Bank of America is rolling out new tools to more closely monitor the hours worked by junior investment bankers, part of a larger trend by banks to limit the hours of younger employees in the months following the sudden death of a junior associate.
Bank of America's new monitoring tools, due to take effect next week, will require junior investment bankers based in the U.S. to log their hours worked daily, rather than weekly, into the company's timekeeping software. of The Wall Street Journal ReportedThey also enter information about the transactions they are responsible for, the senior bankers they supervise, and their ability to take on more work, using a scale of one to four.
“Earlier this year, we successfully piloted this improved technology platform to enable our teams to more efficiently serve our investment banking clients,” a Bank of America spokesperson told the outlet.
The bank did not respond luckRequest for comments.
This change is The Wall Street Journal investigation Bank of America employees were found to often turn a blind eye to the bank's policies for maintaining work-life balance. According to the media, many junior investment bankers at Bank of America were routinely instructed by their superiors to lie about the hours they worked to avoid work-hour restrictions. After the investigation, Bank of America began encouraging junior employees to accurately report their hours and to blow the whistle on superiors who instructed them to fail to do so. Now, junior bankers in the industry typically work around 100 hours a week and have Saturdays off.
JPMorgan has similar restrictions. Limit working hours Junior bankers are allowed to work up to 80 hours a week, the bank confirmed. luckThe work-hour limits are a first for the bank: JPMorgan already has “pencil-down” periods from 6 p.m. Friday to noon Saturday and has taken steps to ensure employees have at least one full weekend off each quarter.
Lasting change
Investment banking is initially attractive to young people, but Mint MillionaireBank of America is also known for overworking its junior bankers with a culture that leads to burnout. The set of restrictions on work hours came after the sudden death in May of Leo Lukenas III, a former Army Special Forces soldier and investment banker who had been at the bank for just a year and worked more than 100 hours a week on $2 billion in deals.
Douglas Walters, managing partner at Grey Fox Recruitment, said Mr Lukenas told him in mid-March he was leaving the bank because of irregular hours. said ReutersMr. Loukenas worked at Bank of America for just a year, and the company's tools to limit work hours were in development before his death.
But the loss was Wall Street's Working conditionsSuch systems have long been notoriously difficult to reform in the long term, given that banks have had little success in cracking down on a culture that encourages employees to overwork themselves. Work restrictions were implemented The incident comes more than 10 years after a 21-year-old trainee with epilepsy died from a seizure after 72 hours on the job in 2013.
The bank, then Bank of America Merrill Lynch, encouraged employees to take at least four weekends off per month. Goldman Sachs similarly reformed after Bank of America's intern death, cutting intern hours in 2015. 1 day, 17 hoursIt suggests they go home by midnight and don't return to work until 7 a.m. the next day. Goldman Sachs' then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein said at the time that interns should have lives outside of work.
“You have to be an interesting person, someone who has interests outside of the narrow scope of what you do,” Blankfein says. “You have to be someone that people want to talk to.”
