‘We Work With Adults’ | Standard Chartered CEO on WFH, Tariffs & Fed Rates

Standard Chartered Chief Executive Officer Bill Winters tells Bloomberg Television's Lizzy Burden that he still sees no need to hand down orders to force senior bankers to be in the office more, even as rival banks get tougher on their employees.

“We work with adults,” said Winters, speaking in a Bloomberg Television interview on Thursday. “The adults can have an adult conversation with other adults and decide how they’re going to best manage their team.”

Winters has maintained a high degree of flexibility at London-based Standard Chartered even as the likes of HSBC Holdings Plc and his former employer JPMorgan Chase & Co. have cracked down on pandemic-era hybrid working practices.

HSBC this week told managing directors that they would have to work at least four days from the office, Bloomberg previously reported. The lending giant is considering introducing a companywide mandate for all office-based staff to come in at least three days a week, despite a looming desk shortage in some of its buildings.

JPMorgan, Winters’ former employer, has ordered all of its employees to return to the office five days a week.

“Our MDs want to come to the office,” said Winters. “They come to the office because they collaborate, they manage their people, they lead teams. But if they need the flexibility, the can get it from us.”

Since the pandemic, Standard Chartered has avoided a blanket return-to-office mandate by allowing managers and individual employees to agree their own schedules on when and when they will not be in the office.

“It’s not a free for all,” Winters said on a conference call with reporters. “It’s all by agreement between the employee and their leader.”

Winters said office attendance varied across the bank’s worldwide network with some markets seeing more in-person working and others less. The firm — which unveiled a 48% increase in reported profit before tax for the second quarter on Thursday — has had relatively low attrition, which Winters partly attributed to his firm’s flexible work policies.

“There are some markets where there’s effectively peer pressure to come in more often, and there’s other markets where there’s less of that,” he said. “People come into the office because they want to come into the office.”

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