Many companies are having employees return to office as the pandemic wanes and corporate culture, for better or for worse, starts to assimilate back into pre-COVID culture.
Shutterstock
While some employees are still fully remote, others have adopted a hybrid mode where they’re only expected in-office a few days a week, while many businesses have imposed testing and vaccine requirements for employees that are to appear in person.
Either way, it’s safe to say that most major companies will probably never get back to the way things were before the pandemic with 100% certainty.
Goldman Sachs is looking to change that.
According to an internal memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the company is planning to axe all vaccine and testing requirements and mandate all employees back in office five days a week.
Effective on September 6 (the first day back in office after the Labor Day weekend), Goldman employees will be permitted to enter offices without masks, a negative COVID test or any vaccination.
“With many tools including vaccination, improved treatments and testing now available, there is significantly less risk of severe illness,” the memo reportedly read. “In line with updated protocols, if you have not been coming in to the office, please speak with your manager to ensure that you understand and adhere to your division’s current return to office expectations.”
The company, which provides test kits to employees and performs tests on premises, also stated that such a process would soon be coming to an end.
“With antigen test kits widely available in the community, we will begin ramping down the provision of test kits on our campuses, with the current expectation of ending the program by year end,” Goldman’s memo read.
The swift and harsh decision makes Goldman Sachs the first big bank to make such a requirement.
The bank was under criticism earlier this year when it began tracking employees via employee ID swipes in and out of its office buildings to ensure that employees were following the RTO rules set forth by their managers and teams.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon previously voiced his concerns for remote work back in early 2021, calling remote work “an aberration” that the firm was planning to “correct as quickly as possible.”
“More is going to be done digitally,” Solomon told Credit Suisse analyst Susan Katzke. “But at the end of the day, I’m a big believer in personal connectivity in a business like ours. I don’t think, as we get out of the pandemic, the overall operating mode, the way a business like ours operates, will be vastly different.”
Goldman Sachs was down just shy of 20% in a one-year period as of Wednesday afternoon.
