Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters says he will let his staff decide whether to return to the office.
“We work with adults, and the adults can have an adult conversation with other adults and decide how they’re going to best manage their team,” Winters said in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday.
“It’s working for us,” Winters said. “How other companies make that work? Everybody’s got their own recipe.”
Winters told Bloomberg that he practices hybrid working and tries to be in the office four days a week.
“Our MDs want to come to the office. They come to the office because they collaborate. They manage their people. They lead teams. But if they need the flexibility, they can get it from us,” Winters said.
Standard Chartered did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Wall Street remains divided about remote and hybrid work. In June, Citi announced it was giving its hybrid employees two weeks of remote work in August. Most of those workers are required to be in the office at least three days a week.
Sara Wechter, Citi’s chief human resources officer, said in a memo to employees on June 9 that the bank’s “hybrid work model helps us attract and retain top talent and sets us apart from other companies.”
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, on the other hand, have long opposed remote work. Both CEOs have publicly said that their banks function better when staff work in the office.
“This is not ideal for us and it’s not a new normal,” Solomon said at a conference organized by Credit Suisse back in 2021.
“It’s an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible,” he continued, adding that he didn’t want to see “another class of young people arriving at Goldman Sachs in the summer remotely.”
Dimon wrote in his 2024 annual shareholder letter that JPMorgan had “allowed some bad habits to develop” in the last five years.
“Working from home exacerbated the situation by hindering innovation, slowing decision-making, inhibiting information sharing, reducing efficiency, and creating more politics and bureaucracy,” Dimon said in his letter.
In January, JPMorgan said in a memo to employees that it was “asking most employees currently on a hybrid schedule to return to the office five days a week.”
“I’m not against work from home. I’m against work from home that doesn’t work,” Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg in May.
“It’s an apprenticeship system and you can’t learn working from your basement,” he added.
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