Republica Press

Your Business & Political News Source

REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

New York Public Library

Wall Street Banks Are Getting Flexible on Working From Home

by

When Tom Naratil arrived on Wall Street in the 1980s, work-life balance didn’t really exist. For most bankers of his generation, working long hours while missing out on family time wasn’t just necessary to get ahead, it was necessary to not be left behind.

But Mr. Naratil, now president of the Swiss bank UBS in the Americas, doesn’t see why the employees of today should have to make the same trade-offs — at the cost of their personal happiness and the company’s bottom line.

Employees with the flexibility to skip “horrible commutes” and work from home more often are simply happier and more productive, Mr. Naratil said. “They feel better, they feel like we trust them more, they’ve got a better work-life balance, and they’re producing more for us — that’s a win-win for everybody.”

Welcome to a kinder, gentler Wall Street.

Much of the banking industry, long a bellwether for corporate America, dismissed remote working as a pandemic blip, even leaning on workers to keep coming in when closings turned Midtown Manhattan into a ghost town. But with many Wall Street workers resisting a return to the office two years later and the competition for banking talent heating up, many managers are coming around on work-from-home — or at least acknowledging it’s not a fight they can win.

rolled out its plan last month to allow 10 percent of its 20,500 U.S. employees to work remotely all the time and offer hybrid schedules for three-quarters of its workers.

“Talent will move, and it’s not only about a paycheck,” he said.

said. Wells Fargo started bringing back most of its 249,000-person work force in mid-March with what it calls a “hybrid flexible model” — for many corporate employees, that entails a minimum of three days a week in the office, while groups that cater to the bank’s technology needs will be able to come in less often.

BNY Mellon, which has nearly 50,000 employees, is allowing teams to determine their own mix of in-person 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 has been palpable” as employees eagerly map out their plans, said Garrett Marquis, a BNY Mellon spokesman.

Moelis & Company, a boutique investment bank, has strongly encouraged its almost 1,000 staff members to come to the office Monday through Thursday, but with added “intraday flexibility” over their hours, said Elizabeth Crain, the company’s chief operating officer. That might mean dropping children off at school in the morning, or taking the train during daylight hours for safety reasons, she said. The new approach fosters teamwork and enables employees to learn from one another in person, while also giving them more control over their schedules.

Ms. 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 unthinkable before the pandemic: a weekly 9 a.m. session with a personal trainer near her office. She said she hoped that breaking out of the confines of the traditional workday sent a message to employees that they were trusted to get the job done while making time for their personal priorities.

said last month.

But he and Goldman’s David Solomon have welcomed efforts to get workers back into Manhattan offices. Mr. Solomon echoed Mayor Eric Adams at a talk at Goldman’s headquarters in March, saying it was “time to come back.”

Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs, said returning to the office “is core to our apprenticeship culture” and client-focused business. “We are better together than apart, especially as an employer of choice for those in the beginning stage of their career,” she said.

For months, Mr. Dimon has made a similar argument at JPMorgan — and continued to even as he said about half its employees would work from home at least some of the time.

“Most professionals learn their job through an apprenticeship model, which is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world,” he wrote. JPMorgan has hired more than 80,000 workers during the pandemic, he said, and it strives to train them properly.

building a new headquarters in Midtown that will be the home base for up to 14,000 workers, will move to a more “open seating” arrangement.

Banks outside New York are also adapting: KeyCorp, which is based in Cleveland, hasn’t set a specific return-to-office date, but expects half its staff to eventually show up four or five days a week. Another 30 percent will probably come in for one to three days, with the ability to work from different offices. And 20 percent will work from home, albeit with in-person training and team-building events.

The new setup is “uncharted territory” that is necessary to keep the work force engaged, said Key’s chief executive, Chris Gorman. While he comes in every day and is a big believer in face-to-face meetings, Mr. Gorman said he had avoided a heavy-handed approach that could alienate employees and prompt them to look elsewhere.

Mr. Naratil, the UBS president, is also a believer in in-person gatherings — he still spends most of his week at UBS’s office in Weehawken, N.J. — but he said the great remote-work experiment of the last two years had debunked the myth that employees were less productive at home. In fact, he said, they are more productive.

The increasingly hybrid workplace has forced leaders to connect with their teams in new ways, like virtual happy hours, Mr. Naratil said. The rank and file have shown that they can rise to the occasion, and the onus is on bosses to attract workers back to physical spaces to generate new ideas and strengthen relationships.

Managers, he said, need to 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 to,’” he said. “That’s not the answer.”

View Source

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

A New York Intellectual Bastion Finds a New Home

by

For a certain kind of intellectually inclined New Yorker, the weekly Friday lunch of the New York Institute for the Humanities has long been a coveted invitation. Held for more than four decades in a succession of sometimes cramped rooms at New York University, it’s the kind of gathering where you suddenly realize that the seriously dressed-down person who had just abruptly put down a paper plate of deli sandwiches to pose a sharp question about a talk on Nietzsche’s concept of anti-education or the legacy of the documentary “Paris Is Burning” is actually an eminent philosopher, a prizewinning novelist, or maybe a downtown musician or painter.

Now, after a period of pandemic-related uncertainty, the institute is leaving its longtime home at the university and moving uptown. Starting June 1, it will be based at the New York Public Library, which, after the pandemic lifts, will host the institute’s weekly gatherings in its flagship 42nd Street building while partnering on public events through its Center for Research in the Humanities.

Eric Banks, the institute’s director since 2013, said the move came after N.Y.U. informed him last fall that, as part of pandemic-related cuts, it would be discontinuing its support for the institution, which had a $200,000 annual budget. Under the new arrangement, the bulk of the institute’s budget will be paid for by its own fund-raising, including what Banks said was “substantial initial support” from some of the group’s fellows.

William Kelly, the library’s director of research libraries, said in a statement that the partnership was important as the city faces what is likely to be “a long and difficult recovery” from the pandemic.

two-day symposium in 2016 on Black Lives Matter; a 2018 celebration of the jazz experimentalist Cecil Taylor; and an eclectic exploration of solitary confinement in 2012 that brought criminal justice reformers together with artists and philosophers.

As the city’s intellectual scene has evolved, the institute may no longer draw the kind of gossipy coverage that followed some of its internal blowups over the years. But Banks said the partnership with the library would help shore up and even expand its place in New York’s “intellectual infrastructure.”

“It’s not just a star-studded group,” he said. “The point is really to foster connections and conversations that are really hard to make happen under other circumstances.”

View Source

Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy