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Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) has become the latest Wall Street employer to mandate greater office attendance from employees.
Starting from September, employees at the bank will be expected to spend four days a week working on-site, up from the current expectation of three days.
BNY execs said the firm remains “committed to maintaining personal flexibility,” but claimed the move would encourage greater learning and collaboration.
BNY increases in-office requirements for employees
The new mandate for BNY staff was confirmed in a memo sent by the bank’s executive committee, as first reported by Reuters.
“We believe that it is important that all of us spend more time together working, leading, and learning from each other,” the leadership team wrote in the notice.
The executives suggested that in-person work would allow for greater speed, efficiency, and customer service.
“In person we can respond more quickly to dynamic, fast-paced financial markets and better serve our clients," the note said. “Most managers are already in the office 4 days a week, and we have seen the positive momentum this creates.”
While the majority of managers are already working in line with the updated mandate, most BNY staff have only been expected to attend the office three days per week since early, a policy introduced in early 2023.
The move comes amid a wave of employers in the financial services sector clamping down on remote work, requiring staff to spend more time in the office.
Wall Street rallies against remote – but BNY ‘committed’ to flexibility
At JPMorgan Chase, perhaps the widely-known case of a Wall Street giant ordering staff back to the office five days a week, CEO Jamie Dimon went one step further than BNY, stating that remote work “doesn’t work in our business.”
Like BNY’s executives, the controversial banking boss said that more time together is key for communication and collaboration. But unlike Dimon, BNY’s leadership team did note that “occasional remote work can be effective.”
Dimon’s attack on remote work has been met with opposition from some employees, who argue that ending hybrid work is a “great leap backward,” and negatively impacts workers who require work-life flexibility to take care of childcare, family, and caring responsibilities.
BNY executives insisted that the bank remains “committed to maintaining personal flexibility and will continue to support remote work one day a week.”
The memo confirmed that BNY has no current plans for a full-time return-to-office mandate.
However, that pledge did include a fairly substantial caveat: “We have no plans to return to 5 days in office unless circumstances were to demand otherwise.”
Beyond Wall Street, many other major organizations have also moved to call staff back to the office full time.
At the beginning of 2025, a five-day return-to-office mandate came into effect at Amazon, while Google recently moved to end remote work for certain teams, including HR operations and technical services.
Just as with BNY’s memo, a spokesperson for Google said the change was designed to promote more in-person collaboration.
“As we’ve said before, in-person collaboration is an important part of how we innovate and solve complex problems,” they explained. “To support this, some teams have asked remote employees that live near an office to return to in-person work three days a week.”
