- Wall Street firms have a diverse spectrum of views on how to get workers back to the office.
- Boutique bank PJ Solomon is adopting a hybrid model that includes big changes.
- The bank is renovating its office space and giving senior bankers a high degree of flexibility.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
As Wall Street looks to return to the office, some firms have long-term plans to maintain footing both remotely and in person.
That’s the goal at one of the industry’s oldest boutique investment banks, which is also adopting a new approach to work for a post-pandemic world.
PJ Solomon has plans to reconstruct parts of its New York City headquarters and introduce a hybrid work model enabling some teams to permanently split their time between home and the office.
In doing so, the bank is hoping to offer senior dealmakers some flexibility while still ensuring junior bankers get valuable face-to-face time.
“I’ve got a partner who’s living in Greenwich, and he loves Greenwich. He didn’t love commuting an hour and a half each way — but he loves Greenwich,” Marc Cooper, the chief executive of PJ Solomon told Insider in an interview. “But, you know, that’s the vagaries of doing the job.”
He added: “How do you think he feels when he really thinks about it, if he commutes that hour and a half, and he goes into his office, and he makes phone calls?”
Across Wall Street, the question of how bankers plan to make their way back to their desks has been a source of growing consternation.
Many junior bankers, beaten down by a year of crushing deal volumes and social isolation, have expressed an eagerness to get back to work. Top bosses like Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon share their view.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, some senior dealmakers in non-C-suite roles have come to recognize how doing business virtually can make their lives easier by reducing travel time, cutting down on the exhaustive rites of banking like an initial-public-offering road show, and enabling more client meetings to happen in a given day.
In addition to cycling some of its roughly 140 employees in and out of its offices through its new hybrid model, PJ Solomon is in the process of implementing other substantive changes.
For instance, the company is physically remaking parts of its headquarters on the 31st floor of a Manhattan skyscraper at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. Some employees began to head back to the office in the springtime, but the firm said it may be able to start moving a larger number of people back by midsummer as construction concludes.
“We’re spending money retrofitting our space for this new environment — knocking down offices, separating offices, creating more collaboration space, creating more cubicle space for young people,” Cooper said.
“This is not under the heading of pandemic restrictions or social-distancing needs going into the future or health issues,” he added. “This goes under the heading of an opportunity — an opportunity to do things better, to do things differently, to do things that would be productive for our bankers.”
PJ Solomon gave us an inside look at its back-to-office reboot
Pre-pandemic, PJ Solomon was on track to hire enough people that the bank would soon have needed to take another half-floor of space, or an additional 20,000 square feet of real estate, to accommodate its growing workforce, Cooper said.
Now those plans are moot because of the ability of a hybrid model to cycle people in and out such that multiple bankers can share the same space over the course of a given week.
“Can you spell ‘enormous’?” Cooper said when asked about the model’s cost-saving potential.
“I would say, over the next bunch of years, it could save us $10 million a year,” Cooper added. “Rent in New York, last I checked, isn’t cheap. You just don’t need that kind of real estate anymore.”
Meanwhile, the firm has also recently been making changes to its technology infrastructure, Simon Upton, a veteran of Credit Suisse who joined PJ Solomon as its chief operating officer at the start of this year, told Insider in January.
Among some of the adaptations has been outfitting conference rooms with Zoom capabilities to enable people both on- and off-site to converse.
During the course of the pandemic, PJ Solomon also invested in the services of multiple consultants — including experts in technology, real estate, and architecture — to help lay the groundwork for these new plans.
“Now, with the mobile technology that we’ve rolled out, the cloud-based systems we’ve rolled out,” Cooper said, “you can be as productive working in the office as you can be working at home.”
A high degree of support for junior bankers
Junior bankers — namely, analysts and associates — will still be expected to spend five days a week at the office.
“If there’s one shortfall for fully remote working, it is that it’s been probably more strenuous for the young people than it has been for the senior people because of this one single issue,” Cooper said.
“They have a very steep learning curve,” he added, saying bringing juniors back to the office, where they can learn and ask questions, is key.
“They’re just out of school. They really haven’t been taught a trade yet,” he said. “This is a trade.”
From the time junior bankers start at PJ Solomon, they’ll be placed into “class cohorts” and stick together through a series of three development events: a meeting with a 20-year-plus veteran managing director at the firm, a wine tasting with Cooper, and a presentation by Kenneth Baronoff, the company president who joined PJ Solomon in 1999.
At the office, vice presidents will be at the vanguard of training juniors hand in hand. The firm regards their function as being the “connective tissue” between juniors who are in the office and the seniors who will have more flexibility.
What’s more, the leaders of each of the seven sector groups of that firm will appoint a designated person on their team to assist the group head and senior leadership in conducting regular check-ins with all of the group’s analysts and juniors.
For instance, that person might be the group’s “staffer,” the person embedded into each team who conventionally helps assign work to juniors.
Senior bankers have more flexibility to come in and out
The rotational model will kick in at the vice-presidential level and above.
First-year vice presidents will be able to take one day a week to work remotely, second-years will be able to take two days, and third-years can take three days to work elsewhere.
Directors and managing directors will have the greatest degree of flexibility, being asked by the firm to spend a minimum of one to two days a week at the office and able to take up to four days a week to work externally.
But seniors will be expected to interact heavily with their junior bankers.
Cooper himself, as CEO, will host small group lunches with analysts and associates. He and his senior colleagues plan to run mentorship circles with juniors, as well as a firmwide summer event specifically for summer analysts and interns.
Plus, he’ll meet weekly with the entire firm to provide company updates or discuss market activity and have a separate standing Monday morning appointment with managing directors.
Managing directors and directors will also meet with Cooper at special off-site gatherings, and managing directors will plan to add one more layer of face time away from the office by hosting entertainment outings with their groups.
As PJ Solomon makes these sweeping changes to the way the firm runs its operations, Cooper is clear-eyed about some of the challenges.
“As a CEO and as a manager, it’s far easier for me to manage if everyone’s in front of me,” he said. “The easy way out is, ‘Come back to the office.’ For me, that is.”
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