Wall Street Grudgingly Allows Remote Work as Bankers Dig In
The New York Times
Finance employees who couldn’t imagine working from home before the pandemic are now reluctant to return to the office. Their bosses can’t figure out how to bring them back.
In her two decades on Wall Street, Nadia Batchelor never once thought she could do her job from home. Face-to-face meetings were a must for Ms. Batchelor, a senior executive at Jefferies, a New York investment bank. Without being in the same room as her clients and colleagues, she assumed, there was no way she could win their trust and do her job of introducing companies to potential investors.
She often woke up at 4:30 a.m. to drive from her home in New Jersey, catch a bus into Manhattan, hop on the subway, squeeze in a workout and get to Jefferies’ trading floor by 7:30 a.m. Work dinners ran late into the night, and redeye flights to London were common.
But after the pandemic forced Ms. Batchelor, a 42-year-old mother of three, to work from home and realize that she could manage just fine, a full return to her grueling schedule is out.
