I never got to experience the protected Saturday / weekends while working in banking. I am curious to hear from the younger monkeys how the policy is working? Do you feel the policy is actually protecting your time? Are you simply ignoring emails on your days off? Does it apply to live deals? How does senior management view the policy? Do you find yourself playing catch up all week after using your protected time?
Thanks!
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I'm sure you'll get variable responses, but I think it's been working at our firm. The group heads and MD's do an outstanding job to establish group culture and try to minimize nonsense work, which definitely helps us over the week itself and lends at least a slight degree of predictability.
I usually don't come in on Saturday unless there's a live deal. Otherwise, I might log in remotely for a few hours, but nothing substantial. It's nice to have a day off occasionally for certain, though to your point I feel like weekdays are slightly busier (though not particularly so). All in all it's a good development for the industry in my view. It's never going to be a predictable 50 hour job, but there are certainly ways to cut inefficiency to some degree and give folks a bit of visibility in their day to day.
Saturday policy is/was definitely beneficial from a junior banker perspective, but the "enforceability" does vary to one degree or another from group to group. In my experience, most senior bankers were generally respectful of the policy but there were also some that expected you to work for them on saturdays and not "report it". Ideally you still checked on your email to make sure nothing urgent came up, but generally people weren't randomly getting blown up on saturdays.
As you might imagine, buy-in was stronger from the more administrative, "heads of group" bankers who had more HR responsibility. Mileage varied with individual MDs.
That being said, it was immeasurably preferable from a morale perspective, and I think much more sustainable for those who might have otherwise not considered a longer term stint in banking.
Live deals trumped the policy, but there were processes in place that MDs were supposed to use to make sure the head of the group/staffer was aware of the situation for accountability. Again, mileage varied, but for the most part, people tried to protect Saturdays even where there were live deals going on if possible.
There's probably some residual catch-up involved around the fringes, but I think MDs probably also got a bit more focused on what they wanted, knowing that they no longer had that extra day to iterate needlessly, so on the whole it probably improved from that perspective as well.