Will the City ever learn to love working from home?

Independent

a day ago

A workplace counter-revolution is underway, and HSBC is the latest to join it – by issuing a back-to-the-office order to its senior staff.
The London-listed bank, which reported a 29 per cent slump in second-quarter profits, is turning away from hybrid working and wants those bearing the august title of managing director and up to 'set an example'.
You can bet their underlings will heed that. It's inevitable at a big financial institution staffed by ambitious people who are naturally attuned to 'how things are done around here'. The City is the kind of place you get with the programme or get out.
So how long before four days in the office turns into five? Not long, I suspect.
That's assuming HSBC can find enough desks for everyone: there have been reports of shortages as it prepares to move from its Canary Wharf tower to a new home in the City of London, near St Paul's Cathedral. Some of the big US bulge-bracket investment banks with famously unforgiving cultures – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the like – went back to a full five days a week some time ago.
The CIPD, a professional body for people working in HR, recently issued a report looking at practices a year on from the implementation of the Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023.
It found that, while 91 per cent of employers offered some form of flexible working, the number offering hybrid working, with part of the week in the office and part working from home, had fallen to 74 per cent from 84 per cent in 2023. Some 14 per cent of employers offering hybrid working were also planning to either introduce or increase the number of mandatory days in the office over the next 12 months, à la HSBC.
This is despite 41 per cent of employers believing that an increase in home and hybrid working has led to increased productivity and efficiency in their organisations, versus 16 per cent taking the opposite view.
The more radical – and controversial – four-day working week recently received a thumbs up from 100 per cent of the employers participating in a national trial organised by the 4 Day Week Foundation. All 17 participating companies planned to stick with it, reporting enhanced productivity from happier workers.
But I wouldn't expect to see too many joining them. It's interesting to note that Radioactive PR, an early adopter that I featured in a column looking at the practice five years ago, moved to four and a half days post pandemic, partly to help the company come through the wrenching impact of Covid.
'It makes business sense, and that's all I can make decisions based on, just like when I made the decision to go four-day in the first place, saying at the time that it was for as long as it worked for us,' CEO Rich Leigh said in a blogpost.
The company has since been taken over by the Stakked agency collective and merged with Munch PR, and the new owner tells me: 'When we acquired the business, the Radioactive agency was on a five-day working week, and continues to be so at Munch.'
The likes of Goldman Sachs have never struggled for talent, despite the negative attention that the brutal work culture faced by juniors in the City and on Wall Street has sometimes fostered. In 2021, a slide deck was leaked that reported an average 95-hour work week among 13 junior Goldman analysts. In 2013, City banks faced calls to overhaul working practices following the death of a 21-year-old intern at Bank of America after an all-nighter.
Those banks have not noticeably struggled for staff since then. As for the compilers of the Goldman slide deck? They weren't exactly asking for full adoption of hybrid working, duvet days and cuddles from the CEO. They wanted a cap of – wait for it – 80 hours. Sign up to work for one of these institutions, and you know what you're getting into. High pay, but at a steep cost.
However, could banks without the allure of the Goldman name benefit by sticking with the more flexible working practices to attract bright individuals, quite willing to work hard, but put off by the culture of some institutions?
It is notable that Standard Chartered, one of HSBC's smaller Asia-focused rivals, is still offering hybrid working despite its tough-as-nails CEO, Bill Winters. Lloyds Banking Group, meanwhile, mandates only two days a week in the office, and I understand there are no plans to change that.
The CIPD survey would suggest they are being rewarded. Some 80 per cent of the employees surveyed said hybrid working had had a positive impact on their quality of life, while a third thought working flexibly had had a positive impact on their career. Only a small proportion of workers – three per cent – said they had left a job since January 2024 due to a lack of flexible working. But apply that number to the British workforce as a whole and you get 1.1 million people.
A final point: the decline in hybrid and flexible working inevitably makes life much harder for disabled workers. For the record, I am one of them. The government claims that it wants to help them into work, but that's only getting harder, and I'm not seeing much sign of it finding ways to address the daunting fences they have to clear just to get an interview.
Plus ça change from Starmer Inc.