make sure we had our business under control, what we needed to do was to make sure that we did everything we needed to do for our people, and that really involved making sure we are connected, communication was really important. It was important to create and maintain a sense of energy. That’s relatively easy at the outset in the sense that everyone is in the same boat. There was almost a hero effect when we went into the first lockdown around March last year, but in maintaining that for a really long period of time, when we were going in and out of lockdown was the challenge. Exactly as you said, making sure wellbeing, mental and physical, as well as care for each other was a really important part of making sure that our people felt they were supported, and we did everything for them and communities.

With clients, what we decided to take is an issues led, and asset backed approach. What I mean by that is, issues led is being all about being relevant to our clients and their needs, and to make sure that we are really well positioned to give our clients the insight they needed at the right time. Asset backed is all about bringing the depth of capabilities and technology enabled assets to our clients for them to be successful and indeed those elements came to life in the work we did with Susan and her team at the Oxford University Press as well.

All of this is underpinned by three core tenets of how we operate. The first is speed, because our clients really need to believe that we are willing to move and able to move quickly to get them the results they need at the right time, really important in a fast-moving world. We’ve seen how quickly things have been changing over the last few months, and indeed will continue to do so over the coming months.

The second is imagination. When the environment is very uncertain, the way to move forward has to be creative. We’ve got to creatively figure our way out of these problems, and importantly to reset ourselves to be in a different place to where we started, because the world will change, undoubtedly, the world is going to change as a result of this crisis.

Third, care, we want to make sure that our clients understand we care about them, of course, we care about our people, but also our clients, and that our engagement with our clients, is about them, and not just about us, PwC. Within risk assurance, which is the part of the business I represent at PwC, I have seen some really great examples, where teams have brought this to life, working with clients to deliver the results that make a real difference.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Thanks Sam, that was such a comprehensive response. I would like to just hear a couple of examples from you as to how we worked with clients to really deliver results that make a difference?

Sam Samaratunga:

Of course, yeah, let me bring to life something that we did, that really lives up to the concepts of speed, care and imagination. The example I want to talk about is some work we did on popup NHS supermarkets for National Health Service staff. The basis of the idea, the colonel of the idea was that health staff can pick up a box of food from the hospital site, take it home, feed their families. There were a number of benefits to frontline staff, who are working incredibly hard as we all know, that they don’t visit the supermarket where there were challenges with supply of food in the early days, there was the risk that they would spread the virus, and also to allow frontline staff, who were working really hard to spend more time with their families and to make sure they were well fed as well.

We worked with some other organisations to set up these supermarkets at the hospitals, and the concept used, the wholesale food supply chain, rather than the supermarket food supply chain, which was helping to maintain that industry, the wholesale food industry, which was struggling given that hotels, restaurants, and so on were closed as well. It also meant, because we were relying on the wholesale food market, that the cost of the food that NHS staff were buying was significantly cheaper than they could through shopping at the supermarket. One of the by-products was that it became a focal point for all the gifts and donations that people wanted to give the hospitals as well. We responded to that working with these other organisations with care, with speed, and it was a creative solution for solving what was quite a big problem in the early stages of the lockdown period.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Thanks Sam, that’s such a great example and as you said, something that really made a difference.

Susan, I just want to come back to you, because Sam has talked about speed, imagination, and care as being core tenants of our approach, the PwC approach over the last year, and Oxford University Press has worked with PwC for about seven years. I wanted to get your perspective on those three things, should we start with speed first?

Susan Armour:

Absolutely, and I just have to mention that the example, Sam, that you’ve shared is absolutely fascinating. This is really an insight into things we read about and hear on the news, but really don’t know how it all comes together, so fascinating for me to hear that. Teresa, just to give you the context, my world intersects with PwC when it comes to our business partner management, these are suppliers, customers, agents, authors. Our team is responsible for making sure that we work with our business partners and ensure that they share our ethical standards and embrace our partner code of conduct. But in order to manage and store the due diligence and other records that comes with tens of thousands of business partners, we rely upon a PwC platform. You’ve asked me about speed, and there is this funny analogy I have, that has stuck with me for some time now, in terms of working particularly internally and externally with third parties. Sometime ago, when I worked in Silicon Valley, I hired a contractor, who was fabulous and helped complete a project. When we started out talking about the timeline and her schedule, she said something like this, work at your pace, so if you want to waltz, we can waltz; if you want to tango, we can tango.’ In that project, trust me, we tangoed, and we got it done at an incredible speed.

Now the PwC team that we work with exhibits those same client focus qualities in my mind, and for the last six years, I’d say it's mostly been a waltz, but recently we started working on some additional changes and improvements to this platform, which were really take us in a giant leap forward. It's fair to say, it's been a tango from December.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

As someone who watches strictly come dancing, I totally get the analogy that you just used. Just moving on, how important is imagination in how we work with you?

Susan Armour:

I love the concept, and the idea of imagination, and the fact that it is so important. I have to say though, our work isn’t necessarily imaginative, but it does require thinking, and judgement, and problem solving. In this regard, the PwC team has helped us and supported us. To their credit, though, the team has learned our internal language. You can appreciate this that in every organisation there is an internal language that develops. This team really speaks our language fluently, that helps us, because we are just able to communicate that much faster and clearer. Another real benefit that the team brings to us is, they will bring solutions that they’ve implemented for other clients. As I mentioned, we are working on this big project now, and I remember at a meeting not long ago, saying, ‘you can do that,’ and I probed a bit further and I said, ‘well all I can say is, we definitely owe a debt of gratitude to the client, who asked for that same feature in the tool.’

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

I would definitely take your, ‘you can do that,’ as imagination. If I can just ask you about the final one that Sam mentioned, care, given OUP’s mission and your role in it, how does care fit in with how we work together.

Susan Armour:

I think about it as a fair way to take imagination, Teresa. Care is more straightforward, and let me tell you in terms of care, we’ve had the good fortune of working with the same PwC team for the last seven years, that’s a huge benefit for us. We just feel trust and respect as each year passes on. We’ve even made it a point to celebrate milestones together. There are periods of times where it feels more like business as usual, we still make time for catch ups. I’ve often told members of that team that they make us feel as if we are their only client. That’s a high bar. I spent early years of my career at an international law firm, and that was always the standard we were taught to achieve as young associates. What I would say is that, I feel like the PwC team truly cares about our success and they continually demonstrate that. They really bring to the table the best services and products for us.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

Thanks Susan, it's such a privilege to hear you describe the relationship with PwC in that way. The final thing I want to come back to is that you mentioned earlier your colleagues advice about regarding yourself as a custodian of a 500 year old department, and for Sam and I, who are partners in a 170 year old firm, that really resonates with both of us.

Thinking about that future, what are some of the major priorities or challenges you had, and what you think will be important in terms of solving them? Sam, can I actually start with you first?

Sam Samaratunga:

Yes, absolutely Teresa. One of the things that is very obvious, very visible, is just the pace of change, and the volatility that is becoming a norm. We realised even before the pandemic that things are changing very fast, so rapid change is becoming business as usual. A couple of things are really important in being able to address that.

The first is, being agile. Agile both in mindset, and the ability to change, and to make decisions quickly, because that’s key to not just surviving, but thriving in a rapidly changing world. How do we anticipate the problems, the challenges, the risks that we face, and rapidly react to things when they do change, so that’s important. One of the underpinning capabilities for that is being digitally enabled and digitally driven. We again knew that technology and digital capabilities were important but being able to embrace that and being able to leverage technology and the digital world, will be key to navigating the challenges ahead in a fast-moving world.

Susan Armour:

I agree with Sam, digital is critical, especially for our business model; agility absolutely, and I would add to that list, Sam, resilience. But if I step back and think about anything specific for OUP and I imagine it's aligned with your own ways of thinking, it's how do we work in the future. This has been such a game changer for all of us, working from home for this extended period of time. The future ways of working are going to be different. That is going to have a significant impact on our business. Practically speaking, we have to think about how we further evolve our office spaces, and how we do that at pace.

Sam Samaratunga:

Yeah, 100 percent, and that really resonates with the thinking that we are putting in at PwC. In many ways, just given the nature of our business, we had a head start, because working away from the office, at client sites, sometimes out of hotels in different locations, that was the norm for us. We had a good starting point, where people were connected, we have the technology to be able to do that, and many of our people were used to doing that, and of course traveling before. We still have a lot of thinking to do in terms of the, what purpose does the physical office play in the future, but also all of the opportunities that are created in being able to work much more remotely, both within and across the UK, as well as internationally. Exactly, as you say Susan, quite a bit of thinking that we can do to really take advantage of what we can do in the future, and not just go back to where we were a year, year and a half ago.

Susan Armour:

That makes perfect sense to me, Sam. Even if we step outside of ourselves and our work worlds and just think about the experience we’ve been through for the last year, just in terms of impact to the wider society, I go back to the work that our colleagues are doing at the university, and just how they have developed this vaccine, I am hopeful that this will be a genuinely historic achievement, and one I hope will contribute to future health and prosperity across the globe.

Teresa Owusu-Adjei:

That’s such a great, and positive, and inspiring note to end on. Thank you so much Susan and Sam for such a fascinating discussion, and of course thanks to everyone for listening.

To find out more about how we are helping our clients to navigate the coronavirus pandemic, visit our website at www.pwc.co.uk/covid19.

Finally, please don’t forget to subscribe to keep up to date with our business in focus podcast series.

Thank you everybody and see you next time.

Participants

• Teresa Owusu-Adjei, Partner in PwC Financial Services Tax team, PwC
• Susan Armour, Group ethics and compliance officer at Oxford University Press
• Sam Samaratung, PwC's EMEA and UK risk assurance leader