A lot of trends emerged during the pandemic that we hardly acknowledge these days.
Plenty of people have expensive exercise equipment sitting in the spare room now acting as clothes horses. More than a few got stuck into baking for a while – the pricey bread maker that was de rigueur in some quarters around 2020 and 2021 now sits in the back of the press gathering dust.
And many people invested in home office set-ups that in some cases are superior to their actual offices, with big monitors, high-end headphones and the like.
Alas, for many, the home office is becoming of less and less use. Many companies have cut back sharply on hybrid working, and Revolut – long a holdout in favour of the practice – is cutting back too.
The bank is changing its rules for graduates and interns, requiring them in the office three days a week. The rules for other staff remain unchanged.
Revolut has long made the ability to work from home a key selling point to prospective employees. Chief executive Nik Storonsky has previously said he didn’t care where his staff were as long as they did the work, which is not a bad attitude to have.
There are a few issues at play here, however. First, it is arguably more important for younger workers to be in the office than older hands. For one, they have yet to build up their experience of office life and learning from others.
Second, Revolut is no longer the plucky start-up of a few years ago. It has more than 13,000 staff and is aiming for a valuation of $200 billion (€173 billion) if it goes public in 2028. For comparison, AIB has 10,207 staff and a market cap of €21 billion.
Its peers are now the big global banks – many of which have tighter working rules – and it is in the crosshairs of regulators. It has already been pulled up more than once over its controls, and one of the easier ways to manage that issue is to have people working in the office.
Regardless, it seems hybrid working will be less common in future. That expensive monitor and fancy keyboard may not be getting so much use.
