While some firms are adapting to a new reality in which employees are given flexibility, others insist staff get back to the office more often than not.

Financial services firms trying to get staff back to the office are facing operational challenges and pushback from a revamped workforce, forcing some to change their plans, according to news reports.

Many of the firms are operating on a hybrid model as they deal with training new staff and new regulatory issues, FA-IQ sister publication FundFire writes, citing operations executives speaking at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference on May 17.

Edward Jones, for example, lets its staff work remotely full time, work at the office full time, or work two to three days at the office per week and the rest from home, said Tim Ney, a principal at the firm, according to the publication.

“We’re all trying to get to the same place — how to preserve culture, how to preserve the training and mentoring. We've just taken a flexible approach,” he said, according to FundFire.

Morgan Stanley, on the other hand, is less flexible.

“We’re expecting people to be in the office more than they're not,” said Graeme McEvoy, global head of Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Securities Group, according to the publication. “We recognize that there's some value to be gained by working asynchronously from home, but in order to be truly effective working asynchronously, you need to have figured out how to work synchronously.”

Goldman Sachs, in a similar vein, told staff to come to the office four to five days a week, said Brian Steele, a managing director in the firm’s global markets division, according to FundFire.

Executives who want staff to come in believe that the gains in productivity reported as the workforce set up out of the office were due to previous training and existing relationships — and the same can’t be expected of new employees.

“It's been two years, going on two-and-a-half years, [and] a large percentage of people have never had the same training that those people who left the office in 2020 have had,” McEvoy said, according to the publication. “It's difficult to assume that somebody who's never sat on the floor and sort of learned through osmosis how to have a difficult conversation with an upset client, or how to have a difficult conversation with an upset trading desk … is going to pick it up on a Zoom screenshare.”

Some firms, meanwhile, are adjusting their original plans because they’re not sitting well with the employees.

BNY Mellon Pershing — which had its workers return to the office three days per week, with remote work set for Mondays and Fridays — learned that its approach didn’t work, said Debra Guarino, a managing director in BNY Mellon Pershing’s operations and trading services unit, according to FundFire.

“We quickly realized that that is not what people wanted, and so we've become a little more flexible and intentional in our approach,” she said, according to the publication.

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