Memorial Day is hardly past, and yet the focus on post-summer – and how often bankers should work from the office – is ramping up in earnest.
This should hardly be a surprise: It’s virtually (or not so much, in the Zoom-meeting sense) become an annual ritual since banks across the sector tentatively set Labor Day 2020 as a go-to red-letter date upon which to decide how and when to re-staff the office in the early COVID era.
Since then, every year has carried with it all manner of reminders – usually couched around the end of summer – that banks would like to see more of their workforces in person.
Royal Bank of Canada relayed Thursday that it wants its employees – at least those not already in the office full time or remote full time – to work from the office four days a week starting in September.
The directive came in a memo, seen by Reuters and sent shortly after RBC disclosed quarterly earnings that saw the bank’s provisions for credit losses jump by $504 million over the same three months a year ago.
And yet the four-day mandate is – arguably – barely a change from the stance the Toronto-based lender took in March 2023, when it gave its hybrid workers the option to work from the office three or four days a week, starting that May.
RBC spokesperson Gillian McArdle noted as much in an emailed statement.
“We set the expectation in 2023 that we’d come together in the office for the majority of the time, with the flexibility to work remotely one to two days a week,” McArdle said Thursday. "RBC is a relationship-driven bank and in-person, human connection is core to our winning culture.”
If some of the language looks familiar, RBC CEO Dave McKay was credited as saying much the same in the bank’s August 2022 plea for more frequent office attendance.
“We’re a relationship-driven bank,” McKay wrote at the time. “Direct human connection is core to our culture and how we bring our purpose to life for all those we serve.”
Technology, he said, “can’t replicate the energy, spontaneity, big ideas, true sense of belonging and fun” of being in the office together.
McKay countered that hybrid work was “here to stay,” but that “for hybrid to continue to work effectively, we need to get the balance right and be a bit more deliberate about when and how we organize on site.”
The push for more employees to return to the office is not exclusively seasonal. JPMorgan Chase in January told employees companywide to return to the office five days a week starting in March.
“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan’s operating committee wrote at the time in a memo. “We think it is the best way to run the company.”
Citi, meanwhile – long a stalwart defender of flexible work – pledged in January to maintain its hybrid schedule. Though even Citi has its limits. The bank announced in April that it would close its office in Málaga, Spain – seen during the COVID-19 pandemic as a draw for junior bankers seeking an eight-hour-a-day, no-weekend alternative to the 70-hour (100 or more in busy stretches) workweeks they could expect in London or New York.
RBC isn’t the first bank, either, to tighten its office-work policy this spring. BNY in April called its employees back to the office four days a week starting in September – but with a caveat that the bank did not intend to push the mandate further.
“We have no plans to return to 5 days in office unless circumstances were to demand otherwise,” BNY said in its April memo.
RBC’s three-day requirement will remain in effect for the summer, two sources familiar with the matter told The Globe and Mail.
