Standard Chartered Plc said it would maintain a flexible attitude toward its employees’ working arrangements, bucking a trend among some of its Wall Street rivals that are ordering workers to return to office five days a week.
After a recent assessment, the London-listed lender concluded that keeping the “current approach, with strong guardrails, remains right for us,” Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters said in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg News.
“There are many reasons to join and stay at Standard Chartered,” Winters wrote to the bank’s 81,000-strong workforce. “This element of our increasingly differentiated employee value proposition is undoubtedly one of them.”
The current hybrid work policy at the lender has remained largely unchanged since the pandemic led businesses around the world to embrace work from home. However, in recent years — after the end of the global health crisis — competitors including JPMorgan Chase & Co. have told their employees to return to the office five days a week. HSBC Holdings Plc recently told its UK retail banking staff to expect smaller bonuses if they failed to show up in office frequently enough.
Calling such mandates as “prescriptive policies,” Winters however added that while technology has enabled collaboration effectively from anywhere, it still cannot fully replace the unique benefits of face-to-face interactions.
Winters cautioned that for the current hybrid policy to be maintained would require “real commitment” from the company’s staff and that workers who failed to come to the office for extended periods of time could face action from their managers.
“The underlying principle is clear; flexible working and in-person collaboration are complementary, not mutually exclusive,” Winters wrote.
The memo was first reported by Financial News.