The chief executive of Goldman Sachs praised the group of dissatisfied analysts at junior investment banks who raised concerns about their workload to management last month and pledged to ease the pressure on employees.
“It’s great that this group of analysts has approached your management,” said David Solomon in a voice memo sent to bank employees on Sunday night. “We want a workplace where people can share their concerns freely.”
In response, the CEO said the bank would step up enforcement of the “Saturday rule”, which prohibits junior bankers from working from Friday at 9 pm until Sunday morning, among other measures.
“We are accelerating our efforts to hire new junior bankers from investment banks and transferring bankers internally to lines of business where activity levels are higher,” he said. “We are also being more selective about the business opportunities we seek and we are working to automate certain tasks in our business.”
Solomon emphasized how working from home increased the tension in an already stressful business. “In this world of remote work, it seems that we have to be connected 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All of us – your colleagues, your managers, our division leaders – see this. . . This is not easy and we are working hard to make it better. “
Even with many sectors of the economy closed or limited by the pandemic, capital markets have been highly active in the past 12 months, with debt issues and volumes of initial public offerings at or near historical levels.
Solomon’s comments come in response to the circulation of a set of slides entitled “Research on Working Conditions”, which a small group of junior investment bank analysts presented to Goldman’s management in February. The deck detailed 95 hours of work a week, little sleep, harsh treatment by senior bankers and the negative opinion of employees about the Wall Street company.
The 13 self-selected analysts included in the survey rated their job satisfaction and the company as two out of ten, on average. One wrote: “I have been to an orphanage and this is arguably worse.”
The slide set, which was formatted to look like an official Goldman presentation, received a lot of attention in traditional and social media.
Solomon said he expected Goldman to continue to face high customer demand and emphasized the need to meet the challenge.
“Remember: if we all make an extra effort for our customer, even when we feel like we’re reaching our limit, it can really make a difference in our performance,” he said.