Finance professionals see the future of work as hybrid as large corporations push for a return to the office

Employees of large financial companies want flexibility. They’re not ready to return to a 9-to-5 office job post-pandemic, despite urging from some C-suite executives.

“Companies themselves often have regulations about the number of days employees are expected to be,” Grace Lordan, director of the Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), told me. “However, employees prefer an approach that puts productivity and autonomy first.”

Lordan is co-author of a new report by Women in Banking and Finance and LSE based on interviews with 100 UK financial and professional services workers, from entry level to senior management. The participants were from companies such as Barclays, BlackRock, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan and UBS.

In a 45-minute interview, each participant discussed the future of work. 95 participants suggested a variant of hybrid work. And almost a third emphasized trust as a necessary ingredient for hybrid work to function effectively in the future. Only five participants (two women, three men) named a classic office work week as their personal ideal.

Some leaders, like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, aren’t fans of hybrid work. Solomon wants employees to go back to the office five days a week, despite some opposition. After February’s Omicron wave, only about 5,000 of Goldman’s 10,000 employees at the company’s New York headquarters returned.

But Solomon stands firm. “Before the pandemic, about 75% of our employees were in the office every day of the week,” Solomon said in an interview with CNBC last month. “Today it’s about 65%, so we’re working pretty much the same way we used to.” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has also long had a desire for workers to return to the office.

Meanwhile, UBS is pursuing a different approach – a “Virtual Worker Framework”. US-based employees in certain roles will have the option to work 100% remotely rather than hybrid, Marc Montanaro, head of HR at UBS Americas, told me recently.

Remote work seems to be a new mainstay in the USA. An analysis by LendingTree found that 29.1% of Americans worked from home in the last seven days of October this year, up from a very similar 29.5% in October 2021.

In the UK, over 100 employers of all types, from all sectors, are taking part in four-day, 32-hour workweek trials (without workers’ wages being cut). The action is the result of a campaign by a non-partisan, non-profit group. However, Lordan says that working four days a week from 9am to 5pm isn’t real flexibility.

“The four-day week is very rigid,” she says. “We’ve found that corporate managers are taking much more imaginative approaches to the future of work and are seeing the benefits in terms of productivity.” According to the report, managers often prefer a remote-first approach that meets local operational needs.

Of the study participants who suggested hybrid work, more than half cited flexible working arrangements with stabilized or increased productivity, the report found. One participant told researchers, “I’m not strictly limited to nine to five. If I’ve been working very, very late one night, I can just sleep until 10 or 10:30 and then work a little later in the morning and then finish a little later.”

Of the 100 participants in the LSE study, 68 were identified as women, 31 as men and one as gender-matched. Fifty-nine individuals identified as White, 29 as Asian, and nine were Black. According to Lordan, an increasingly hybrid and mobile financial services workforce can help retain and attract diverse employees, including women who seek flexibility.

“Right now, the roles that are demanding executives to fully return to the office are income-generating roles,” the report said. If companies continue to deny flexibility for these roles, it will “negatively impact the gender pay gap as they are among the highest paid in society,” the authors note.

“Companies that adopt a rigid model will lose diverse talent,” says Lordan.

See you tomorrow.

Sheryl Estrada
[email protected]

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