Why senior bankers dislike remote working: “The menace is gone”

Nearly six years on from the pandemic, remote working has been consigned to a memory for many investment bankers. A new study* from Cecilia Jane Pritchard Jones, a Masters student at the University of Durham, explains why.

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Earlier this year, Pritchard Jones spoke to 15 “M&A practitioners” in London, including senior bankers and lawyers. Her findings, published in November, help explain why remote working didn’t endure in M&A.

Fundamentally, there was the weight of tradition. Senior bankers have spent their careers commuting to the office. “So pre-COVID, [I was] London based,” one senior London banker informed Pritchard Jones. “In the office five days a week, frankly in the office seven days a week for many chunks of my career – if not six or seven.” 

Working from home was an aberration for bankers schooled in office jobs. Senior bankers didn’t know how to manage the young bankers they couldn’t see in-person, and the young bankers in turn were less able to impose limits on senior bankers’ demands. “There were stories of internal colleagues who set up calls at 10pm on a Friday night because they knew people would be around. It’s just not right…..,” another senior banker told Pritchard Jones. 

Working from home made life challenging for bankers with managerial responsibilities. One mid-ranking banker told Pritchard Jones that managing a 15-person junior team was very difficult during the work from home era because you never knew where anyone was. “I was able to identify one individual who we fired who was working remotely in a different country and would disappear for hours in the middle of the day,” he reflected. Another senior banker told Pritchard Jones that his junior bankers became “detached” during COVID. Many of them left as a result: the turnover of analysts and associates was “tremendous” during the period; 70-80% of that population disappeared.

The bankers told Pritchard Jones that doing deals in a disembodied way was hard. Everything was more transactional. You couldn’t tell what clients were really like. "I’ve not recognised someone who I have been looking at on screen for a while because they are a lot shorter than I anticipated they would be,” confessed one banker.

Most damningly, though, the senior bankers Pritchard Jones spoke to reflected upon how difficult it was to have an edge when they were pitching remotely for business in a competitive industry. There can easily be six or seven banks chasing a deal, and clients will give them each a one-hour slot, said a mid-ranking banker. When bankers pitch in person, they’ve been known to dress in yoga pants or take ice baths. You can't do that on screen.

” A lot of it is theatrical, and you lose a lot of that theatre – in terms of you know coming in and out of the room or the kind of atmosphere you create in a room,” said one senior banker of the pitching process. Deals are about emotion and bankers are masters of emotional manipulation, he added. “You just don’t get that on Zoom, so that kind of menace in the negotiations, the threat or whatever you are trying to get across, that doesn’t have the same impact.”

None of this may make much difference to the junior bankers who spend most of their time building models and PowerPoint presentations, but it explains why senior bankers told Pritchard Jones they’re back on the road meeting clients in person again.

Some of the senior people Pritchard Jones spoke to did, however, acknowledge some advantages of the remote working era. It was more efficient, said one senior banker: "You didn’t worry about all the BS." 

Others suggested that junior bankers benefitted from more client exposure during the remote era. "Rewind pre-COVID, if that was an in-person meeting would I have dragged someone off their desk for a half hour commute there and back – probably not as that would have been two hours of their time but now, they can say something for 20 minutes or 10 minutes and then get back to work,” said one. This can still occur when bankers attend meetings remotely from the office.

*M&A from Home: London's Mergers and Acquisitions Sector During the Covid-19 Pandemic

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