Flex Report: Financial Services (2024)

About the Financial Services Deep Dive

It’s been four years since the COVID-19 pandemic began and upended work as we know it, yet we still see a pronounced push and pull between workers and employers regarding flexible work. Perhaps no industry has made as much noise about closing the book on remote work as Financial Services.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been a famously outspoken critic of remote work for years, but other top firms had resisted racing headfirst toward strict return-to-office mandates until recently.

Last fall, Bank of America began sending “letters of education” to workers who hadn’t met the company’s attendance expectations, threatening them with disciplinary action if they didn’t comply within two weeks. Deutsche Bank also made headlines with its plan to reverse course from its wildly popular pandemic-era flexible work policy to force workers into the office more frequently, which was met with fierce internal criticism and pushback from the workers’ union.

So what’s happening in Financial Services? Is there a steady drumbeat back toward full time in office work, or are the firms less prominently in the headlines maintaining hybrid work arrangements?

In this report we explore trends in Financial Services as a whole, as well as dive into particular segments of interest like Banks. We analyze 777 companies that collectively employ more than nine million people to understand the trends over the last year and compare sector-by-sector differences. Read on for a full deep dive!