HSBC top staff to hot desk at London HQ as bank scraps executive floor
HSBC Holdings Plc has scrapped the executive floor of its
Canary Wharf headquarters in London and turned the private offices of its top
staff into client meeting rooms and collaborative spaces.
Chief Executive Officer Noel Quinn and other senior managers have
been kicked out of their offices on the 42nd-floor and will hot desk on an
open-plan floor two storeys below, Quinn told the Financial Times in an
interview. The offices were empty half of the time because senior staff were
traveling around the world, which was a “waste of real estate,” he said.
Quinn told the newspaper that he won’t be in the office five days
a week, saying “it’s unnecessary” and “the new reality of life.” A
representative for HSBC confirmed
the FT report to Bloomberg News.
The London-based bank, which expects to eventually shrink its
property footprint by 40%, doesn’t plan to renew many of its city-center leases
due in the next three to five years, Quinn said. The lender is also shifting to
a policy of about two employees per desk, excluding branches, he said.
Last year’s abrupt shift to remote working has sparked a debate across
industries about future demand for office space, prompting a number of global
banks and other large firms to rethink how employees operate. Standard
Chartered Plc this month formalized hybrid working for staff across its global
operations after 84% of employees asked to keep the flexible arrangements
pioneered during the coronavirus pandemic.
Still, not all banks are embracing a permanent shift to working
from home. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon said
in February that remote work was “an aberration that we are going to correct as
quickly as possible.”
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