Deutsche Bank AG’s decision to ban staff from working at home Friday and the following Monday — a common practice at firms that come to the office three days a week — has drawn a new line in the sand in the ongoing tussle between bosses and workers.
The German banking giant said the move was designed to “spread our presence more evenly across the week,” Deutsche Bank Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing and Chief Operating Officer Rebecca Short said in a memo. The company will also require its managing directors to come in at least four days a week as of June, while all other staff need to be in three days. The mandate “will ensure consistency across the bank,” a spokesman for the bank said.
But the Friday-to-Monday ban is very rare, and illustrates the growing frustration of companies that pay millions for office real estate that often empties out at the bookends of each working week. Many companies with hybrid-work plans allow workers or teams to choose which days they come in, and among those that require attendance on certain weekdays, it’s typically Tuesday through Thursday. Just 6% of US firms that call workers in on specific days choose Friday as one of those days, according to an index of the workplace arrangements of more than 5,800 firms administered by Scoop Technologies Inc.
“I’ve actually never heard of a company putting that specific rule in place,” said Scoop co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Rob Sadow on Deutsche Bank’s new practice. “Executives want to balance the flexibility employees want, getting people together in person, and generating real estate savings given reduced office use.”
Deutsche Bank’s desire to find that balance comes amid an ongoing shakeout in the $20 trillion US commercial real estate market that’s due in large part to the post-pandemic resiliency of remote work. Office-vacancy rates across the US rose to 21.4% in the fourth quarter, according to real estate brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., and close to one-third of all office space sits empty in San Francisco. Landlords in New York, meanwhile, lowered office rents last quarter “in the hopes of sparking increased touring and leasing activity,” JLL said.
The crisis is worldwide: McKinsey Global Institute estimates that pandemic shifts could erase as much as $1.3 trillion of real estate value in big cities around the world by 2030.
Deutsche Bank’s memo noted that its current real estate usage is “inefficient,” a common concern among businesses with hybrid-work plans. (A company spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Badge-swipe data from security firm Kastle Systems show that New York offices were about one-quarter full on Fridays in recent weeks, compared with pre-pandemic attendance levels, and were more than 60% full in the middle of the week. Monday attendance typically falls somewhere in the middle of that range. Workplace-management software provider Eptura, which tracks desk and meeting-room bookings, calls this phenomenon the “mid-week mountain.”
The result is that sometimes workers can’t even find a place to sit down when they do come in, especially if the firm no longer has assigned desks, according to Andy Cohen, co-CEO of architecture and design firm Gensler. On other days, the CEO and other senior leaders might be the only ones in. It’s gotten so bad that some firms are pumping in white noise to make offices appear more crowded, according to Alex Birch, co-founder and CEO of XY Sense, an Australian maker of workplace sensors.
“Deutsche Bank is trying to spread the peak a bit to Fridays and Mondays,” Sadow said. “One of the worst things is to go into the office and be alone. Executives want people to be there.”
But forcing staffers to disrupt entrenched work-life patterns could backfire, workplace experts said, with lower engagement and retention rates. “Solving a real estate utilization problem with dictated mandates on when to be in the office risks doubling potential attrition,” said Debbie Lovich, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group who leads the firm’s work on people strategy. The labor market remains tight, despite scores of layoffs, and workers dissatisfied with their employers’ flexible-work policies are much more likely to be looking for a new gig, research has shown.
Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who tracks remote-work trends and is widely sought out by organizations for flexible-work insights, said working remotely on Fridays has become the norm: “Don’t try to get people in on Fridays.”
