Santander to insist UK workers are in office three days a week

Santander has joined the ranks of employers herding reluctant British workers back to the coalface, telling office staff they must turn up in person for at least three days a week on average.

While the bank’s back-office staff will still be able to work from home more regularly than before the pandemic, the minimum requirement now tips the balance in favour of the traditional workplace rather than home.

The Spanish-owned bank’s updated work policy comes as one of the big four accounting firms, PwC, warned that it would clamp down on remote working and another, Deloitte, said it would no longer conduct remote interviews for graduates.

Santander said in a memo to its 10,000 UK office workers that the current guidance of two to three days a week in the office would give way to a formal attendance requirement of 12 days a month from the end of 2024.

The change is designed to get staff back to their desks, but with more flexibility than a formal three-day week, the Sunday Times reported. Santander’s memo said that working in person together from offices was “vital in supporting and developing our people, especially those at the earlier stages of their career”.

The bank’s UK chief executive, Mike Regnier, is one of those enjoying the perks of hybrid working, clocking on at his family home in Harrogate, Yorkshire, at least one day a week. Regnier recently told the Observer that he “wouldn’t have accepted this job” if he’d been away from his family five days a week.

About 1,000 of the affected staff work in London offices, but the biggest number will be about 4,500 people who work at Santander’s new Unity Place “campus” headquarters in Milton Keynes, including Regnier. The chief executive has said that he hopes the lure of the complex would help staff to kick the Covid working-from-home habit.

The news comes after PwC told its 26,000-strong workforce in the UK that it would start tracking their locations, in a similar effort to ensure that staff spend at least three days a week either in the office or at client sites.

PwC described its policy as a shift from a “hybrid working balance” towards “more in-person work”, noting that its previous “guidance of at least two to three days a week was open to interpretation”.

Concerns about remote working have led Deloitte to reinstate face-to-face interviews for its graduate scheme, the Financial Times reported. The bank had conducted an entirely online recruitment process during the pandemic, but financial regulators have warned of the risks of cheating.

Hybrid working remains prevalent in the UK. Londoners work an average 2.7 days a week in the office, according to recent research by the Centre for Cities thinktank, less than Paris, Singapore and New York.