Office life: Wall Street’s rush to return
Some companies are bringing their workers back to the office, said Sridhar Natarajan in Bloomberg.com— with mixed results. Last week, JPMorgan Chase issued a “mandate that its senior traders return by Sept. 21.” But within days, an employee in the bank’s trading unit tested positive for Covid-19. The same thing happened at Goldman Sachs, which had been preparing “to start bringing staffers back across most divisions” in October. “Wall Street firms have seen revenue rise with most staff working from home” since spring, but “executives have expressed concerns about productivity and the erosion of company culture.” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told analysts that internal studies found work-from-home productivity had been slipping in recent months, particularly among younger employees on Mondays and Fridays.
Our staff is just “happy to be able to see each other again,” said Alex Conant and Terry Sullivan, founding partners of public relations firm Firehouse Strategies, in The Wall Street Journal. “As weeks turned into months, the deficiencies of working remotely became apparent.” In Washington, we followed guidelines from officials about when it was safe to reopen businesses. We all wear masks and have “high-grade air purifiers throughout the office.” This is a reality a lot of workers might have to get used to, said Emily Oster in Bloomberg.com. You may wonder, Why is it safe now? It’s not. “But staying closed also has serious risks in terms of employment, income, and, yes, health.” For months we’ve been “operating under the assumption that pretty soon this will end.” That’s no longer tenable. “We have started to realize—and I know we do not want to hear this—that it’s not a few weeks, or even a few months. Employers have realized they need to plan for the long term.” The kinds of investments they are making now show they “expect we’ll just have to get used to living with Covid-19.”
It’s easy to construct the argument that the pandemic has diminished to the point where there’s “a net social benefit” to getting back to work, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. “Believing it is hard.” The banks point to low case numbers in New York as justification. But “white-collar workers who’ve been huddling at home since March” have not developed any degree of immunity. And many of them have been sheltered from seeing the worst of the epidemic’s ravages. The truth is that bankers are just unable to leave the corporate ladder behind, knowing that “face time is the most important corporate virtue.” It’s worrisome that other, saner industries will be tempted to follow the lead of a Wall Street culture that has spent “decades filtering for macho displays of pointless sacrifice.”