Bank of America crossed a major threshold last week in its return-to-office plan as it called all workers — regardless of vaccination status — back for the first time since the pandemic began.
While it's too soon to determine whether this will lead to an increase in office attendance, the bank's previous efforts to boost numbers could foreshadow challenges in getting people back. BofA first called back vaccinated employees to the office in March, and the results in the months since have been a mixed bag — leading to some frustrations, employees said.
Some employees told Insider in interviews over the past several weeks that they had witnessed lackluster attendance in their divisions, while others said they'd observed people coming in five days a week. Officially, the company's policy is to encourage employees to work from the office — but not to prohibit those who need it from enjoying occasional flexibility to work from home.
To that end, the bank has held off from issuing a company-wide mandate that people spend five days a week in the office. At the same time, it's also avoided setting a company-wide hybrid policy in the way that banks like JPMorgan and Citigroup have.
Instead, the Charlotte, NC-based bank has given individual business lines — from global markets to technology — the right to implement their own expectations about how many days their workers need to be in. Some employees said that managers had pegged their teams' return-to-office thresholds at five days a week, while others said they'd been told to spend at least three days in the office, but could spend two at home if they like.
To assess how the return-to-work process is going, managers have been given access to reports, which are based on the company's tracking of ID swipes, to see whether their teams are meeting their own internal quotas, people with knowledge of the situation said. But, even while compliance among some employees has been mixed in recent weeks, bank managers have waffled internally over how to boost attendance, they added.
Plus, a senior executive in the markets division said, senior leaders have been discouraged from taking the heavy-handed approach of some of their peer banks to get attendance up.
"There are areas completely empty and areas completely full. It is very binary," this person said, describing attendance on trading floors at the bank's tower at One Bryant Park in New York City. "That creates a lot of tension."
Empty seats are triggering frustrations
Some of the people interviewed for this story described a more aggressive culture in parts of the markets division, especially equities, where managers want more face-time from their staffers and to see filled-up trading floors. As a result, some managers have instructed their employees to come back five days a week, the people added.
Separately, a senior technology staffer who works at the bank's campus in Newark, Delaware — a hub for back-office functions including help desk support and card production — said their division had completely different requirements about how frequently its people should be in.
This senior tech staffer said that employees reporting to Aditya Bhasin, the bank's chief technology and information officer, were told in a recent all-hands meeting that they'd be granted two days per week to work from home. The Delaware campus is a "ghost town," the person said last week during the bank's mass return to the office.
On most days, "the parking lot is less than 50% full," this person added and, on a "good day," overall attendance at the Delaware hub has oscillated between 30% to 40%. One reason could be that the hub counts a number of contractors as employees, and they have yet to return to the office.
People familiar with Bank of America's return-to-work policies insisted on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about their observations because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with reporters.
While seeing empty seats has produced frustrations among both managers and employees who have decided to come in, the complaints also demonstrate how difficult it has been for Wall Street banks to get it right — even when they adopt Bank of America's more laissez-faire approach.
Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan — both of which have exhibited greater rigidity in trying to get workers back in their seats — have fielded internal complaints from employees who feel they should be given more leeway.
JPMorgan, for instance, has seen a wave of dissent from angry staffers bristling under the weight of the enforcement measures it uses for its hybrid model. After a raft of internal pushback, one top technology executive recently agreed to walk back his teams' return-to-work requirements, as Insider previously reported.
'The monitoring really bothers me'
At Bank of America, the reports showing whether attendance has been good or bad during any given week can also be something of a Rorschach test.
The senior markets executive said that leaders in the global markets division receive weekly reports to assess team attendance. He characterized the results through May at the One Bryant Park office as "concerning." This executive said it was "a bad sign" that many people who were supposed to be in the office weren't complying.
Fridays, in particular, have often been significantly emptier on trading floors, raising eyebrows among some senior leaders, the source said.
Others cast the same report's results in a positive light.
A company spokesman did not dispute the existence of the reports but said "the vast majority of our Global Markets traders and salespeople are in the office every day serving clients."
Several employees contacted by Insider were surprised to learn about the existence of the reports tracking teams' return-to-office compliance. Others, such as the senior technology staffer at the Delaware office, said they were aware that the reports were being assembled, but that managers had privately told them the swipe data wouldn't be used at the personal level.
Nevertheless, the shadow of that possibility — and the tracking itself — are stirring anxiety among some.
"The monitoring really bothers me," said the tech staffer, who is spending two days a week at home. This person expressed concern that the bank could eventually use the office-attendance data "to punish us and take that time away."
"I'm an adult. I know what I need to do. I'm doing my job," this staffer added. "I don't need you to micromanage me."
This story has been updated from its original version.
Are you an employee at Bank of America? Contact these reporters: Alex Morrell can be reached via email at amorrell@bjinnox.com, and on encrypted apps Signal or Telegram at (262) 573-1023. Reed Alexander can be reached via email at ralexander@insider.com, and via SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.
