Faced with intense competition from private equity firms and tech giants such as Google for the best graduate talent, Goldman Sachs wants to ensure that its junior bankers take weekends off during the gruelling early stages of their careers. In addition to softening its image, Goldman Sachs is hoping to make itself more attractive to the world’s brightest workers, who may otherwise be put off by horror stories of long hours working at a major financial institution.
Wall Street and the City of London have long been alluring places for twentysomethings to start their careers, with the promise of attractive salaries and bonuses – but they come at a price. For many young bankers, days involve long, hard hours and it is not unknown for new staffers to regularly work between 55 and 70 hours in any given week. According to Bloomberg News, the world’s most famous investment bank has made a concerted effort to improve the work-life balance of its younger employees.
Most notably, Goldman Sachs has decided to stop offering two-year contracts to investment-banking analysts, choosing instead to make them full-time employees with more opportunities to receive feedback from managers.
Burnout in the financial sector became a touchstone media subject over the summer. On 15 August, 21-year-old finance student Moritz Erhardt – who was working as an intern at Bank of America in London – died after working without sleep breaks across three consecutive nights. Although the cause of death has yet to be confirmed, Erhadt’s father blames the bank’s prolonged working hours for placing intense pressure on the intern. Following the tragedy, Bank of America said that it will look into its working practices.
The bank may do well to follow the example of Germany’s labour ministry, which banned managers from calling or emailing staff out of hours except in emergencies. In other words, no German workers can be penalised for failing to pick up messages after working hours, in the interests of preventing “self-exploitation”. Large, blue-chip companies such as Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom have announced that they fully endorse the measure.
Germany’s step also chimes with online media mogul Arianna Huffington’s contention that having consistently good sleep is essential for workers who are looking to become industry leaders. Huffington said that after enduring years of sleep deprivation, changing her sleep pattern from four hours a night to seven or eight led to “my best years … I have never been more creative, more productive, less reactive”.