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United Kingdom IT

Bank Employees Resign After Executive Demands Return to Offices Without Space for Everyone (theguardian.com) 141

Posted by EditorDavid from the office-spaces dept.
Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from the Guardian: Staff have resigned at Starling Bank after its new chief executive demanded thousands of workers attend its offices more frequently, despite lacking enough space to host them.

In his first major policy change since taking over from the UK digital bank's founder, Anne Boden, in March, Raman Bhatia has ordered all hybrid staff — many of whom were in the office only one or two days a week, or on an ad-hoc basis — to travel to work for a minimum of 10 days each month. But the bank, which operates online only, admitted that some of its offices would not be equipped to handle the influx... "We are considering ways in which we can create more space," an email sent by Starling's human resources team and seen by the Guardian said.

Starling has 3,231 staff, the vast majority of whom are in the UK with some also in Dublin. However, the Guardian understands that the bank has only about 900 desks, including 260 at its Cardiff site, 320 in its London headquarters and 155 in Southampton. The bank has a further 160 desks in its newest site in Manchester, where it has signed a 10-year lease to occupy the fifth floor of the Landmark building, which also houses Santander UK and HSBC staff... Some staff have already resigned over the "rushed" announcement, while others have threatened to do so...

The return to office announcement came a month after the Financial Conduct Authority hit Starling with a £29m fine after discovering "shockingly lax" controls that it said left the financial system "wide open to criminals". That included failures in its automated screening system for individuals facing government sanctions.
Starling Bank issued this statement to explain its reasoning. "By bringing colleagues together in person, our aim is to achieve greater collaboration that will benefit our customers as we enter Starling's next phase of growth."

The article also notes that the U.K. supermarket chain Asda "has also toughened its stance, making it compulsory for thousands of workers at its offices in Leeds and Leicester to spend at least three days a week at their desks from the new year."
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Bank Employees Resign After Executive Demands Return to Offices Without Space for Everyone More

Bank Employees Resign After Executive Demands Return to Offices Without Space for Everyone

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  • Yay misery! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @04:43AM (#64967943)
    Let's make people miserable, misery and profits are causally linked!
    • Just turn the tables. Show up. Refuse to work while standing. Repeat.

      • Show up. Refuse to work while standing.

        That won't work for me.

        I use a standing desk.

        • I too have an automatic standing desk. I always use it in the lowest position, while sitting on a chair. But it's really handy to raise it up about once a year if I have to change a cable under the desk:)
        • sit in protest!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by munehiro ( 63206 )

        That's what I did. I worked for a major pharmaceutical company. If I could not find a desk, I would just go home.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by clovis ( 4684 )

        Just turn the tables. Show up. Refuse to work while standing. Repeat.

        They'll just take out desks and put in picnic tables for six workers to share. Arrive early so you don't get the middle position.

        • Just persist. Easy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Just turn the tables. Show up. Refuse to work while standing. Repeat.

        Yeah, don't just go home. Stay around, and if you're standing, close your laptop, and bounce around people who have a desk. Interact with them, even if they're busy. Make sure that you're constantly bumping into desks, knocking stuff over and other things.

        And if they're laptops, shut their lids. if someone stands up, get to their desk, sit down, and shove their stuff to the side.

        Basically everyone without a desk shoudl float around looking

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

      it's classism, the entitled upper class needs to squeeze as much revenue as they can from the lower classes

      this is the real meaning of the word 'productivity'

    • Would you push a button for a million dollars knowing that it would kill a random person.

      Somebody over on Bluesky made the point that CEOs do that every day that's their job.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rta ( 559125 )

        only a few years ago I was introduced to "The ones who walk away from Omelas", a short story by Le Guon published on 1973, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] .
        It was an uncomfortable listen, and I still don't entirely "agree"... but the gist of it is that we all (who are on /. ) push that button too, not just the CEOs.

      • Losing a job isn't the same as being killed - it just isn't.

        Are you really quoting a random bluesky poster as a source of intelligent insight? Seriously?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rta ( 559125 )

          Certainly, but also I'm sure the deaths attributable to loss of jobs are non-zero. (probably due to depression, heart attack, and alcohol issues) (ask perplexity.ai about it... it'll quote studies )
          e.g. short term:

          Job loss is associated with a 73% increase in the probability of death, equivalent to adding 10 years to a person's age

          https://drexel.edu/news/archiv... [drexel.edu]

          e.g. long term:

          Even 20 years after displacement, there is a 10%-15% increase in annual death hazards for displaced workers4.

          (from ~2006 looking back to people laid off in the 70s and 80s http://www.econ.ucla.edu/tvwac... [ucla.edu] )

          Thus it's probably more true than not that CEOs of large companies have caused deaths by layoff, though the 1 death per $1M seems pretty high to me

          • I'll agree with that stat. I attempted suicide a couple months after being fired from my 1st job out of college (lasted 9 months). Lost the job right before my school's career fair so I went back, got a bunch of interviews, but didn't have a good reason why I wasn't working anymore. Not getting any offers after a bunch of interviews was crushing. I couldn't tell anyone I would do a better job than my first attempt. I lost the job due to an undiagnosed sleeping disorder unknown to me at the time. With

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rta ( 559125 )

              Glad you've made it this far! Hope you find something that works for you in the 24-7 distributed async world.

              (There was a guy at a prev job who had something like that. This was pre-covid at a remote hostile company (gaming industry) ... didn't know him really, but he was in the office at odd hours. he drove an old BMW iirc.)

        • In the US it very much can be even ignoring the stress components another commenter mentioned since we tie our health coverage to employment. Layoffs do literally kill people.

  • Another moron CEO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 1s44c ( 552956 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @04:56AM (#64967949)

    He was probably trying to get people to quit. Either that or he is too dumb to realize a thousand people can't sit in a hundred desks.

    Once these moron CEOs take over the company will never do anything except soak it's customers for more profits.

    • With four times the staff to the desks I imagine a lot are on remote contracts, a form of mandatory relocation fee will apply.

      Otherwise just another quiet firing round. Asking people to freely double their hours with expensive commutes isn't going down well.

      • With four times the staff to the desks I imagine a lot are on remote contracts, a form of mandatory relocation fee will apply.

        Otherwise just another quiet firing round.

        Oh yeah. We few million observers can reeeally tell how “quiet” that firing round is. We can hear the screaming, from across the pond.

        With four times the staff to the desks, I can only imagine how many morons he thought were going to actually believe his excuses. If someone is running a business and needs to fire people, then fire people.

        These Idiot Games, need to end. We keep this up, and we’ll be walking into a fucking game show studio every Friday to play for our next paycheck, all

        • The only people who will be left in Starling bank will be absolutely desperate and incompetent. There must be plenty of top people leaving now, but I certainly wouldn't be hiring from there next year. There can't be any that are staying for loyalty and those with shares or options will be wanting to cash in what they before the crash. This is the kind of thing which really kills a company irrecoverably.

          • Re:Another moron CEO (Score:4, Interesting)

            by eneville ( 745111 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @06:43AM (#64968065) Homepage

            The only people who will be left in Starling bank will be absolutely desperate and incompetent. There must be plenty of top people leaving now, but I certainly wouldn't be hiring from there next year. There can't be any that are staying for loyalty and those with shares or options will be wanting to cash in what they before the crash. This is the kind of thing which really kills a company irrecoverably.

            I agree with most of what you say, but there's some bits I can't agree on.

            Some people will be there out of pure convenience. For example, some people balance work and personal responsibilities, some have to WFH so they can care for family members (school run, elderly family member living with them etc).

            Some might also foresee the eventual demise and are waiting for redundancy options.

            I wouldn't disregard people just because they're there out of convenience, you should absolutely not turn down an applicant juts because of where they worked and you absolutely should consider all applicants with a fresh pair of eyes and do your job as a hiring manager and not just rely on their work history. Yes starling bank is failing and people will leave at different times for different reasons. Some even feel a duty of care for the projects they're working on as they feel personally invested. These are the people you should be looking to recruit.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rta ( 559125 )

              Heh, sounds like you've been burned by this before.

              But yeah, you never know from the outside who was on which side of specific issues, who was making it better, who was making it worse... etc.

              When we bring this concept to the world of political or armed conflict the western world especially has serious problems w/ this:
              e.g. let's say the enemy army did some atrocities. (or the opposing party proposed legislation that you find loathsome)
              Is the enemy soldier /politician who argued against the atrocities /

        • Layoffs look bad for management. Shows they hired more people than their revenue could support or more people than they actually needed. If they simply don't replace the people they drove out with their toxic workplace then they can just kinda quietly weasel their way out of it... Or so they think. Might get them a few years even.

      • I imagine a lot are on remote contracts, a form of mandatory relocation fee will apply.

        According to TFS, they are hybrid workers who already commute to the office one or two days per week.

        • Yeah, that's probably what the contract says, so this is a material change. Unless I'm mistaken, the employee will need to sign a new contract agreeing the change. You'd have to move to be closer to the office or you'd be extending your work week 4-6 hours likely. That's not manageable.

          By fee, I mean a reasonable employer would not make a contract change like this without expecting people to walk away. They're hedging their bets that the deficit can be filled in reasonable time.

      • My commute hours come out of company time. Now that we know remote work is successful, requiring the alternative is something they need to pay for.

    • The (former) Moscow Hotel is asymmetric, the left and right sides being built with different architectural styles because the design included both options and it was intended for Stalin to approve one of them. Stalin put his signature on the design without further comment and nobody dared to ask which half was meant, so it was just built as approved.

      The CEO of this bank isn't called Dzhugashvili is he?

    • Re:Another moron CEO (Score:5, Interesting)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @08:40AM (#64968203) Journal

      While sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, don't rule out incompetence.

      This literally happened at my former employer. CEO demanded RTO. they still had "town hall" meetings people brought up the lack of spacev repeatedly. Waves of bullshit came back in return. Well RTO day happened and there were photos circulated of people sitting on the floor, which is likely illegal from an health n safety point of view. The policy was walked back, and a scapegoat was found to eat a healthy dinner of lightly poached crow

      But the "leadership team" as they styled themselves actually thought they could bullshit their way around arithmetic.

    • Pretty obvious tactic. Company needs to reduce head count because of poor management. Management is either too cheap or too chicken shit to do layoffs. So they just make it harder for everyone under the theory that the people that will work hard and really stick it out will stay.

      Chances are that the people that do stay aren't the best people either though since they are smart enough, talented enough and secure in themselves enough to know to go work someplace that has good management.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )

      I think the best move is to abduct the guy long enough to permanently tattoo “not leadership material” on his forehead. That way he is branded for life. No future in politics for him. Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

    • He was probably trying to get people to quit.

      I think an interesting response from the employees would have been to comply. Everyone shows up. 1,000 people in a building laid out for 250 employees.

      Then someone calls the fire marshall regarding occupancy limit.

      You get sent home from that, it's the employer failing to provide an environment fit for work. Can't occupy the building until the numbers are brought down. Sorry, have to either lease a bigger building or give up on the return-to-office decree.

    • The term I've heard for it is 'constructive' or 'disguised' dismissal . And it's illegal in many civilized places (so, not the USA obviously).

  • Wow, this is a new level of stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @05:10AM (#64967955)

    No matter how you feel about RTO mandates, I think we can all agree that anyone requiring people to come into the physical office should - at a minimum - provide an actual space to come into!

    I was tempted to declare this as "peak" stupidity, but I'm sure some other CEO will top it soon enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I was tempted to declare this as "peak" stupidity, but I'm sure some other CEO will top it soon enough.

      Indeed. How can somebody so abysmally stupid get into such a position?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 )

        How can somebody so abysmally stupid get into such a position?

        It's not so bad, it practically guarantees him a future appointment to Trump's cabinet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      That is how I feel about the RTO mandate in my company. It has slashed a lot of office space in the last four years, which would cause me, without moving myself, suddenly a 300 miles (or 600 miles a day) commute.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      It was pretty clear from the very moment that "forced home office" started in 2020 that companies were embracing this as an opportunity to lower their office expenses, shifting them onto their employees. Now that they also experienced the down-sides of people working remotely, they want both: Not returning to pay for suitable office space, but also having the employees come into one place for work.
      So the next level will probably be demanding that employees pay rent for cubicles in some office selected by b

    • provide an actual space to come into!

      Not just a space. A DEDICATED PERSONAL space. If you want me to come into the office I'm not going to sit at a flex desk. I paper, books, folders, materials that get worked out of, I prefer my chair in a certain position, and don't feel like touching a communal mouse and keyboard. I need drawers where I can keep pens, calculators, and a space in the change room for any uniform or PPE I intend to wear.

      Until you have all of those personally assigned I'm going to work in the place where I'm most effective: aro

  • What sort of advert is that the bank's CEO hasn't reckoned the limitation of there being just over 1/4 the number of desks needed to satisfy his edict?

    • TFS lists a total of 895 desks.

      There are 3,231 employees.

      They are required to RTO for 10 out of 20 working days per month, which requires 1616 desks.

      895/1616 = 55%.

      Where are you getting 1/4?

      • Re:Bank CEO can't calculate 3.6:1 contention (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @05:33AM (#64967979)

        It's probably not that simple, unless management is also handling/mandating the scheduling. Otherwise you have to allow for the possibility that more than 50% of the people might be coming in on any given day.

        Although desk space for 75% of the staff is probably somewhat more than is actually needed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        Without a fixed schedule, nothing prevents 0% workers in office on Monday and 100% in-office on Tuesday. ~3000 employees is nowhere near a large enough population to rely on statistics without significant provision for spikes.

        They would have to go with fully scheduled in-office days. Since they want 50% in office, the minimum repeating schedule period will be two weeks.

        Of course, as you pointed out, that still leaves an office space deficit.

    • This is a move to force employees out of the company without it being called a layoff. It's fraud.

  • So, cretin CEO tries to shift blame? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @05:29AM (#64967975)

    After fucking up massively himself, it is suddenly all those home-office workers that are responsible, at least that is what he implies. And he did not even have the minimal smarts to make sure his asshole move actually worked. How do these morons get into such positions?

    • You guys are not understanding the likely goal here: Getting people to quit rather than fired. Why? If the UK is is like the US you don't have to pay benefits to people who quit.

  • Bank math (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Njovich ( 553857 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @05:34AM (#64967981)

    Banks are so used to be able to 10X the underlying asset. Oh we need to create 10 million, just need 1 million for that.

    Ask these people to arrange workplaces for 1000 people and they'll have 100 chairs. Then they write up their stupidity as an 'efficiency win' and get a bonus.

  • why resign ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Growlley ( 6732614 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @05:48AM (#64968005)
    Log a health and safety whistle blower complaint - more money when they illegally fire you - yeah capitalism baby!

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @06:00AM (#64968015)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • No you want them to fuck off and not come back. Much cheaper than a redundancies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      The correct countermove is to show up and sit on the floor. Invite a health and safety inspector. Repeat until they either spend a metric assload of money on more office space or give up on RTO. I'm discounting the possibility that their board will recognize that the criminal element they failed to control against is the CEO and sack him.

  • that's their strategy to not pay severance hold the line no matter how uncomfortable it gets

    • Then they can pay more than the severance for the constructive dismissal. The bar for proving untenable working conditions is easily passed at tribunals.

  • One CEO gets it!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @06:09AM (#64968031)

    ‘If I scrapped working from home, I wouldn’t have any staff’

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne... [telegraph.co.uk]

  • Similar story at BT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rjforster ( 2130 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @06:11AM (#64968035) Journal

    They have a "3 Together 2 Wherever" rule which is 'advice' right now but becomes 'policy' in the new year. The biggest push-back isn't from people who want to continue to work from home, most of us _did_ work in the office in the before-times after all. No, the biggest push-back is from people who are OK with the 3 days a week but want to know about corner cases:
    What if I have a bad cold and could work from home but don't want to infect my colleagues?
    What if there is literally nobody in my team in the same office so I'm still putting a headset on to talk to someone far away?
    What if I need to use a non-corporate laptop (a "dev laptop") to do actual proper technical work and find that I'm outright forbidden from using the office wired lan and the small print of the wifi forbids me using that as well - so do I just down tools on those 3 days in the office?

    Of course, HR are as useless as a chocolate teapot over this, their responses (when we get them) are scattered around various FAQs (falsely anticipated questions) and emails and often don't answer the actual question and continue to talk about 'opportunities for collaboration'. In one case the response was an email containing a screenshot of text which is not searchable and probably in breach of accessibility laws.

    • A chocolate teapot is still more useful than nailing Jello to the wall. At least it can be a pretty, unused, useless decoration like these CEOs.
  • Even where productivity data are clear about the lack of need for in-office, they still insist on it to protect their own careers.

    • The data is not clear. Not by a long shot. Even anecdotal evidence is wildly inconsistent. I've been running software development projects for the last decade if do, and I absolutely saw a reduction in both quantity and quality of production when WFH became the norm. Others claim the opposite.

      • Not saying there's no synergy to being in person. Human beings are social animals, and communicate on more levels than one. But outside of categories where it has a logical value, some of the emphasis has an edge of hysteria to it. Like it's a matter of ego rather than a practical question. There's always been too much self-important mumbo jumbo in management culture that's now threatened, even in relatively loose industries.

  • When will PR/HR stop with this idiotic narrative? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by munehiro ( 63206 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @08:19AM (#64968179) Journal

    They are not promoting any collaboration. We are all stuck in open spaces, talking on the phone or making powerpoints, in hot desks that ensure you have no idea where your colleagues will be today or tomorrow. This is not enhancing collaboration. This is what you are attempting to gaslight your employees because you want them to bully them into quitting and go somewhere else.

    • This! Hot Desking, Hotel Desking, whatever you want to call it is the worst concept business has created in the past 20 years. Couple that with an Open Office plan and it's amazing that anyone can get any serious work done. The only people I've ever seen that like this are the office gadflies that walk around and talk to people all day but never do any actual work. When my company decided that they were looking to do this, they sent out a survey asking us our opinion on it. The response was overwhelmin

  • Malicious compliance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Sunday November 24, 2024 @08:23AM (#64968185)
    Everyone go in every day, and stand around doing nothing since they lacked space and technology to work. What an RAF friend of mine called malicious compliance to stupid orders from high command. I suspect UK labor laws would make firing them hard and teh CEO would rethink his stance.

  • looking at their stock history... they had some of their best years while wfh was going on... and some of the best growth... amazing how transparent they are with their actions. And the pace of this BS is only increasing. Unlike the US, the labor laws in the UK are much more geared to protecting the workers.

    After the 29million fine for essentially catering to criminals with money laundering and sanction busting... can't wait to see how the payouts to employees hidden by NDAs will impact their performance.

  • Companies need to do layoffs all the time.

    A "go back to the office" mandate is a cheap and effective way to reduce personal without the drama.
    When the next recession hits, we will see a lot of companies adopting a go back to the office policy.

    • Nobody is going to leave in protest of a return to the office order if they think they can't easily get another remote job. That means that those who stay are the ones least likely to be able to get another good job. The result is that you just caused your most talented employees to quit.

      It's a cheap and easy way - doesn't mean it's a good way. If the CEO is looking to quickly reduce headcount so that they can also leave and get a better job based on how successful they were at doing that, then it's a good

  • that during the downturn we seem to be heading into, many companies will force in-office policy. But companies that stay mostly remote will collectively learn how to do remote better, and when there's an uptick, the "innies" will have to change to recruit, but not be good at remote, and will shrink as a companies.

  • We can fit my entire team into the executive conference room. And Bhatia's mahogany desk can seat st least four people.

  • When I was a young'un my Ma and Pa told me "Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach."

    It was a rubbish saying - total wank really - but that's how some people think.
    There's perhaps a tiny kernel of truth in it, just as there's a kernel of truth in:

    "Those that can, do. Those that can't get into management."

    There's a huge amount of sentiment around how terrible management can be and generally is, but the bottom line is it's all about middle management.
    Middle managers are usually people just trying to forge

  • CEO1 (to golf buddy): Yeah, worked again! You think they'll even catch on?
    CEO2: Let's hope not. I kinda like the squirming. I mean musical chairs right? [chuckle] [whump] Aw shit. Mulligan, Carl? Fuck it, let's go eat.
    CEO1: Sure, Darren, I hear, Huxbies has a great new orphan dish. It's served tartare so they only serve clean orphans. You won't get worms. I mean this chef's 7 and a half stars, runs his own farm even--sustainable.

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