CEO David Solomon could not have been pleased at the turnout when Goldman Sachs reopened its 44-story headquarters in lower Manhattan on the morning of Feb. 1. The building had been closed for a month as COVID-19’s Omicron variant swept through town. Now, finally, with luck, Goldman employees could resume working together in person, as Solomon emphatically wants them to do, without further shutdowns. Yet as of late morning on that Tuesday, only about 5,000 of Goldman’s 10,000 HQ workers had shown up—despite having had over two weeks’ notice, and in seeming defiance of Solomon’s pointed desire to get everyone back in the office as soon as safely possible.
Is that tepid turnout an anomaly? Or is it a harbinger?
Solomon has risked looking like a Neanderthal as remote work has gone mainstream worldwide. Top-tier tech firms—Salesforce, Twitter, Meta (Facebook’s parent), Spotify—have told thousands of employees they’re liberated to work remotely full-time, anywhere in the world. Some of Goldman’s Wall Street rivals, including Citigroup and UBS, are letting staffers work from home regularly and claim the policy will give the firms a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining excellent employees. Solomon has said the opposite. Remote work “is not ideal for us, and it’s not a new normal,” he famously told a finance industry conference in February 2021. “It’s an aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.”