Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon hates remote work. Now managers are cracking the whip on returning to the office.
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- Some Goldman Sachs managers have doubled down on the firm's full-time return-to-work policy.
- Goldman CEO David Solomon is famously anti-remote work, and has been pushing RTO for over a year.
- Other companies like Zoom, Meta, and Amazon have also pushed RTO for at least part of the week.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has long been vocal about his dislike for the remote work that became widespread during the pandemic.
Most Goldman employees in revenue-producing roles have already returned to the office full time, Bloomberg reported, but employees in other roles have reportedly been more resistant, displeasing senior management.
Certain managers have responded by reemphasizing the company's policy that all employees work from the office five days a week.
"While there is flexibility when needed, we are simply reminding our employees of our existing policy," Goldman Sachs HR chief Jacqueline Arthur told Bloomberg in a statement. "We have continued to encourage employees to work in the office five days a week."
Solomon was pushing for a return to office as early as 2020. That July, he directed his team to draft memos ordering employees to return to the office by the end of the summer, New York Magazine reported in a profile of the CEO.
Though he reluctantly yielded on the issue for a while after facing pushback from his top advisors, he made his disdain for remote work public.
"This is not ideal for us, and it's not a new normal," Solomon later said at a conference in February 2021 regarding remote work, Bloomberg reported. "It's an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible."
The first COVID-19 vaccine wasn't approved until December of 2020, and vaccines only became available to the general public in April 2021 in most states.
Goldman Sachs requested its employees to return to the office in June 2021.
The firm tried to incentivize people to come back with cocktail nights and free food, but its tactics turned more stringent. By March 2022, the bank was taking attendance by monitoring ID swipes into and out of its offices, and using spreadsheets to keep tabs on which teams were most frequently in the office, Insider previously reported.
One New York-based investment banking analyst told Insider last year that employees were reprimanded if they didn't go into the office full time.
"They're definitely watching the swipes," the analyst said. "If you aren't in more than three to four times a week, you'll get a call from the business unit leaders reminding you of the expectation to be in the office."
As of last October, 65% of the company's workers had already returned to the office full time, according to Solomon.
Solomon did not immediately responded to Insider's request for comment.
Other major companies like Meta, Amazon, and even Zoom have also been pushing workers to return to the office for at least part of the week. These kinds of efforts are not without pushback, however.
Research shows that workers today are putting an increasing value on the option to work remotely.
Workers today view hybrid work accommodations as equal to an 8% pay increase, Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor, told The Wall Street Journal. Employers who insist on in-person work are seeing slower hiring rates than those who offer hybrid options, the WSJ reported earlier this month.
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