As many professional workers have settled into now well established hybrid work patterns, banks and other financial services companies have stood out in recent weeks for the battles they are still having with staff.
Several lenders have upset employees by demanding they return to the office more days a week, with workers complaining of draconian measures, such as monitoring their attendance and threats of disciplinary action for non-compliance.
A stark divide has also opened up between some Wall Street lenders, some of which — Goldman Sachs, for example — require bankers to be in the office five days a week, and their European rivals, which are more relaxed about homeworking.
“It’s only my team leader who is required to be in five days a week, but the message is clear that we should all do the same,” said one banker at JPMorgan in London, which has asked its 2,000-odd managing directors to be in the office full time, while more junior staff can spend up to two days at home.
“This is coming straight from the top and everyone knows the implicit rules.”
At the other end of the scale, staff at the UK’s NatWest are expected to work in the office just twice a month, with 95 per cent adopting a hybrid approach and staff coming into the office on average once or twice a week. Rival British bank Lloyds requires staff to be in only twice a week.
Research by Scoop, which tracks hybrid working, shows 93 per cent of British finance companies offer the perk compared with 87 per cent of their US counterparts.
Drilling down into the data on banks, 18 per cent of lenders globally offer full workplace flexibility, where staff can be at home five days a week; 50 per cent have hybrid structures and 32 per cent require staff to be in the office full-time.
Employees in heavily regulated roles, such as trading, were required to work in the office throughout the pandemic and still have little flexibility.
Part of the more recent drive to bring back senior staff in particular more frequently is that banks are finding it harder to train junior workers if their managers are not with them in the office.
“Banks are having to come face to face with the fact that there are things that don’t work as well when no one is in the office,” said Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Insead business school.
“They made promises to their employees about working from home, who then made significant life changes on the back of them. Now it is very hard to undo those promises.”
Several banks and finance firms have taken steps to remind staff of their obligation to come back to the office more often.
Bank of America in January sent “letters of education” to Wall Street staff who had not been showing up at 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 informed 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 docked or even be fired.
Mortensen, who has been studying remote working for 20 years and advised several finance groups on their hybrid working policies during the pandemic, said enforcing mandates and tracking data were likely to have a corrosive effect on staff relations.
“Rather than sending threats and monitoring staff, managers need to think about other ways of encouraging workers back to the office.”
Wall Street chief executives have been among the most critical of staff working outside the office, with Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon once calling working from home “an aberration” and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon describing himself as a “sceptic”.
Morgan Stanley’s recently departed CEO James Gorman said last year that employees “don’t get to choose their compensation, they don’t get to choose their promotion, they don’t get to choose to stay home five days a week”.
At the opposite extreme, Lloyds has faced resistance even to its fairly relaxed policy. Its attempt to encourage more UK staff back into the office after last summer by offering free food prompted a backlash. Nearly a third of respondents to an annual staff engagement survey reported dissatisfaction with the bank, with its policy on flexibility cited as the main cause, according to an internal presentation seen by the Financial Times.
Several other banks — such as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, HSBC and Barclays — ask most office staff to be in for a minimum of three days a week, with some roles required to be in more often, especially for regulated roles in investment banking or for branch staff.
Last month Deutsche Bank became the latest lender to update its flexible working policy, requiring all managing directors to be in the office four days a week.
The memo from chief executive Christian Sewing and chief operating officer Rebecca Short said other staff 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 designed to “spread our presence more evenly across the week”.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford, said he advises companies to focus less on ordering to the office for a set number of days, and instead try to ensure teams are in at the same time to encourage socialising and collaboration.
“What completely defeats the point is having a two-day policy where people come in when they want,” he said. “The most successful way is co-ordination.”
Clare Hart, chief executive of outsourcing company Williams Lea, which helps banks implement hybrid working, added: “The hardcore five days a week is aspirational for some banks, but to what end?
“Does it make you feel good that everyone is in every day? The most important thing is we have the most productivity. We can do that in three days.”
Banks that take a firm line on returning to the office run the risk of disenfranchising staff who have got used to hybrid working, according to analysts.
A study of US financial services workers by Deloitte last year found that two-thirds of those who worked remotely at least part-time said they would leave their role if they were mandated to return to the office full time.
The report found that seeking greater flexibility was the main reason staff would consider leaving their company, just above better benefits or pay.
The study argued that overly strict return-to-work policies could leave companies vulnerable to losing their pipeline of future leaders and make it harder for them to hire.
“The ultimate challenge of mandating five days a week in the office is that it is very costly,” said Bloom. “For every person who quits, it costs about half their annual salary in recruitment and retraining to replace them.”
One unexpected benefit of bankers working 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 Work-from-Home and the Risk of Securities Misconduct, academics found that for traders working at home during the most intense phase of the pandemic, there was a 14.7 percentage point fall in the annual probability they would trigger a misconduct report compared with their colleagues in the office.
One theory the researchers set out was that they expected more violations in the office, “perhaps because physical proximity offers greater opportunity for collusion and exposure to inside information and misconduct of others”.
They also suggested there was a selection effect involved, in that staff who were trusted to work from home were less likely to commit trading violations.
“Ultimately this comes down to the culture of a workplace, regardless of how flexible it is,” said Mortensen. “Lack of trust is a cultural problem.”
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