Sophie Mellor Mon, September 12, 2022
Michael Nagle—Bloomberg/Getty Image
As Labr Day weekend came to a close and bankers at Goldman Sachs shuffled back to the office on Tuesday morning for the mandatory return to a five-day in-office workweek, they found the free coffee cart, which usually sat in the lobby of the 200 West Street office, missing.
The days of the complimentary “grab and go” coffee station, brought in last year as an incentive to get people back into the office, are now over, the New York Post reports, as the banking giant strips away pandemic-era perks.
Sources at Goldman Sachs told the Post that management has a far stronger tool than coffee to get people back into the office anyhow: the threat of being fired.
“RIP to another pandemic perk for junior bankers,” one junior Goldman banker told the Post. “I’m sure the partners still don’t have to pay for their coffee—or anything in their fancy dining hall.”
Another blow to junior workers
Goldman Sachs is notorious for its aggressive push to get workers back into the office.
On Sept. 6, Goldman Sachs announced it would do away with all COVID-19 restrictions and said anyone was allowed to enter the office without a mask, regardless of vaccination or testing status.
Goldman CEO David Solomon previously called work from home an “aberration” and told Fortune, “I just don’t think the way we work in our business is that different than it was five years ago, and I don’t think it will be different five years from now.”
“The secret sauce to our organization is, we attract thousands of really extraordinary young people who come to Goldman Sachs to learn to work, to create a network of other extraordinary people, and work very hard to serve our clients,” Solomon said.
Goldman is hoping to go back to the way things were before the pandemic. Over the past two years, Goldman had also paused its annual year-end performance reviews, where the company would famously cut 5% of its bottom performing employees—but Goldman executives warned this practice would come back by the end of the year.
However, the aggressive push back to the way things were has been met with discontent, especially among junior bankers. According to the New York Post, six overworked first-year bankers quit together and walked out en masse in late August, with sources telling the paper that the atmosphere at the financial giant is at “an all-time toxic high right now.”
Doing away with perks
Beyond COVID measures and free coffee, Goldman is also ending free daily car rides to and from the office, which were introduced at the start of the COVID outbreak to help those who still wished to go into the office.
And it also isn’t the only company doing away with perks. Morgan Stanley has taken away free tickets to the U.S. Open tennis championship, which were once available to top performers at the bank.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, told employees in March it was getting rid of free services like laundry and dry cleaning in the office and planned on pushing back the free dinner offering from 6 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
But as companies aggressively push to get employees back into the office, the best perk a company could offer may just be an option for hybrid work.
JPMorgan and BofA cautious on job cuts as Goldman layoffs loom
Lananh Nguyen and Saeed Azhar
Tue, September 13, 2022
NEW YORK (Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, the two largest U.S. banks by assets, expressed caution about job cuts in contrast with Goldman Sachs, where hundreds of layoffs could start as early this month.
"You need to very careful when you have a bit of a downturn to start cutting bankers here and there because you will hurt the possibility for growth going forward," Daniel Pinto, president and chief operating officer of JPMorgan, told investors at a conference Tuesday. "If anything, in some environments like this, there may be some very, very top bankers that you could not access or hire in the past that now they're available to be hired."
That stance compares with plans by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, according to a source familiar with the matter, to cut jobs as early as this month after pausing the annual practice for two years during the pandemic. Goldman had a headcount of 47,000 at the end of the second quarter, a 15% jump from the previous year.
Wall Street bankers have become increasingly concerned about layoffs in the coming months. As the risk of recession looms and the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to curb inflation, deal markets have dried up.
JPMorgan's upbeat view underpins the company's approach to its workforce, said Lance Roberts, chief investment strategist and economist at RIA Advisors.
"We will see if JPMorgan is right in their more optimistic views, but history suggests that with the Fed actively hiking rates and reducing their balance sheet, the outlook is more cloudy with a chance of heavy rain," Roberts said.
Despite the investment-banking slowdown, Bank of America is currently satisfied with its staffing levels, the company's chief executive officer said on Monday.
"We're fine with our headcount," Brian Moynihan told Fox News in an interview. "I'm confident if we need to manage headcount when people leave us to go to other employers, we just won't fill all the jobs, but we're in good shape."
JPMorgan had to adjust salaries to deal with "way elevated" attrition in the first half of the year, bank President Pinto said. While attrition is still high, it's normalizing, he said. The bank had more than 278,000 employees at the end of the second quarter, up 7% from a year earlier.
Citigroup declined to comment on job cuts. Moelis & Co referred Reuters to July comments from its chief executive.
"The word goes out right around Labor Day to look at your headcount in a bad year," Ken Moelis said at the time. "It's just the way the cycle works."
(Reporting by Lananh Nguyen and Saeed Azhar; additional reporting by Niket Nishant and Mehnaz Yasmin; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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