With many professional workers now settling into well-established hybrid work patterns, banks and other financial services companies have come to light in recent weeks for the battles they continue to have with employees.
Many lenders have upset employees by requiring them to return to their desks more than once a week, with workers complaining about strict measures, such as monitoring their attendance and threats of disciplinary action in the event of non-compliance.
A stark gap has also opened up between some Wall Street lenders, some of whom – Goldman Sachs, for example – require bankers to be at their offices five days a week, and their European rivals, who are more relaxed about domestic duties.
“My team leader is the only one who is required to be there five days a week, but the message is clear that we should all do the same,” said one banker at JP Morgan in London, who has asked his roughly 2,000 managing directors. In the office full time, while entry-level employees can spend up to two days at home.
“This comes straight from the top and everyone knows the implicit rules.”
At the other end of the scale, NatWest UK employees are expected to work in the office just twice a month, with 95 per cent adopting a hybrid approach and employees coming into the office on average once or twice a week. Rival British bank Lloyds Bank requires staff to be present only twice a week.
Research by Scope, which tracks hybrid work, shows that 93 per cent of UK finance companies offer perks compared to 87 per cent of their US counterparts.
Digging into data on banks, 18 per cent of lenders globally offer full workplace flexibility, where employees can be home five days a week; 50 percent have hybrid structures and 32 percent require employees to be in the office full-time.
Employees in highly structured roles, such as trading, have been asked to work in the office throughout the pandemic and still have little flexibility.
Part of the more recent push to bring back senior staff in particular more frequently is that banks find it more difficult to train junior staff if their managers don't have them in the office.
“Banks have to face the fact that there are things that don't work well when there's no one in the office,” said Mark Mortensen, assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD business school.
“They made promises to their employees about working from home, who then made major life changes on their own. Now it is very difficult to go back on those promises.”
Many banks and finance companies have taken steps to remind employees of their obligation to return to the office more often.
Bank of America last January sent “educational letters” to Wall Street employees who did not show up to the office, telling them they could face disciplinary action, following similar reminders by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and HSBC.
Other lenders – including BNP Paribas, Citigroup and EY – have told staff in the UK that they are monitoring office access data, with some warning that those who do not attend as regularly as expected could have their bonuses revoked or even… Fire them from work.
Mortensen, who has been studying remote work for 20 years and has advised several financial groups on hybrid work policies during the pandemic, said imposing mandates and data tracking would likely have a detrimental impact on employee relations.
“Instead of sending threats and monitoring employees, managers need to think of other ways to encourage employees to return to the office.”
Wall Street CEOs have been among the most critical of employees who work outside the office, with David Solomon of Goldman Sachs once describing working from home as an “aberration,” and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan describing himself as a “skeptic.” “.
Morgan Stanley's recently departed CEO, James Gorman, said last year that employees “can't choose their compensation, they can't choose their promotion, they can't choose to stay home five days a week.”
By contrast, Lloyds Bank faced resistance to even its somewhat lenient policy. Its attempt to encourage more UK staff to return to their offices after last summer by offering free food has sparked a backlash. Nearly a third of respondents to an annual employee engagement survey reported dissatisfaction with the bank, with its policy on flexibility cited as the main reason, according to an internal presentation seen by the Financial Times.
Many other banks – such as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, HSBC and Barclays – require most office staff to be at work a minimum of three days a week, with some roles required more often, especially for structured roles. In investment banking or branch employees.
Last month, Deutsche Bank became the latest bank to update its flexible working policy, requiring all managers to be at their desks four days a week.
The memo from chief executive Christian Sewing and chief operating officer Rebecca Short said other employees could work from home two days a week, but banned the common practice of staying away from the office on Mondays and Fridays in moves aimed at “distributing our presence more evenly”. all the week”.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, said he advises companies to focus less on filing into the office for a set number of days, and instead try to make sure teams are there at the same time to encourage socializing and collaboration.
“What completely defeats the point is having a two-day policy where people come when they want,” he said. “The most successful method is coordination.”
Claire Hart, chief executive of outsourcing firm Williams Lea, which helps banks implement hybrid working, added: “A five-day week is aspirational for some banks, but to what end?
“Does it make you feel good about having everyone there every day? The most important thing is that we have the most productivity. We can do it in three days.”
According to analysts, banks that take a firm stance on returning to their offices risk depriving employees who are accustomed to hybrid work.
A Deloitte study of financial services workers in the US last year found that two-thirds of those who worked remotely at least part-time said they would leave their role if tasked with returning to the office full-time.
The report found that seeking greater flexibility was the top reason employees considered leaving their company, little more than better benefits or pay.
The study argued that overly strict return-to-work policies could leave companies vulnerable to losing their supply of future leaders and make it difficult for them to hire them.
“The biggest challenge with spending five days a week in the office is that it's very expensive,” Bloom said. “For every person who resigns, it costs about half their annual salary to hire and retrain to replace them.”
One unexpected benefit of bankers who work at home is that they are less likely to engage in misconduct, according to an academic study based on UK lenders published last year.
In Working from Home and the Risk of Securities Misconduct, the academics found that for traders working from home during the most severe phase of the pandemic, there was a 14.7 percentage point reduction in the annual probability that they would raise a misconduct report compared with their employees. Colleagues in the office.
One theory put forward by the researchers is that they expected more abuse in the office, “perhaps because physical proximity provides greater opportunity for collusion and exposure to inside information and the misconduct of others.”
They also noted a selection effect, whereby employees who were trusted to work from home were less likely to commit business violations.
“It ultimately comes down to the culture of the workplace, no matter how flexible it is,” Mortensen said. “Lack of trust is a cultural problem.”
