From Goldman’s ‘Team Blue’ to less crowded lifts, banks in Hong Kong are paving the way for a global return to work
- The return to work in Hong Kong could be a template for how banks bring back staff in other financial centres
- Goldman rotates teams between home and office; ICC tower, home to Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, tweaks lift algorithms to limit passenger load
As many of the city’s lenders prepare to bring back up to half of their staff back to the office in the coming weeks, Hong Kong is shaping up to be a test run for how global banks will fully return after months of engaging in the world’s biggest work-from-home experiment.
Bankers, fund managers and others who have spent months working remotely at their kitchen tables or from their sofas are discovering a dramatically changed environment in their office homecomings.
Staff members at Goldman Sachs are sitting at every other desk at its offices in Central and are divided into “Blue” and “White” teams that rotate between the office and home. At Citigroup, plastic dividers have been installed between seats on the bank’s trading desk and other high-density areas, such as retail branches, and a disinfecting robot patrols the lobby at its Kowloon office tower. HSBC turned its three-day China Conference that normally attracts about 1,000 people into a three-week, online-only affair.
Even the lifts have been reprogrammed at the International Commerce Centre (ICC) – home to Morgan Stanley and other global lenders – and office towers across the city to limit the number of passengers and amount of time spent crammed inside.
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Coronavirus in Hong Kong: where are we now?
“Hong Kong may have seen small victories in combating Covid-19 with the recent news on the relaxation of certain social distancing measures by the government,” Angel Ng, Citi’s chief executive for Hong Kong and Macau, said in a May 18 internal memo seen by the South China Morning Post. “However, we are not out of the woods yet so we should continue to stay vigilant and not let our guard down.”
The coronavirus, which causes the disease Covid-19, has infected more than 5.3 million people worldwide and forced shutdowns of offices from New York to London to Singapore.
