Specifics including days in or out of the office will be communicated by business heads in the coming days, the memo sent Tuesday said. Goldman Sachs on Tuesday stopped requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before entering its offices. (That policy doesn’t yet apply to New York City offices.) Tuesday was also Day 2 for a Morgan Stanley initiative discontinuing COVID testing requirements for office workers. “You no longer need to complete the Bank of America Health Assessment before coming to work in your offices each day, regardless of vaccination status,” the second-largest US bank told employees on Wednesday.
things banks are doing to grease the M&A wheels
Capital One reopened its doors to all U.S. employees Tuesday for the first time in more than two years. The bank’s hybrid work policy encourages — but doesn’t require — in-office attendance Tuesday through Thursday. Employees without proof of vaccination must meet COVID testing requirements, the bank specified in May. The firm has not set as early a date for a full return to the office as some of its Wall Street peers. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has said he expects a “more normal operating posture” with more vaccinated employees returning in September after Labor Day. Wells Fargo told employees last week that US staff working from home would start returning to the office on September 7, Reuters reported last week, citing a memo to employees.
TD joins Bank of America in setting large-scale office returns for June
Toronto-based TD isn’t the only financial juggernaut to announce this week that it’s targeting a large-scale office return in June. Bank of America said Tuesday it wants to return all of its U.S. employees to the office by June 1. And both banks will be mounting those efforts amid an uptick in the COVID caseload in the areas surrounding their financial centers. Bank of America is just one of several major financial institutions that have ramped up efforts to call their workers back to the office in the last year.
What We’re Reading
For positions that “generally need to function inside” offices, those employees will be allowed to work from home for a limited number of days a month, the bank said. While most of the bank’s employees have complied with workplace-attendance policy, the bank began sending letters late last year in an attempt to rear any stragglers back to the office. Workers usually receive an initial notice before receiving a more formal letter of education, BI has learned.
- The standards aim to add ‘formality’ to the bank’s flexibility, CEO Brian Moynihan said Tuesday at a conference as the Labor Day remote-work benchmark passes.
- The bank’s hybrid work policy encourages — but doesn’t require — in-office attendance Tuesday through Thursday.
- Since October 2022, Bank of America has been requiring the majority of its employees to come into the office at least three days a week.
- Workers usually receive an initial notice before receiving a more formal letter of education, BI has learned.
- The bank does not have a vaccination mandate but recommends employees be inoculated and fully boosted.
- Bank of America Corp. outlined a series of next steps for the thousands of employees returning to its offices globally, as it seeks to cement its post-pandemic approach to work.
Support
The bank is incorporating feedback from staff surveys into its new standards, Bloomberg reported. Ontario reported 1,074 hospitalizations from the virus as of Wednesday, up from 611 two weeks ago across the Canadian province, according to Bloomberg. “Failure to follow the workplace excellence expectations applicable to your role within two weeks of the date of this notification may result in further disciplinary action,” read one letter of education that was seen by the Financial Times. Manhattan’s packed Pierre Hotel on Tuesday played host to the Bank Policy Institute and The Clearing House’s annual conference — the first time the gathering has convened in person since 2019. “We are a work-from-office company that may be in center cities. It may be in suburban office space. But we are a work-from-office company,” Moynihan said in April during the bank’s annual shareholders meeting. “Across the company, we will continue to use a multi-faceted approach for flexibility that …
Bloomberg
It should be noted, though, that even the setting in which Moynihan teased Bank of America’s upcoming policy change had a post-COVID air. “As you start seeing some layoffs happening, people will say, ‘Whoa, I don’t want to be laid off, I want to be in the office and have bosses see that I’m working really hard,’” Rudin said.
The bank does not have a vaccination mandate but recommends employees be inoculated and fully boosted. Citi called its vaccinated employees back to the office at least two days a week beginning March 21. The catch there, of course, is that Citi in October made the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for its U.S. employees — setting a Jan. 14 deadline for them to upload their vaccination card or to request exemptions. The bank placed about 150 non-compliant employees on leave the following day, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Last year, the bank had public missteps involving the communication of work-from-home policies and leaked comments from senior employees pressuring people to come in. The move underlines the incremental approaches firms are taking to bring staff back to the office. Wall Street has been grappling with how to draw employees away from their homes as most big banks and asset managers have had their global workforces working at least partially remote for more than a year.
Those in more client-facing roles, such as investment banking and sales and trading, have been asked to come in five days a week, with some flexibility. TD employees can expect further details — including the return timeline for specific units and the extent to which certain positions will be a hybrid of remote and in-office work — from business unit leaders, Lalonde wrote. Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. has updated its post-pandemic return-to-the-office policy, which varies depending on employee roles and functions.
In April of last year, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon mandated the firm’s top executives to come into the office five days a week. Goldman Sachs maintains one of the strictest RTO policies in the business — it asks its workers to come into the office five days a week. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has said that he doesn’t expect workers to come in at pre-pandemic levels, but he wants to see them in the office “three or four” days a week. The bank told staff that office, travel and work-from-home policies will differ depending on the type of role and business at the bank, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News.
Wells Fargo, for example, set a March 14 office-return date for customer-facing employees and those in enterprise functions, regardless of their vaccination status. The San Francisco-based lender had pushed back its large-scale office return five times — also planned in waves — before postponing it indefinitely in late December. Bank of America will release a revamped office-return policy in the next six to eight weeks, CEO Brian Moynihan told an audience Tuesday at a banking conference in New York. Since October 2022, Bank of America has been requiring the majority of its employees to come into the office at least three days a week.
The firm cited rising vaccination rates in the US and within the company, in accordance with guidance from medical experts, to support its new stance. Bank of America’s COVID-19 policy, to this point, has been a bit less defined than those of other banks of its size — and its large-scale return to the office considerably later. In its latest effort to herd its employees back to the office, Bank of America has been sending out warning letters it’s calling “letters of education” to those who haven’t been turning up for work. However, Bhushan Sethi, joint global leader for people and organization at PricewaterhouseCoopers, told Bloomberg that Labor Day may not mark the “great reckoning” office-work proponents may hope.
The policy aims to strike a balance such that it is specific to each of the bank’s units — “You can’t generalize,” Moynihan said, according to Bloomberg — but also consistent and fair across the business. The policy will vary, however, based on job responsibilities and other factors, the CEO said. Sending employees home last year and guiding them through remote work for months was new territory for global firms.
Roles that require in-office work, including employees at financial centers, will continue to be fully based in the office, according to a company memo seen by CBJ. Bank of America told employees this week that it would no longer require staff in most US states to fill out health assessments to go into their offices starting on Monday, according to a memo seen by Insider. JPMorgan Chase also welcomed employees’ office returns in February, and last month discontinued twice-weekly mandatory testing of unvaccinated employees. At the same time, it made face-masking optional in its corporate buildings for vaccinated and unvaccinated employees alike. As of this week, it lifted its ban on hiring unvaccinated people and stopped asking employees to report COVID-19 infections and contact tracing.
The COVID spread nationwide, meanwhile, appears to be on a downward trend — with 26,000 new cases reported daily, on average, according to Johns Hopkins University, compared with nearly 30,000 a day in recent weeks. Bank of America’s office-return call, meanwhile, comes as the daily case average over the past week is about 1,400, compared with about 1,000 over the past 28 days, according to The Wall Street Journal. Another real estate developer, Bill Rudin, CEO of Rudin Management, told the wire service that office attendance may spike in reaction to other economic consequences. The standards aim to add ‘formality’ to the bank’s flexibility, CEO Brian Moynihan said Tuesday at a conference as the Labor Day remote-work benchmark passes. Bank of America has been requesting that employees voluntarily disclose their vaccination status, Insider previously reported. Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, had roughly 212,000 employees as of June.
Bank of America Corp. outlined a series of next steps for the thousands of employees returning to its offices globally, as it seeks to cement its post-pandemic approach to work. The office-return call from the nation’s second-largest bank, though, comes as the COVID-19 caseload — in New York City, anyway — is rising. The city’s daily case average over the past week is about 1,400, compared with about 1,000 over the past 28 days, according to The Wall Street Journal. Bank of America employees, meanwhile, will have some flexibility to work from home but are strongly encouraged to collaborate with colleagues in person, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.