Work-from-home rules for banks are changing, and some of the industry’s biggest players are choosing to bring employees to work five days a week rather than make efforts to comply, including regularly checking workers’ homes.
During the pandemic, the brokerage industry regulator, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), suspended workplace review rules to make it easier for banks to allow their employees to work from home. The agency now intends to return to its pre-pandemic workplace monitoring requirements, meaning some headquarters will have to register with regulators and be inspected remotely at least once every three years under a new pilot program.
Now, some of the banks that have been the most flexible with their work-from-home policies, including Citigroup, Barclays and HSBC, have decided that complying with the updated rules isn’t worth the effort, Bloomberg reports. reported. Meanwhile, three banks are bringing thousands of their employees back to the office five days a week.
Citigroup said Thursday it is requiring 600 employees previously allowed to work from home to come into the office five days a week, although a statement said most of its employees can still work remotely two days a week, according to the division . Barclays, in a memo on Thursday, cited “new regulatory policies” as the reason why thousands of its investment banking employees around the world are returning to five days of in-person work. And HSBC’s 530 New York employees may soon have to change their remote work habits as well, Mabel Rius, head of human resources for the U.S. and Americas, told Bloomberg.
Michael Roberts, CEO of HSBC US and Americas: told Bloomberg that while the bank will comply with FINRA rules, it wants employees to want to return to the office.
“What we didn’t want to do was force people back simply by maternity leave,” Roberts told Bloomberg in an interview on Thursday.
To encourage employees to work in person, you need to listen to why employees enjoy coming to the office in the first place. Roberts said the bank absorbed most of that contribution in its phase. new headquarters in the USA at Hudson Yards in New York to make it “conducive to people returning.”
“We’ll accommodate FINRA rules, we’ll make sure that whoever needs to be there five days a week is here five days a week, but I don’t want to tell people to come back,” Roberts said. “I want them to come back because they want to come back.”
Meanwhile, some other industry giants, including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, have already issued five-day workweek mandates.
And JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, perhaps the most prominent CEO on Wall Street, has long been a critic of remote work. The bank introduced a mandatory return to office policy for senior employees last year, and Dimon said earlier this year that about 60% of the bank’s employees were working full time in the field.
FINRA, for its part, disputes that its updated policy is the reason for banks’ stricter stay-at-home orders. On Wednesday statement The regulator said some of its rules were no stricter than before the pandemic and that it had in fact adjusted some rules, including allowing remote workplace inspections. These changes “provide member firms with more flexibility—not less—to allow eligible registrants to work from home,” FINRA said.
“FINRA has seen recent announcements from firms that new, strict FINRA rules will require them to return their employees to the office full-time,” the statement said. “It is not right”.