Unlimited holidays: how a financial giant’s new approach to retaining its staff

Strategies to keep staff happy vary from season to season. Ideas to attract and retain talent require more ingenuity. The latest, as implemented by financial giant Goldman Sachs, is to offer its executives an unlimited number of vacations to “rest and recharge batteries”

This was announced through an internal communication, the investment bank leaving the remaining staff. As part of this strategy, junior workers will not get an unlimited number of days right now, but yes two extra days a year (beyond its scheduled time), according to the new policy launched in early May.

All employees at Goldman Sachs are required to take three weeks off a year from 2023indicates the memorandum to which Bloomberg had access and was promoted by The Daily Telegraph.

Another point highlighted by internal communication between employees is that they will be forced to rest at least one full week each year.

The new vacation policy came more than a year after a the bank’s junior analyst complained about the 100-hour work week, as a result of physical and mental health deterioration in “inhumane” conditions. Employee statements have revived the debate about overwork on Wall Street and some companies have begun pledging steps to reconcile their workers.

The unlimited vacation policy can have little impact. A 2017 study of HR platform Namely showed that employees in companies with open vacations leave They end up taking fewer vacations each year than the traditional system. The study, conducted in the United States, suggests that workers with the highest vacation enjoy an average of 15 days per year, while there is unlimited rest there are only 13. This review points to the attraction of the best employees as one of the main benefits of this policy.

This move by Goldman Sachs comes at a time when competition has intensified to retain employees and attract new talent. Companies, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, deals with the greater importance that workers place on reconciliation in work and personal life, while reversing the face-to-face policies implemented during the covid-19 pandemic.

The bank has become one of the most aggressive in the financial sector in its desire for workers to be able to return face to face. “This is an aberration that we will correct as soon as possible,” its CEO, David M. Solomon, said last year of teleworking. And I added: “I think, for a business like ours, that is innovative, with a culture of collaborative learning, it’s not perfect. And it’s not going to be the new normal. “

To encourage staff to go to the branch, the bank started providing free breakfast and lunch to employees, but no longer. Last month, the financial giant ended the initiative used in principle to invite staff back to work.

YN