Happy hours
and “Casual Fridays,” team doughnuts and coffee trips have all fallen by the
wayside in the past year, as one office tradition after another was curtailed
by the reality of remote work.
اضافة اعلان
Lawyers rolled
into court from bed. Executives used one good shirt. Sweatpants ruled the day.
But
Citigroup, one of the world’s largest banks, is trying to start a new
end-of-week tradition: Zoom-free Fridays.
The bank’s
new chief executive, Jane Fraser, announced the plan for “Zoom-free Fridays” in
a memo sent to employees on Monday. Recognizing that workers have spent
inordinate amounts of the past 12 months staring at video calls, Citi is
encouraging its employees to take a step back from Zoom and other videoconferencing
platforms for one day a week, she said.
“The
blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic
workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” Fraser wrote in the memo, which
was seen by The New York Times.
“After
listening to colleagues around the world, it became apparent we need to combat
the ‘Zoom fatigue’ that many of us feel,” she wrote.
The memo
said that no one at the company would have to turn their video on for any
internal meetings on Fridays. External meetings would not be affected: “There
still will be client and regulator meetings that need to happen via Zoom,” it
said.
Citi — the
third-largest bank in America and the 13th-largest globally by assets,
according to S&P Global — also asked its 210,000 workers around the world
to make sure they take their vacation time and designated Friday, May 28, a
companywide holiday for all workers to be off and “reset.”
The bank
outlined other steps to restore some semblance of work-life balance. It
recommended employees stop scheduling calls outside of traditional working
hours, and pledged that when employees can return to offices, a majority of its
workers would be given the option to work from home up to two days a week.
“We are all
feeling the weariness,” wrote Fraser, who took up her role as Citi’s chief
executive this month and is the first woman to lead a major American bank. The
pressure is high for Citi to turn itself around, after a banker’s mistake sent
nearly $1 billion wired to the wrong people and the bank was handed a $400
million fine by federal regulators last year over long-running problems.
But
complaints of “Zoom fatigue” have emerged across industries and classrooms in
the past year, as people confined to working from home faced schedules packed
with virtual meetings, and found that their hours of on-camera work were often
followed up by long video catch-ups with friends.
Dr. Aaron
Balick, a psychotherapist and the author of “The Psychodynamics of Social
Networking,” said a key mistake companies made when setting up work-from-home
conditions last year was to treat Zoom calls as the equivalent of face-to-face
meetings. He said that they failed to consider the additional mental burden
placed on workers and the downtime needed to process what was said between
calls.
“They
require different intellectual muscles,” Balick said in an interview on
Wednesday, adding that Zoom calls needed to be treated as a “functionally
different thing.”
Citi’s
“Zoom-free Fridays” have the right spirit behind them, he said, though he
added, “if you’re doing back-to-back Zooms Monday through Thursday and then
have a day off Friday, that’s still not quite good enough.”
Employees
need more opportunities to block out uninterrupted time to work without the
distractions of calls and meetings, he said. Without the structure and routine
of office life, many people have also fallen into the trap of working longer
hours because they have no external cue telling them when to switch off, he
added.
Research has
found that the stresses of the pandemic and increased workloads have meant some
employees could be working as much as two hours a day more than usual.
For Wall
Street, which even before the pandemic had a notorious reputation for extreme
hours, Citi’s efforts to introduce a more flexible approach to work will
probably not go unnoticed.
Last week, a
survey of 13 first-year Goldman Sachs analysts drew attention on social media,
with the analysts claiming they worked an average of around 100 hours a week
and felt they were victims of workplace abuse.
Goldman
responded in a statement that “a year into COVID, people are understandably
quite stretched.” It said it was “listening to their concerns and taking
multiple steps to address them.”
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