In an internal memo, Solomon said he wanted executives to be closer to the “Sky Lobby,” which is a center of collaboration at the company with couches, a cafeteria, and a gym.
“The Sky Lobby was specifically designed to be the hub of this office,” Solomon wrote in the memo, the Post reported. “There is a natural ‘buzz’ there, and I want our leadership team to be part of it.”
However, sources told the Post that company executives are still distanced from everyday employees by a spiral staircase, and that the executives typically work from the executives’ individual conference rooms. An anonymous source also told the Post that there wasn’t enthusiastic support for the move.
The company did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Though the move was announced in December 2019, it wasn’t implemented until this summer due to pandemic-related lockdowns.
Many Goldman Sachs employees aren’t back to working in the company’s offices full-time, with many preferring a hybrid arrangement where they filter in and out of the office throughout a week. Some junior bankers have also resisted returning to company offices after spending much of the pandemic in their homes around the country.
The 49 Black executives represented 3.2% of all executive leadership at Goldman Sachs in 2020, which was a slight improvement from 2.7% in 2019.
The bank employed a total of 21,040 people across the US in 2020. Tuesday’s report showed that 1,425 of these workers were Black, including 649 men and 776 women.
This means they made up 6.8% of the bank’s US workforce – a step up from 6.6% in 2019. Census data shows that 13.4% of the US population is Black.
In the executive summary of the report, CEO David Solomon said there was “still a long road ahead” on improving the diversity of the bank’s workforce, adding that he would “continue to make this effort a personal priority.”
He added that Goldman Sachs has “set additional goals for retaining and promoting talent at the vice-president level.”
Goldman Sachs didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
The report comes one month after the bank announced it was set to invest $10 billion in an initiative called “One Million Black Women.” The project aims to reach 1 million Black women by 2030 through investment in healthcare, jobs, education, and access to capital.
Goldman Sachs has a higher proportion of Black employees in senior executive positions than Morgan Stanley, which revealed in its 2020 Diversity and Inclusion report that it had 37 Black leaders out of 1,705 executives in the US.
Bank of America’s 2020 Human Capital Management report showed that 201 out of its 4,191 executives were Black, while Citigroup’s 2019 Diversity report said that out of 108 executives, four were Black men, but there were no Black women.
Bosses at Goldman Sachs have sent snack hampers to London bankers in response to a survey that revealed the “inhumane” working conditions junior staff faced at the bank in the US, according to a report by the Guardian on Tuesday.
Managing directors, not the company, were paying for the one-off fruit and snacks hampers, the report said, adding that Goldman Sachs hadn’t directly offered any gifts or bonuses to junior bankers following the survey.
In the survey, leaked on March 18, 13 first-year analysts in the US described their declining mental and physical health, 100-hour work weeks, and a lack of sleep. UK staff told the Guardian they too faced burnout.
Some junior bankers told the Guardian they appreciated the gesture of the hampers. But staff at other banks have received much larger gifts.
Investment bankers at Credit Suisse are getting a one-time $20,000 bonus for dealing with an “unprecedented” workload during the pandemic, while Jefferies is offering 1,124 of its junior workers Apple products and workout equipment including Peloton bikes worth nearly £2,000 ($2,750), per the Guardian.
One Goldman Sachs employee told the Guardian that the bank should be doing more for the junior bankers who have to work gruelling hours.
“What we need is not a gesture from [managers], but from the firm,” one London banker told the Guardian.
Insider reached out to Goldman Sachs for comment, but did not immediately receive a response. Goldman declined to comment on the snack boxes to the Guardian.
Four days after the survey came out, CEO David Solomon said that the bank would work harder to give junior bankers Saturdays off.
He added the long and busy work hours were down to working from home and a boom in business during the pandemic.
One unnamed analyst said in the survey that “there was a point where I was not eating, showering, or doing anything else other than working from morning until after midnight.”
Goldman Sachs’ chief executive said the firm will address issues raised by a group of junior bankers who described “inhumane” working conditions, poor mental health, and sleep deprivation in a brutal internal survey.
“This is something that our leadership team and I take very seriously,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in a voice message sent to staffers Sunday, according to a transcript viewed by Insider.
The investment bank will work to more strictly enforce its “Saturday rule,” which stipulates that junior bankers shouldn’t be expected to be in the office from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday, Solomon said. It will also accelerate hiring and shift employees to the firm’s busiest divisions to ease the workload on junior bankers.
In an informal survey posted to social media, a group of 13 first-year investment analysts at Goldman described being so overworked that they were left with barely any time to shower, eat, or sleep.
The analysts said they worked an average of 98 hours per week since January and slept an average of five hours per night. All respondents said their work hours had negatively affected their relationships, and they rated their satisfaction with their personal lives at a 1 out of 10.
“The sleep deprivation, the treatment by senior bankers, the mental and physical stress … I’ve been through foster care and this is arguably worse,” one unnamed analyst said.
All 13 respondents said they have frequently experienced unrealistic deadlines, and 83% said they had frequently experienced excessive monitoring or micromanaging. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they had sought or had considered seeking mental-health counseling due to work-related stress.
At the end of the survey, the analysts suggested several solutions to management, including capping workweeks at 80 hours and giving junior bankers Saturdays off unless they’re given advance notice. First-year analysts are often assigned “quick” work on Saturdays, and it is “incredibly hard to push back,” they said.
Solomon attributed the high-stress conditions to a boom in business amid the pandemic. He also said that working from home has made it more difficult to strike a work-life balance.
“Clients are active, and volumes in a lot of our businesses are at historic highs. Of course, the combination of the pandemic and all this activity put stress and strain on everyone at Goldman Sachs,” Solomon said. “We recognize that people working today face a new set of challenges. In this world of remote work, it feels like we have to be connected 24/7.”
Although grueling hours and heavy workloads are expected on Wall Street – and they’re generally counterbalanced by hefty paychecks – the junior analysts indicated they were unlikely to stay with the bank if working conditions didn’t improve.
“Being unemployed is less frightening to me than what my body might succumb to if I keep up this lifestyle,” one analyst said.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon’s pay was cut by $10 million in 2020 in response to the bank’s role in one of the biggest financial scandals in history, which has led to record-setting multibillion-dollar regulatory fines and multiple criminal indictments.
The pay cuts came in response to a nearly $3 billion settlement that Goldman reached with the US Department of Justice last year where it admitted it violated US anti-corruption laws by offering bribes to foreign government officials to win business from Malaysia’s 1MDB fund – the largest such fine ever paid by a US firm.
Solomon’s total compensation was still $17.5 million last year after accounting for the penalty, down 36% from the $27.5 million he made in 2019, the bank said in a regulatory filing Tuesday. That included a $2 million base salary, $2.65 million cash bonus, and $10.85 million in performance-related stock.
Goldman also slashed COO John Waldron’s pay by $6 million, to $18.5 million, and CFO Stephen Scherr’s pay by $7 million, to $15.5 million.
Goldman also faced investigations from international regulators in more than 14 countries including the US, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UK. Malaysian regulators reached a $3.9 billion settlement with the bank last July, and two Goldman employees have been criminally indicted for their alleged actions.
The filing said that, while none of Goldman’s three top executives were “involved in or aware of” any illicit activity by the company at the time, its board of directors “views the 1MDB matter as an institutional failure, inconsistent with the high expectations it has for the firm.”
Goldman beat Wall Street expectations last quarter, bringing in $11.7 billion in revenue as pandemic-related volatility helped boost the performance of its trading desks and deal-advising business.
David Solomon told CNBC on Tuesday he’s concerned about euphoric activity in the stock market being driven by retail investors buying IPOs.
“I do think we’re at a moment in time where there’s a lot of euphoria. I personally am concerned about that. I don’t think in the long run that’s healthy,” the Goldman Sachs CEO said.
The euphoria was especially visible in the IPO market last week: Airbnb leapt 115% in its first day of trading, while DoorDash soared 86% following its debut.
“There’s a lot of retail participation in a bunch of these IPOs,” Solomon added. “I think that’s something to watch, something to be cautious about.”
David Solomon told CNBC on Tuesday he’s concerned about euphoric activity in the stock market that is being driven by retail investors buying IPOs.
” I do think we’re at a moment in time where there’s a lot of euphoria. I personally am concerned about that. I don’t think in the long run that’s healthy. I think it will rebalance over time as it always does,” the Goldman Sachs CEO said.
Euphoria was especially visible in the IPO market last week with two high-profile IPOs. Airbnb surged 115% during its public debut, while DoorDash soared 86% as it began trading. Those offerings defied many observers’ expectations, and Solomon isn’t alone in his concerns that the market is getting too hot. The Goldman chief executive sees retail activity spiking due to technology that’s made investing and trading more accessible.
“There’s a lot of retail participation in a bunch of these IPOs,” Solomon added. “I think that’s something to watch, something to be cautious about. I think a bunch of these are great businesses, but obviously, the market at the moment is pricing in, you know, perfect execution and enormous growth for a very long period of time. And my guess is there’ll be a rebalancing of that over time for sure.”
The banking icon also said that the current stock market is appropriately looking forward and acknowledging that the pandemic will at one point be beyond us.
“There’s certainly been a meaningful recovery in the economy but there’s still a ways to go. I think we’ve replaced about 75% of the economic output that we lost when we shut down the economy in March and April and so I do think we see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Solomon added that the Fed’s policy actions in the beginning of the pandemic were necessary and staved off a situation that could have been much worse, but they’re not without consequences. Now, people are far out on the risk curve and that’s inflating asset prices, as seen in recent IPOs, Solomon said.