Banks Ease Hours for Junior Staff, but Workload Stays Same

The biggest investment banks recently signaled a sea change in their corporate culture, telling their most junior employees to ease up a bit on their hard-charging work schedules.

Like other practices on Wall Street, however, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

A number of young bankers say that while they can now enjoy a leisurely brunch or a binge of television watching on Saturdays, their overall workload has not changed noticeably. It just gets pushed to a different day.

“If you have 80 hours of work to do in a week, you’re going to have 80 hours of work to do in a week, regardless of whether you’re working Saturdays or not,” said a junior banker at Deutsche Bank, who, like the others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he risked his job by talking to a reporter. “That work is going to be pushed to Sundays or Friday nights.”

“It’s well intentioned,” he added, “but I don’t know if it’s actually practical.”

Young people on Wall Street have long been accustomed to working through weekends and into the wee hours. But in the last six months, many of the major banks have instituted what amounts to a radically new policy: Take a few days off a month, on the weekends.

They are responding in part to fears across the industry that finance is losing its appeal for bright, ambitious college graduates. Silicon Valley beckons, with generous employee perks at companies like Google and Facebook and the promise of wealth and prestige at hot technology start-ups.

At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, traditionally a magnet for aspiring financiers, 25 percent of the undergraduate class of 2013 entered jobs in investment banking, according to school’s career services office. That is big decline from the halcyon days before the financial crisis. Of the class of 2007, 48 percent took jobs in finance.

The changes also were spurred by concerns that rippled through the industry after a 21-year-old intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London died last summer. The cause of death was determined to be epilepsy. Unconfirmed reports on online forums said that he had worked through three consecutive nights as part of his internship.

Still, some junior bankers, known as analysts and associates, are skeptical about the new policies. With Saturday designated a day of rest at some banks, several bankers said that other days, including Sunday, have become more intense.

At Goldman Sachs, which last fall instructed junior bankers to stay out of the office on Saturdays, one analyst said he recently had to work until 4 a.m. on Monday to complete a project on time. He also said he now felt more pressure to get his work done during the week, since he no longer has a full weekend to complete assignments.

The banks’ approaches to their weekend policies vary. In February, Barclays introduced rules that forbid analysts to work more than 12 consecutive days.

One analyst at the firm said recently that he had worked every day from Thanksgiving to the end of February, including Christmas and New Year’s Day.

“I don’t know if my life improved at all,” he said. “There’s not going to be a change in work just because we say one day has to be protected.”

JPMorgan Chase has given its analysts the option of taking a “protected weekend” â€" Saturday and Sunday â€" each month. While several analysts spoke positively about the change, one, who recently left the bank, complained that the weekends had to be scheduled four weeks in advance, requiring the kind of planning that can be incompatible with a young person’s evolving schedule.

To ensure that he could see a preview of “All the Way” on Broadway in February, the former JPMorgan analyst said, he had to submit a request in January. During the show, he was expected to monitor his email and respond to any urgent requests.

Representatives of JPMorgan, Barclays and Goldman declined to comment.

The new programs are still in their early days. At Deutsche Bank, where the policy includes taking some weekend days off, one of the goals was to make weekends more predictable, said a person briefed on the policy who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. The bank also invites analysts to give management feedback, the person said. But not all banks have gone this route. Morgan Stanley, though it has formed a committee to study the issue, has stopped short of establishing a weekend rule, and its chief executive said this year that requiring junior bankers to stay away from the office might not be wise.

“I’m not sure that’s the right answer because I’m not sure how you stop work if there’s a deal on,” the chief executive, James P. Gorman, said on Bloomberg Television in January.

Many in finance say that hard work is to be expected. David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder of the giant private equity firm Carlyle, said in a recent podcast that what he looked for in an employee was “somebody who recognizes that things that are great generally aren’t accomplished 9-to-5, five days a week.”

The banks do appear to be keeping a close eye on whether the new rules are being followed. Credit Suisse, for example, keeps track of any exceptions granted to analysts who come to the office on Saturday, making sure that no one group is working its analysts too hard.

A second analyst at Goldman said that he and others in his team were considering coming to the office this past Saturday to work on an important project, but that their managing director turned down their request, telling them to wait until Sunday.

It does not always work out that way.

“If there’s a huge opportunity for the group, like to build a new relationship with the company, then they won’t have enough sway to push back on the client,” the Goldman analyst said. “But in this situation, I think the M.D. felt that he had a little more power to kind of push back and tell the client, ‘Hey, it’s going to take us more time.’ ”