Johannes (Joop) Smits

Johannes (Joop) Smits is a Partner at PwC Switzerland, where he leads the Sustainable Workforce practice, helping clients turn fair, equitable and transparent workplaces into a source of competitive advantage and organisational resilience.
Joop is a strategic advisor to business leaders, HR leaders, and leaders in procurement and supply chain, with over 25 years of experience across consulting and in-house roles. His work spans HR transformation, organisational effectiveness, job architecture, reward and executive compensation, human rights in the supply chain (an increasing condition for market and customer access), and leadership and culture.

In 2017, Joop founded PwC's EQUAL-SALARY Certification business, leading extensive human rights fieldwork focused on equity in the workplace. This gave him a rare, ground-level view of how pay equity, working conditions and workplace practices actually play out inside organisations. That experience continues to shape his work today, giving him a distinctive, evidence-based perspective on workplace equity and human rights.
Joop is as comfortable in the boardroom as he is on the shopfloor, and it's this combination — strategic thinking grounded in operational reality — that defines how he works. For Joop, real change happens when leadership vision meets the people actually doing the work.

He is a regular speaker at public events, holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and HR as well as an Executive MBA from the Rotterdam School of Management. He is equally an EQUAL-SALARY Lead auditor with ISO9001 and SA8000 qualifications.