Private equity chief says work from home. Or just leave the office earlier

The tension between people who want to work from home and those who want work to happen in the office is a well-noted one. Generally, the former are employees, and the latter are employers. That isn’t always the case, however.

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Speaking to students at the LSE Alternative Investments Conference earlier this week, private equity firm Bain Capital’s co-head, Jonathan Lavine, supported the primacy of a health work-life balance – and of a hybrid office schedule in particular.

“I am not a vigilante,” Lavine said, to believe that “everybody needs to be in the office, or nobody needs to be in the office.” Bain has “a lot of adults, and people need to be in the office an appropriate period of time to get their job done, and to learn too.”

To Lavine, the solution is a balance between the two – “three or four days a week.” Work in general “needs to be a little bit more purposeful, so that entire teams are in at the same time.” Luckily, a solution exists to make that happen from home, in his estimation – Zoom (other working platforms can also be used, presumably).

Hybrid working should also be that – hybrid. Lavine cautiously suggests “that maybe you're in five days a week, but you leave early a bunch of days because you want to go see your kids’ soccer game." (other sports can also be attended, presumably).

Lavine’s stance on hybrid working is rather progressive for a finance chief. Aside from Citi CEO Jane Fraser, who communicated recently that the bank’s 3-days-in-2-days-out system will continue for the foreseeable future, the industry’s leadership generally prefers office hours to work-from-home ones.

The most notable proponent of a full return to the office is JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon. The bank demanded a full five-day schedule from the rest of its employees last month, which its employees called “painful”. Goldman has had the same program for a year and a half, with its employees feeling similarly about the situation to JPMorgan’s.

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