When Tom Naratil arrived on Wall Street in the 1980s, work-life balance didn’t really exist. For most bankers of his generation, it was necessary not only to get ahead, but also not to be left behind.
But Mr. Naratil, now president of US Swiss bank UBS, doesn’t see why today’s employees should make the same tradeoffs — at the expense of their personal happiness and bottom line.
Employees with the flexibility to skip “terrible commutes” and work from home more often are simply happier and more productive, Mr Naratil said. “They feel better, they feel we trust them more, they have a better work-life balance and they produce more for us – that’s a win-win situation for everyone.”
Welcome to a kinder, softer Wall Street.
Much of the banking industry, long a whistleblower to corporate America, dismissed remote working as a pandemic, even relying on employees to stay indoors when closures turned Midtown Manhattan into a ghost town. But with many Wall Street employees resisting a return to the office two years later and competition for banking talent flaring up, many executives are dropping by to work from home — or at least recognize that it’s not a fight they can win.
Flexibility is a new mantra at many major banks, which are shifting to more days at home, hours adapted to the needs of the family and redesigned office spaces, in a break with industry tradition that has long emphasized personal relationships built from grueling hours and punishing workload.
UBS, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, HSBC and BNY Mellon have all announced flexible work plans. Even JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank and a hybrid of work, expects only about half of its employees to end up in the office five days a week. The bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, wrote in his annual shareholder letter Monday that he believed 10 percent of JPMorgan’s approximately 271,000 employees could eventually work from home.
“While the pandemic has changed the way we work in many ways, for the most part it has only accelerated current trends,” wrote Mr Dimon.
But he didn’t sound too happy about it, ticking off a list of “serious weaknesses” of virtual work, including delayed decision-making and a lack of “spontaneous learning and creativity.”
“While it is clear that working from home will become more permanent in corporate America, such arrangements should also work for both the company and its customers,” he wrote.
But more and more often, work schedules must also work for employees.
“It’s all about the talent – how do you hold it, how do you put it on,” says Mr. Naratil from UBS. The bank last month rolled out its plan to have 10 percent of its 20,500 U.S. employees work remotely all the time and offer hybrid schedules for three-quarters of its employees.
“Talent will move, and it’s not just about a salary,” he said.
Citigroup has its 65,000 US employees in the office two days a week and has held workshops for executives and employees on remote collaboration. Globally, most functions will be moved to a minimum of three days a week if it is safe to do so, the company said. Wells Fargo began reducing most of its 249,000 workforce in mid-March under what it calls a “hybrid flexible model” — for many corporate employees, that means at least three days a week in the office, while groups catering to the technology needs of the bank will be able to enter less often.
BNY Mellon, with nearly 50,000 employees, empowers teams to define their own mix of personal and remote work. And it introduced a two-week ‘work from anywhere’ policy for people in certain roles and locations. “The energy around the office was palpable,” said Garrett Marquis, a BNY Mellon spokesperson.
Moelis & Company, a boutique investment bank, has strongly encouraged its nearly 1,000 employees to come to the office Monday through Thursday, but with added “intraday flexibility” during their hours, said Elizabeth Crain, the company’s chief operating officer. That could mean taking kids to school in the morning or taking the train during the day for safety reasons, she said. The new approach promotes teamwork and allows employees to learn from each other personally, while also gaining more control over their schedules.
Mrs. Crain said everyone was much more flexible. “We all know we can deliver,” she said.
Ms. Crain, who has worked in the financial industry for more than three decades, recently committed to something that would have been unimaginable before the pandemic: a weekly 9am session with a personal trainer near her office. She said she hoped breaking the constraints of the traditional workday would send a signal to employees that they had the confidence to get the job done and free up time for their personal priorities.
“Haven’t we all changed after two years?” she said.
Not yet. There have been some notable setbacks: Wall Street heavyweights Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have recognized the need for greater flexibility but have so far resisted a review of their operations.
Both called employees back to their offices last summer, highlighting the merits of personal work for building culture, innovation and learning. James Gorman, the boss at Morgan Stanley, said at the time, “If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come to the office.”
While he stands by that comment, Mr. Gorman’s tone has softened somewhat: Showing up three or four days a week is important for career advancement and growth, allowing professionals to hone skills such as emotional intelligence and reading body language, he said last month. .
But he and Goldman’s David Solomon have welcomed efforts to get workers back to its Manhattan offices. Mr. Solomon echoed Mayor Eric Adams in a talk at Goldman’s headquarters in March, saying it was “time to come back.”
Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs, said return to the office is “at the core of our learn-work culture” and customer-centric business. “We are better together than apart, especially as an employer of choice for those at the beginning of their careers,” she said.
For months, Mr Dimon has made a similar argument at JPMorgan – and he continued to say so, saying that about half of his employees would work from home at least some of the time.
“Most professionals learn their jobs through an apprenticeship model, which is nearly impossible to replicate in the Zoom world,” he wrote. JPMorgan has hired more than 80,000 workers during the pandemic, he said, and it aims to train them properly.
“But this is harder to do through Zoom,” he said. “Over time, this disadvantage can dramatically undermine the character and culture you want to promote in your company.”
Some banks are rethinking their real estate needs. With more people working from home, HSBC, which has nearly half of its 8,000 U.S. employees in Manhattan, expects to reduce its real estate footprint, said Jennifer Strybel, the chief operating officer in the United States.
The bank is keeping its building, which overlooks the New York Public Library headquarters in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, at 40 percent capacity. The space has been redesigned, replacing rows of open terminals with more tables to encourage collaboration. There is a reservation system for desks, lockers for employees to store belongings and a ‘keyboard garage’ for those who don’t want to lug equipment around. There are charging points scattered around the site.
Mr Dimon said JPMorgan, which is building a new headquarters in Midtown that will be home to up to 14,000 employees, will move to a more ‘open-seat’ arrangement.
Banks outside New York are also adapting: Cleveland-based KeyCorp has not set a specific return date, but expects half of its staff to eventually turn up four or five days a week. Another 30 percent will probably come in for one to three days, with the option to work from different offices. And 20 percent will work from home, albeit with personal training and team building events.
The new setup is “new ground” needed to keep staff engaged, said Key’s chief executive, Chris Gorman. Although he comes in every day and is a big believer in face-to-face meetings, Mr. Gorman said he’d avoided a heavy-handed approach that could alienate employees and push them to look elsewhere.
Naratil, the president of UBS, also believes in face-to-face meetings — he still spends most of his week at UBS’s Weehawken, NJ office — but said the great remote work experiment of the past two years the myth that workers at home were less productive. In fact, he said, they are more productive.
The increasingly hybrid workplace has forced leaders to engage with their teams in new ways, such as virtual happy hours, Naratil said. The grassroots have shown they can handle the occasion, and it’s up to the bosses to lure employees back into physical spaces to generate new ideas and strengthen relationships.
Managers, he said, should have a good answer when their employees ask the simple question, “Why should I be in the office?”
“It’s not ‘Because I told you,'” he said. “That’s not the answer.”
