WFH: Blackrock orders managing directors to work full week from office
Blackrock is ordering its most senior staff to work from the office five days a week in the latest example of financial institutions abandoning the flexible working from home (WFH) policies many adopted in the wake of the pandemic.
The investment juggernaut will tell its workers that all of its approximately 1,000 managing directors across the world will be obliged to work from the office for the full working week, according to the Financial Times.
The revamped policy is the second time Blackrock, which under Larry Fink’s 33-year stewardship has become the world’s largest asset manager, has tightened home-working rules since its initial hybrid policy. In 2023, it announced it expected all staff only to work one day a week from home.
Fink has been an outspoken critic of WFH. During the throes of the coronavirus lockdowns, the Wall Street grandee lamented the difficulty his firm faced retaining Blackrock’s company culture while staff were at home, telling a press conference that “cultures were not meant to be done in a remote fashion”.
He also attributed rising US inflation to the falling productivity that he blamed on the proliferation of WFH policies in corporate America in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 gas price shock.
But Blackrock’s decision only to mandate a five-day week from its managing directors stops short of the blanket WFH bans rolled out by other US finance juggernauts. Most of Wall Street’s largest investment banks – including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan – have re-introduced full-time office attendance policies.
Goldman chief executive David Soloman has previously called WFH an “aberration”. And more recently, Jamie Dimon, the veteran boss of JP Morgan, was heard blasting workers’ capacity to service clients and contribute to meetings from home in a leaked recording of a company town hall.
Blackrock’s refreshed office policy is expected to apply to the investment giant’s managing directors in London but the group may encounter teething issues trying to enforce it.
In a recent interview, Fink said he wanted to bring its 3,000-strong workforce under one roof in London, but the Square Mile’s constricted office market meant the firm was struggling to find a appropriate site that was big enough.
“I am so short of space here in London with all our acquisitions,” he told The Times. “I need an office tomorrow but there is nothing here.”
As part of the same interview, Fink also revealed his New York-headquartered firm was investing billions of pounds into “undervalued” UK assets.
Blackrock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.