Goldman Sachs HQ’s Office Occupancy At 60-70%
USA – A representative from Goldman Sachs told Fortune that recent in-person attendance at the bank’s headquarters at 200 West Street in New York averaged 60 percent to 70 percent in the recent week, reported the prestigious financial magazine Saturday (12 March, SGT).
The office occupancy rate is close to what the commercial property recorded last fall before the Omicron shutdown. During which, about 8,000 staff of the global bank reported into their headquarters at least one day per week.
The Goldman Sachs representative said this after it was estimated that only half or about 5,000 of Goldman Sachs’s workers in its headquarters showed up during the day the investment banking giant reopened its offices across the country last month.
In early-March, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has been asking employees to return back to working in the city, hosted a town hall meeting for Goldman Sachs’s staff. While the journalists were not allowed in the internal gathering, Adams later told the media that the bank only had just a “couple of thousand employees” working in its headquarters in New York City.
Nonetheless, a growing percentage of staff is expected to return to Goldman Sachs’s workspaces as the COVID-19 pandemic wanes. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has repeatedly insisted that workers should return to the office full-time, and he called work-from-home (WFH) as a temporary aberration.
He thinks in-person interaction is vital to the investment bank’s apprenticeship culture. The firm’s operating model includes recruiting some 3,000 new college graduates per annum who learn from veteran bankers and build networks face-to-face. The experience also fosters teamwork, which is central to the bank’s culture. Solomon believes this won’t be possible if remote working becomes the new norm.
While the impact of remote and hybrid work on company performance and career progression is still not clear, some of Goldman Sachs’s Wall Street competitors, especially Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase and, also want their staff to return to their offices.
On the other hand, others like UBS and Citigroup think the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly altered how people work, and they considered hybrid work as a top perk for luring top talent.
