Transcript: Why the pandemic couldn’t kill the 100-hour week

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Why the pandemic couldn’t kill the 100-hour week’

Craig Coben
There’s a lot of inefficiency in the way investment banks work. Bear in mind, most of the time, you’re pitching and chasing business. And so, by definition, 90 per cent of your time is wasted. Unfortunately, you don’t know which 10 per cent of your time is well spent.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Bethan Staton
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Bethan Staton, filling in this week for Isabel Berwick.

In some sectors, long hours are part of the job. Bankers and lawyers have historically worked for 90, 100 or even 120 hours a week in the run-up to big deals and been paid handsomely for their time. Since the pandemic, changes like flexible working and more focus on employee wellbeing have made life a little easier for most workers.

Are things changing in law and high finance? To find out, I’m joined by two people who’ve spent many years immersed in those worlds. Craig Coben is a retired investment banker who held senior roles at Bank of America and Deutsche Bank during a 25-year career. He’s also a contributing writer for FT Alphaville. Craig, welcome to Working It.

Craig Coben
Good morning.

Bethan Staton
I’m also joined by Suzi Ring, the FT’s legal correspondent who covers a wide range of topics here, including London law firms. Suzi, welcome.

Suzi Ring
Hi, Bethan.

Bethan Staton
Let’s get started.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Just to put some of these working hours in perspective, an 80-hour week will mean working about 7am to 7pm seven days a week; 120 hours, you might work 7am till midnight every day of the week. Craig, you’ve worked as a banker and you’ve worked as a lawyer. What are people in these jobs actually doing that takes all these hours?

Craig Coben
Look, they’re not working the whole time. People do step out to eat. They go to the gym. And in fact, in many cases, people try to make sure that they stay late enough to be able to eat at work and take a car home. It’s not continuous work the whole time in most cases, unless a deal is incredibly hot and just a million things are going on at once. But people are expected to get in relatively early at a bank, somewhat later at a law firm, and in many cases, they’re expected to stay late because work arises on an irregular basis. But it’s not continuous work the whole time. Those are office hours, not work hours.

Bethan Staton
Suzi, you’re covering law. So when we’re looking at the legal sector where there’s really similarly long hours in some cases, are we talking about kind of high-pressure work that’s ongoing for the whole time? Or is it, you know, a bit more back and forth? Can you paint us a picture?

Suzi Ring
Yeah. So I think the thing to think about is that obviously within law there are different practice areas. And I’m sure, you know, Craig would speak to this as well, talking about investment banking versus maybe, you know, sales and trading, which is more kind of market hours.

But when you’re talking about corporate law and you are advising on an M&A deal or an IPO or something that is time-sensitive, high-pressured, that’s when you get the really crazy hours of, you know, junior associates staying up all night to complete contracts and make sure the deal is done. And so it’s really those kind of transactional practices where you see the long hours and the real kind of pressure on the legal industry.

Bethan Staton
So, Craig, you survived a long career in investment banking. You’ve written about it for the FT. Why do you think you lasted as long as you did in that career?

Craig Coben
That’s a hard question. Look, it’s not because I worked the longest hours, but you have to have resilience, or people sometimes call grit to survive in the business. You don’t actually have to be particularly intelligent. You have to have a minimum level of competence and smarts, but it isn’t a business that rewards extreme genius.

A lot of what investment banking involves is salesmanship. And I think a lot of even what junior bankers are doing are preparing what are effectively sales materials, in most cases, pitch books.

Bethan Staton
Do you think that’s tied to the culture of long hours that people are expected to be present, to be around? There’s an understanding among workers that they need to sell themselves as well?

Craig Coben
I think the long hours are a byproduct of the way in which investment banking operates. In particular, there is a constant pressure to originate business and to bring in new business. And because investment banking is so competitive, because the clients are demanding, you end up having to spend a lot of time in the office working on presentations, revising presentations, updating presentations, coming up ideas for new presentations. And that’s really where the proverbial hamster wheel arises from.

Bethan Staton
Suzi, in law, how common is it that client satisfaction and the drive for that and pressure from clients are leading to especially junior staff having to work super long hours?

Suzi Ring
I think it’s totally driven by that. I think it’s all driven by client demand and obviously similar to what Craig is saying in banking, the model inherently demands long hours because a lot of things are done by the billable hour. So your success is measured, at least in part, on the number of hours that you bill. That is how much you are bringing in for the firm. And that ultimately is what clients are demanding of you.

Bethan Staton
One of the things that’s happened in the world of work more broadly now is that the pandemic has kind of ushered in a greater focus on wellbeing. We’ve been thinking more obviously about working from home, remote work, flexibility. Is this filtering through at all to these industries? And if so, how?

Suzi Ring
Yes, it definitely is filtering through to legal industry, not least because we’ve obviously got a new generation of people coming through who perhaps are valuing work-life balance more than generations past. And I think that it’s a non-starter these days to not have any flexibility around working from home or remote working. And also, there’s an understanding that firms need to respond if they want to have a diverse workforce, to open up the industry to more people.

I think still law lends itself to presenteeism. For example, we’ve seen in London a number of firms have moved from a kind of three-day-a-week mandate to be in the office to a four-day-a-week. And the kind of conversations I have privately with managing partners is that they would like everybody to be in five days a week, but they just can’t demand that because that would lead to a loss of talent because that’s not what young people coming through these days want.

But I think in an ideal world, if you asked management of most law firms in the city, to be honest, they would prefer people were still in the office five days a week.

Bethan Staton
But the talent and the workers still have a bit of leverage there that they’re able to work.

Suzi Ring
Definitely. And if anything, even more so at the moment because there’s been such a competition for young talent in London, which is reflective of the fact that a lot of US firms have been coming into London, heavily investing here and throwing lots of money at junior associates. So it’s more important than ever for firms to make sure they’re being competitive in terms of their offering for young people.

Bethan Staton
Absolutely. Craig, do you think since the pandemic, 100-hour weeks are now a thing of the past?

Craig Coben
I think it’s easy to overstate the situation in the first place. I don’t think 100-hour weeks have ever been particularly normal; 60-, 70-, 80-hour weeks are probably more normal for junior staff. And it’s not week in, week out. You will have periods in which you’re busy and periods in which you are a lot less busy.

And as I said, you know, in many cases, especially for junior staff who are single, who don’t have anything in the fridge, they’ll kind of go to the gym from 5 to 7 in the afternoon, in the evening and eat at work and take a taxi either to home or to a night spot where they’re meeting their friends.

So it’s not quite the Dickensian workload portrayed in the media. And also there’s a wide variation in terms of junior performance and junior commitment. Some juniors have an absolutely Stakhanovite work ethic. In fact, they probably work more than they need to just because they wanna feel like they’re part of Wall Street or the city, or because they just get slightly obsessive, whilst others coast. And I’ve seen the full spectrum of work ethic in my career.

So I think what you’re now seeing is, you know, banks are gonna be tracking how many hours people work. They’re gonna be looking at it more closely. Some juniors will take advantage of the system and game it. Don’t underestimate that. But most won’t and most will probably continue to work more or less as before.

Bethan Staton
The picture you’ve painted there, Craig, is I guess a bit more nuanced than this really punishing work schedule. And in some ways it seems like there’s a little bit of flexibility, perhaps, built in. Do you think that the way of working in these banks at the moment is logical and sort of effective? Is it making the best use of young bankers and senior bankers’ time? And are there ways that you would change it if you could kind of design it in the best way?

Craig Coben
You know, that’s a tough question. There’s a lot of inefficiency in the way investment banks work. Bear in mind, most of the time you’re pitching and chasing business. And so by definition, 90 per cent of your time is wasted. Unfortunately, you don’t know which 10 per cent of your time is well spent in many cases. But yes, there are tremendous inefficiencies, but it’s not that easy to resolve them. It’s a bit like trying to reform the public sector. Everyone cites waste and fraud and inefficiency, but nobody can really fix it, even though everyone seems to have a smart idea.

Investment banks, first of all, they have to have certain controls in place, and that requires a kind of command and control hierarchy, and that itself introduces all sorts of other inefficiencies, as you can imagine. But you can’t have the work decentralised, you know, for all sorts of regulatory reasons. It just, it . . . or even client servicing reasons, it wouldn’t work. And second of all, you know, deals are unpredictable. The work is non-linear. You can’t plan the work like you would in a factory. And I think that creates a lot of inefficiencies and people quite naturally get frustrated, but we get frustrated because they see with hindsight how it could have been done. It’s not that easy to know how it should be done ex ante.

Bethan Staton
Suzi, what kind of harm does it do to someone when they regularly work a really, really long week like this?

Suzi Ring
I think the harm is both in terms of your immediate wellbeing, but also can be around some of your long-term decision making. So I was speaking to a very senior partner in the city recently who was saying to me that they’re feeling increasingly concerned having conversations with associates and senior associates around them, that people are making decisions, for example, maybe not to have children or not to pursue things in their personal life because they don’t see a way of doing that and maintaining the jobs that they have.

And this person was saying to me that actually concerns them. And that’s one of the things that they’re really thinking about at the moment, because obviously these jobs consume a large part of people’s lives, but hopefully people don’t want that to be impacting other decisions they might have made in their personal life.

Bethan Staton
Craig, I’ve read about long hours at the beginning of people’s careers as something of a rite of passage. Where does it end? Or do people just generally continue to work these long hours long into their career?

Craig Coben
I think for investment bankers, the hours start to taper off, or at least you get more independence, but you’re always on call. I mean, even as a senior banker, and I would be on holiday, I would have to do conference calls late at night or on the weekends. You’re always on call as a senior, as a senior banker. And you do . . . And you do work. You have to review the books that people are putting together, but you have a little bit more freedom and independence. And this is even before the pandemic, you could work a lot more remotely.

I would be travelling three days a week anyway. And so, you know, I’ve done conference calls from ski slopes and, you know, I can still remember one time being on the top of a mountain. It was snowing in France and I had my snowboard on, I’ll have to sit in the snow for like 45 minutes, freezing cold, taking this call, which was fairly urgent. So I think that’s really what happens with a lot of bankers is that, you know, even at the senior level, you’re still there for the client. You have to be on the phone and sometimes you have to interrupt your holiday to go to a meeting.

Bethan Staton
So one argument and I guess one thing that I struggle to kind of get my head around a bit is that with both banks and law firms, you could maybe hire twice as many people on half the pay and work them half as hard. Suzi, why isn’t that an option?

Suzi Ring
So it’s a very interesting point, and this is something that gets discussed a lot, and particularly, again, recently with junior associate salaries climbing so much. I do speak to a number of general counsels at companies and this came up recently where people were saying, you know, we would rather that a law firm put two associates working 10 hours a day on a matter than one working, like, an 18-hour day. Again, I think that is all very well in theory, and I’m sure that some of those people do mean that. However, the client demands don’t change and sometimes this stuff is said, but ultimately they just want their law firm to get on and do the job.

So I don’t know if that follow-up is going on in terms of kind of holding law firms accountable. If GCs are trying to put some pressure on that aspect of things. But yeah, I think that, you know, ultimately it comes down to these are businesses and they want to be profitable and you’re not looking to add overheads where you think you might not need to.

Bethan Staton
Do you think that the increased salaries that we’ve seen in law recently do bring with them an additional worry really that young lawyers are gonna have to be worked really hard, working really long hours?

Suzi Ring
They definitely do. Speaking to a number of senior managers privately, even some who have implemented these changes when this all sort of kicked off earlier this year, that was exactly the response that they were getting from some of these young associates saying to management, we’re concerned that these pay rises that are sort of seemingly slightly come out of the blue are in effect a way of you telling us you want us to work more.

Now, people tell me that they are trying to put those fears aside and tell them that’s not the case. It’s purely us just being competitive. We know you work really hard, but it can’t do anything, surely, other than signal that message or make people feel beholden to work as hard as they possibly can to feel deserving of those kind of salaries.

Bethan Staton
Yeah. Is there a possibility that AI is gonna lighten the load?

Suzi Ring
There’s definitely a sense that AI is gonna remove some of the drudgery. So you won’t have necessarily junior associates spending hours and hours just going through documents and doing stuff that, you know, really doesn’t require someone who’s trained as a lawyer to do. But the way people talk about it to me is that just allows kind of an increase in efficiency.

It means that those junior associates can be put to work in other ways. It doesn’t mean that they’re gonna be working less. And I mean, the corollary of that is obviously law firms don’t want AI to mean that their billable hours are suddenly going down and clients are paying them less. They want to show they’re being more efficient, but they still want to bring in that revenue. So they’re just gonna try and find ways to utilise those people in other ways for clients, not necessarily that they’re working any less hours.

Bethan Staton
Craig, now that you’re out of the business, do you miss it?

Craig Coben
Well, I spent 27 years in investment banking. And so I think I had my fill of the business. I miss a lot of the people and I miss the camaraderie of working with the people. It’s actually a good workplace in general. It’s a tough business, but I work with some great people. And when you’re working hard on a project together, you forge a bond that is not easily broken.

Bethan Staton
Well, thanks very much, both.

Craig Coben
Thank you very much.

Suzi Ring
Thanks very much for having me.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Bethan Staton
This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]