Sweeten your offer

One firm that we spoke to about Brexit earlier this yeRa said teams had long been burning the midnight oil to compile a couple of strategic ‘manuals’, one for each way the referendum vote might go. They fully expected to bin one of them – and as the vote came in, of course that’s the one they were thanking their lucky stars for. There’s a moral in that story somewhere. If this year has taught businesses anything, it should be the value of scenario planning.

The biggest risk story in this year’s PwC survey seems to lie in a different section of the report entirely. Firms have a severe case of spare capacity. In the top 10, headcount is up by 8% – but chargeable hours are down 3%. It’s workforce planning and resourcing, says PwC, where firms really need to be investing to profit through the precarious.

BRANDS STANDING

The job candidate is now as much a tech-enabled and advert savvy consumer as a starry-eyed hopeful – and employer branding approaches must evolve to match

Ps AND Qs

Pitching teams took centre stage at Briefing 5P 2016 – presenting all they’d learned about the power of pricing, projects, process, and themselves as empowered business services people

TOUGHENING UP ON TIME

Charles Russell Speechlys used new technology to reset the time-recording culture among fee earners – while also providing timely information flows to management