COMP NEWS – Bankers who work from home may be doing so their jobs more ethically, as a new survey suggests they are more than five times less likely to engage in financial misconduct.
Most business leaders harbor a deeply-rooted belief: Offices as sanctuaries of corporate integrity, bustling with industrious individuals who diligently toe the line of right conduct under the leader’s watchful eye. Indeed, that’s a major reason why many business leaders want their employees in the office: they feel they can keep control, ensuring compliance with laws, rules, and policies. However, a recent peer-reviewed study in the European Financial Management journal comes to puncture this inflated balloon of conventional wisdom: Bankers working from home, while brewing their morning coffees in pajamas, have been setting a higher ethical standard than their well-heeled office counterparts.
That certainly puts a different twist on the demands by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs that their bankers work from the office five days a week! These major banks could be unwittingly opening the door for greater financial misconduct by forcing in-office work.
One theory suggests that unethical conduct is easier to overlook or partake in when performed in a closed environment. Working from home away from counterparts that toe the line of ethicality (and legality) encourages bankers to stay on the straight and narrow path.
Imagine a trader, comfortably ensconced in a cozy home office, engaging in remarkably fewer instances of financial misconduct than their counterparts in the tumultuous trading floor. It’s a plot twist that could give a Hollywood scriptwriter a run for their money.
This dramatic revelation was born from the meticulous analysis of data from one of the top five U.K. banks. During the year-long period of lockdown, researchers scrutinized misconduct reports relating to 162 traders. The resulting data unveiled a startling truth: traders working from home had a modest 7.3% chance of sparking a misconduct alert, while their office-going brethren had a spine-chilling 37.6% probability.
In other words, the hallowed office, often hailed as a paragon of professionalism and integrity, was home to over five times more instances of misconduct than the remote workplace.
Unethical conduct, it seems, is as contagious as a yawn during a monotonous Monday morning office meeting. Like a chuckle that leads to a laugh riot, one wayward trader can lead to an avalanche of similar behavior.
This trend is not dissimilar to a classic high school scenario where the temptation to “fit in” can lead to a spiral of poor choices. Even within the hallowed halls of finance, no one is immune to the infectious nature of unethical behavior.
The researchers assert that removing a trader from an office environment riddled with unprofessional conduct significantly reduces their likelihood of engaging in similar indiscretions. The analogy is akin to moving a box of doughnuts away from a group of dieting colleagues–when temptation is out of sight, it’s also out of mind.
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