Long-term productivity may suffer with remote work: Citi CEO

Bloomberg

Citigroup Inc’s Michael Corbat said he’s worried about potential long-term negative effects after many of his employees spent the vast majority of 2020 working from home.
“People talk about the productivity that comes with working remotely,” Corbat said in
a televised interview for a Bloomberg Invest Talks event. “Well, if I worked seven days a week, 15 to 16 hours a day and I don’t take any holidays, at least for a period of time I’m going to be more productive.”
While more remote work will probably mean Citigroup can shrink its real estate footprint, Corbat said he’s hesitant to declare a widespread shift towards the practice. The CEO said in May that, unlike some of his competitors, he wasn’t considering the option of letting workers stay at home permanently after the pandemic ends.
The New York-based bank, which has about 200,000 employees worldwide, wants to see how productivity changes over longer stretches of time and whether creativity suffers before deciding how much working from home to allow, Corbat said.
Citigroup and many of its competitors have kept the vast majority of staff home for much of the year to help stem the spread of Covid-19. Now, as governments around the world rush to procure vaccines and promising new therapies for the virus, many companies are developing plans for eventually bringing workers back.
“I don’t want to wake up as an industry and have hollowed out our skill sets,” Corbat said. “We’ll absolutely continue to accelerate the move toward digital and, where appropriate, more remote. But I certainly wouldn’t want to see us move too quickly.”
In the meantime, as parts of the US and Europe battle a resurgence in cases, the company hasn’t been reluctant to keep workers home or send them back if they’ve ventured into the office, he said.
“We absolutely like to have our people in when we can have them in, but we’re not going to put them at risk,” Corbat said. “We’ve got to stay flexible and obviously we’re going through a bit of resurgence in parts of the world right now. We’ve been in the phase of tapering back.”
In the wide-ranging interview with Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein, Corbat also addressed the infamous four-day stretch in 2008 when Wells Fargo & Co scooped up Wachovia Corp out of Citigroup’s grasp. Citigroup and Wachovia had signed an agreement on September 29 to merge, but that was trumped by Wells Fargo, which officially announced its purchase of the bank on October 3. Corbat, noting he wasn’t involved in those negotiations, said he still thinks the acquisition would have been helpful to Citigroup today.
“In banking, and in particular in consumer banking, scale matters,” he said.