“I’m glad we decided to come back in these five or six weeks before our move,” said Drew Goldman, global head of investment banking coverage and advisory at Deutsche Bank. “It’s a chance for people to get reacclimated with each other in person. And it allows colleagues to get back and make sure their technology and everything is set up as they move to our new offices.”
To ease its transition, Citigroup is running shuttles between its Tribeca headquarters and major transportation hubs, allowing employees to avoid taking the subway. Teams are having socially distanced gatherings on newly reopened rooftop decks.
The bank also is offering discounts on food in its cafeterias; Goldman Sachs is providing free meals and complimentary gym memberships for staff. Bank of America welcomed some of its Chicago employees back with balloons and goody bags.
Still, coming back can be a tough adjustment—one senior banking executive chuckled as he recalled overhearing junior bankers griping about their first-ever experiences commuting.
Mizuho Financial got a taste of how difficult it can be to bring people back after months of remote work. The firm recently announced that many U.S. employees would soon be expected to be in the office more regularly, albeit with the option of working from home six days a month.
But shortly after, the company issued a separate memo clarifying that its longtime policy allowing anyone with a household member who is unvaccinated to work from home still stood. Employees who were uncomfortable with the level of masking being required in the office—either too much or too little—were also allowed to continue working remotely.
“Mizuho has taken a pragmatic approach throughout the pandemic and this was continued by allowing a number of exceptions when we asked employees to return to the office this month,” Jim Gorman, a spokesman for Mizuho, said in a statement. “We are very pleased with our reintegration.”
For now, heightened Covid restrictions are leading to shifts even at Goldman Sachs, where CEO David Solomon is a staunch advocate of returning staff to the office. The bank welcomed many of its new campus hires this month with a scene that was vastly different from when interns gathered over the summer.
Then, Solomon was fielding questions from hundreds of smiling students in a tightly packed room inside the firm’s Jersey City office. Last week, the new workers were socially distanced and masked up in a vast conference hall at Goldman’s headquarters.
Either way, Solomon had a positive takeaway. He declared: “It was hands down the best part of my week.”
—With assistance from Hannah Levitt, Sridhar Natarajan and Katherine Doherty.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.