Bank of America is rolling out a new tool to more closely monitor the working hours of its junior investment bankers. This is part of a larger pattern: banks limit the working hours of young employees a few months after the sudden death of a junior employee.
BofA’s new monitoring tool, reportedly set to take effect next week, will require junior investment bankers in the U.S. to log their work hours daily, rather than weekly, in the company’s time-tracking software. Wall Street Journal They also provide information about the deals they work on, the senior bankers they supervise, and how capable they are of taking on more work (on a scale of 1 to 4).
“We successfully tested this enhanced technology platform earlier this year to help our team serve our investment banking clients more efficiently,” a BofA spokesperson told the outlet.
The bank did not respond to AssetsPlease leave a comment.
The changes were made after a WSJ An investigation found that BofA employees often ignore bank policies designed to ensure a healthy work-life balance. According to the source, many junior investment bankers at BofA were regularly told by their bosses to lie about their work hours in order to get around work-hour restrictions. After the investigation, BofA began encouraging its junior employees to accurately report their work hours and to blow the whistle on managers who told them otherwise. Today, junior bankers in the industry are typically expected to work about 100 hours a week and have Saturdays off.
JP Morgan has introduced similar restrictions, limiting the number of hours junior bankers can work to 80 hours per week, the bank confirmed to AssetsThe working hour restriction is the first for the bank. JP Morgan has already introduced a “pens away” period from 6pm Friday to noon Saturday and has taken steps to ensure staff have at least one full weekend off each quarter.
Permanent change
While investment banking may initially be attractive to some young people and promise them millionaires, it also has a reputation for wearing down young bankers and creating a culture of burnout. The spate of work-hour restrictions came in the wake of the death of Leo Lukenas III, a former Army Special Forces soldier turned investment banker who died suddenly of a blood clot in May. He had been at BofA for just a year, working over 100 hours a week on a $2 billion deal.
Lukenas said in mid-March he wanted to leave the bank because of the dangerous work hours, said Douglas Walters, a managing partner at GrayFox Recruitment. Reuters. He worked at BofA for only one year. BofA’s time-limiting tools were already in development before Lukenas’ death.
Still, the loss sparked a broader discussion about working conditions on Wall Street, which have long been considered harsh – and which will be difficult to reform in the long term, as banks have had little success in tackling a corporate culture that encourages its employees to overwork. BofA introduced work-hour restrictions over a decade ago, following the 2013 death of a 21-year-old epileptic intern who died of epileptic seizures after 72 hours on the job.
The then Bank of America Merrill Lynch recommended that its employees take at least four weekends off a month. Goldman Sachs made similar reforms after the BofA intern’s death, limiting its interns’ working hours to 17 hours a day in 2015. They were supposed to be home by midnight and not return to work until 7 a.m. the next day. Goldman Sachs’ then CEO Lloyd Blankfein said at the time that interns should have a life outside of work.
“You have to be interesting and have interests that go beyond what you actually do,” said Blankfein. “You have to be someone that other people like to talk to.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
