Forcing employees back to the office several days a week could fuel resignations, according to an investment banking CEO who also believes in-office days should prioritize socialization over intensive work.
Speaking to Fortune on the sidelines of the MoneyLive Summit in London on Wednesday, Przemek Gdanski, CEO of investment banking giant BNP Paribas’s Polish division, said he did not believe in enforcing strict, blanket return-to-office mandates.
“We actually don’t do that,” he said. “We’d like to have a 50/50 split between remote work and office work—but that doesn’t mean that each and every employee has to split the time on an equal basis.”
BNP Paribas—Europe’s second biggest bank based on assets—employs around 8,500 people in Poland, where it services 4.2 million customers. The lender also has over a dozen group companies in Poland, through which it employs thousands more people. Globally, it operates in 65 countries, with 3,500 employees in the United States.
Even split
Across the bank’s global operations, the principal aim is for employees to split their time evenly between working in the office and working remotely—however, that hasn’t translated to a blanket policy. During the pandemic, BNP Paribas decided to give managers the freedom to decide which work model worked best for their team, taking efficiency, effectiveness, and workers’ preferences into account. It now has different teams working in varying forms of hybrid patterns, Gdanski said.
“The only thing we want is for people to be in the office at least four days a month,” he told Fortune. “But I don’t expect them to work very intensely on those days. I want them to be together to maintain and develop relationships and basically chat about life, grab a pizza, and move on.”
While a lot of banks do offer some form of flexible work, according to a recent survey, some high-profile bosses in the finance industry have been vocal about their dislike of remote work. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said earlier this year that working from home “doesn’t work,” while Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman said in January that the decision to work remotely is not up to employees.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs implemented a return-to-office mandate more than a year ago.
The push for a return to office isn’t limited to big investment banks, however—the CEOs of Disney, Starbucks, Apple, and Amazon have all pushed for employees to spend more time in the office.
While many big-name corporations have insisted in-person work is vital to maintain a competitive edge, Gdanski argued that offering teams the option to choose how they work makes business sense, given the shape of the labor market in many countries. The job market has remained robust over the past year in the U.S. and the eurozone, even in the face of economic uncertainty.
“I believe that flexibility is very important, especially in a market where we have practically no unemployment and there is a constant fight for talent, both in terms of talent acquisition and talent retention,” he said, noting that many employees—especially younger generations—valued hybrid work.
“If you start pushing people to come back to the office and they don't like it, they’re likely to resign and go elsewhere, and the market will be happy to absorb them in no time,” Gdanski added. “So flexibility, listening to the employees, and empowering managers to pick a model that they deem the most appropriate for what they do—these are the principles I believe in.”
