Workplaces have long spied on employees, from tracking badge swipes to keystrokes. Now, JPMorgan Chase & Co. is rolling out a plan to monitor the hours of its junior investment bankers, which the $782 billion bank says is for their own benefit.
As part of a new JPMorgan pilot program, it will evaluate whether the hours claimed by junior bankers on timesheets match the activities recorded electronically by its IT systems, according to a recent JPMorgan report. Financial Times. Each week, these employees receive reports showing how their self-reported time compares to numbers based on computer usage, including video calls, desktop keystrokes and scheduled meetings. These tools will not be used for evaluation purposes.
“Like the weekly screen time summary on your smartphone, this tool is about awareness, not execution,” JPMorgan said in a statement. financial times. “It is designed to support transparency, wellbeing and encourage open dialogue about workload.”
While many employees will be anxious about their employers tracking their working hours online, the pilot program is actually designed to counteract overwork among junior staff, the report said. It’s part of a larger movement among Wall Street titans to protect employees from potentially dangerous workloads.
wealth JPMorgan was contacted for comment.
Wall Street’s famous “always-on” culture of intense, sleepless workdays has recently begun to show cracks.
The issue came to a head just two years ago when Leo Lukenas III, a Green Beret who had joined Bank of America as an investment banker, died of a blood clot after a long career at the company.
While the coroner’s report did not establish a link between the banker’s death and his demanding job on Wall Street, his death drew attention to the long hours and declining health of overworked investment bankers.
That same year, junior bankers worked 100 hours a week, more than twice the 40-hour workload of many professionals.
JPMorgan’s latest surveillance tool is just a continuation of the banking industry’s crackdown on related rites of passage.
Wall Street banks began implementing safeguards around the issue a few years ago. In 2024, JPMorgan Chase will limit the working hours of junior bankers to 80 hours a week. The policy is in addition to a “writing down” period from 6pm on Friday to noon on Saturday, as well as guaranteeing staff a full weekend off every three months. Some situations, such as live transactions, are not covered by this policy.
Other banks are also noticing widespread and severe burnout.
2024 wall street journal An investigation found that many junior investment bankers at Bank of America were often asked by their superiors to lie about their working hours to circumvent restrictions. After the report was published, the bank began encouraging young employees to keep accurate records of their working hours and to wave a red flag if their bosses told them otherwise.
In turn, Bank of America launched a new monitoring tool in the fall of 2024 that will require junior investment bankers in the United States to log hours worked daily instead of weekly. wall street journal reported. Younger employees were also asked to enter information on a scale of one to four about the deals they were working on, the senior bankers overseeing them and their ability to take on more work.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com