GRABBING THE REMOTE
Globally, banks have taken contrasting approaches to returning to the office, with HSBC last week axing executive offices. But SA’s banks are again showing the rest of the world how it can be done
Bruce Whitfield
few weeks ago, HSBC CEO Noel Quinn said the bank would be scrapping the executive floor at its Canary Wharf headquarters, which means its top brass will lose their offices and will now have to hot-desk.
It may seem revolutionary, but it’s nothing new.
Investec did it decades ago. Former CEO Stephen Koseff famously had no office and would plonk himself down anywhere he liked when visiting group offices around the world. He would describe it as the best way to keep in touch with what was going on in the bank.
Other SA banks have been doing the same.
AFNB CEO Jacques Celliers tells the FM that his bank hasn’t had an executive floor for years. “I have not had a cupboard, printer or office in that time either. My assistant has worked from home for years,” he says.
It has taken a pandemic, however, for other global banks to wake up and do the same thing.
In a LinkedIn post, Quinn says he has no intention of heading back to the office fulltime, so hot desks will be part of HSBC’s future strategy around hybrid working. The bank’s executives, who were based on the 42nd floor of the offices in London’s East End, will now go back to work after nearly a year of working from home and find their offices gone.
“My leadership team and I have moved to a fully open-plan floor with no designated desks,” Quinn says. Instead, those offices are being transformed into meeting rooms and communal spaces, while executives hunt for workspace two floors below.
In many banks, this would come as a terrible culture shock; maybe, for Quinn, that’s the point. HSBC is embarking on a huge cost-cutting drive which could result in it shedding 35,000 jobs and slashing its office space by 40%. Making executives uncomfortable might help achieve that.
Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala says: “We have just one enclosed office, which is for the chair, and I’ve worked in an openplan space with some immediate colleagues since we moved into Baker Street [the bank’s newish Rosebank offices].”
Tshabalala says that before the pandemic, most senior executives sat with their immediate teams in an open-plan office “accessible to everyone within reason — there are no ‘executive only’ spaces and no separate lifts or entrances”.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Quinn
said the old arrangement had been “a waste of real estate”. As he puts it: “Our offices were empty half the time because we were travelling around the world.”
But while British (and SA) banks seem more open to the idea of remote working, many of the Wall Street banks are pushing for their staff to return to the office as soon as possible, after vaccination.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon recently sent a memo to all staff telling them to “make plans to be in a position to return to the office” by June 14 in the US.
The most outspoken advocate of a return is JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon,
who told a Wall Street Journal event last week that working from home “does not work for younger people, it doesn’t work for those who want to hustle, it doesn’t work in terms of spontaneous idea generation”.
JPMorgan now expects staff to return, in rotation, from July. And don’t expect JPMorgan to ditch its executive suite any time soon.
Somehow it seems easier to adopt a more flexible workplace layout in a tall office tower.
In Nedbank’s case, by contrast, architecture is a limiting factor. Its sprawling head office in Rivonia Road in Sandton is approaching its 20th birthday, and it has a separate, dedicated executive wing coupled with old-school boardrooms, catering and a wine cellar. All those amenities are, inevitably, being used a lot less now.
“We’ve thought about this from time to time,” says CEO Mike Brown. “If we were building again, we would be in an open plan for all executives.”
As it is, Nedbank’s executives, who run large teams — like the corporate and investment bank — share space with the staff. Those with central roles, such as Brown, CFO Michael Davis and chief operating officer Mfundo Nkuhlu, work from the purpose-built wing.
Stellenbosch-based Capitec has the advantage of having recently moved to new purposebuilt offices in the Technopark development in the winelands.
CEO Gerrie Fourie says the bank believes in a hybrid approach to working from home and the office.
“When forming strategy and collaborating on work, we believe in working from the office — the increased focus on the ability to build on each other’s ideas in a physical space is unmatched. Our executive team is at the office about 80% of the time at the moment,” he says.
These different approaches illustrate that there’s no homogeneous view on when people should go back — despite the hoopla about the death of the office. Just as many workers are gagging to get back, a minority would be happy to never return.
The future, however, appears to be a sensible mix of both.
Tshabalala says about 25% of Standard Bank staff worked straight through the pandemic in branches, call centres and essential offices.
Their work experience is not going to change dramatically after the pandemic, he says
(though, hopefully, their stress will ease).
“I’m struck by just how much we’ve learnt,” he says. “Though the technology to work remotely and paperlessly existed, it was being used at only a fraction of its capacity. We now all know that we can work in this way very effectively and for indefinite periods.”
This illustrates how Covid has not only accelerated social change, it has profoundly altered expectations too.
“Our overall demand for physical office space will be a lot lower from now on than it was the past, and we’re already working on rationalising and reducing our physical spaces,” he says.
While the more inflexible companies will probably resist this trend, they’re likely to lose their more talented bankers to rivals that are less ideologically blinkered. And they may end up having to accept this new reality, as much as they don’t want to.