NAB chief Ross McEwan calls time on work from home with senior management office edict

NAB staff are currently spending 1.2 days a week on average in the office. Now CEO Ross McEwan has issued an edict to senior management.

NAB chief executive Ross McEwan with bank customer Salvatore Malatesta, owner of St Ali café South Melbourne. Picture: Supplied

NAB chief executive Ross McEwan has ordered his senior leaders back to the office, five days a week, as part of his push to return to pre-pandemic work routines.

Many of Australia’s biggest companies have adopted hybrid working – or splitting work days at the office and home – permanently after three pandemic-plagued years. Some are even considering going as far to introduce four-day working weeks, heralding one of the biggest changes to office-based work.

But Mr McEwan delivered a clear message to his senior leaders — executive general managers and above — this week, telling them they need to set a greater example in ensuring more employees attend the bank’s new headquarters in Melbourne’s Bourke Street.

NAB staff are currently spending 1.2 days a week on average in the office, spending the rest of the week working from home.

The number is below NAB’s minimum requirement of its broader workforce spending a minimum of two or three days a week in the office.

Mr McEwan is understood to have told his senior leaders that travelling to the office five days a week might not work for some senior staff and they may leave the business.

A NAB spokeswoman said: “Ross has long advocated for the need for teams to be together regularly to collaborate and problem solve for customers. NAB is a relationship bank and those relationships are best delivered face-to-face”.

“Ross believes the most senior leaders need to role model the behaviours and culture expected of everyone at NAB.

“(On Wednesday) he had a regular meeting with his senior leadership group where he spoke with them about the importance of this, and said he expects to see them in the office five days a week. They are the trainers and developers of our colleagues and the culture carriers of the organisation.”

While senior leaders are required to work at the office five days a week, NAB says it has introduced flexibility across its broader workforce, requiring that they spend a minimum of two or three days a week working from the office. A spokeswoman said this guideline has been in place since 2021.

“Ross also appreciates the need and value of flexibility in the workplace and regularly demonstrates that himself,” she said.

Mr McEwan’s comments were understood to have caught some senior leaders off guard. He has long been an advocate of workers returning to the office to revitalise pandemic-bashed CBDs and small businesses such as cafes and restaurants that rely on the commuter workforce.

In February last year he made it clear that companies need to do more to support a safe return to working to the office following pandemic lockdowns.

“Big cities are effectively closed at the moment, and this is having a massive impact on businesses, particularly small business,” Mr McEwan said at the time.

“I saw down Chapel Street and Bridge Road … nightclubs jammed with people with no masks, yet we’re being told it’s not safe to come into the workplace.

“I know they’ve [the state governments] been trying to protect everybody, but we are well and truly vaccinated. I think we need to change to ‘if you feel safe, let’s get into work’.”

Mr McEwan famously travelled to NAB’s new headquarters, at times being the only person working from the building, during the depths of the pandemic. This office has also been designed to support hybrid working.

When it was opened in late 2021, NAB group executive, technology and enterprise operations Patrick Wright said the bank had “championed flexible working for a long time, and the global pandemic accelerated the shift to hybrid working”.

“Working from home is often particularly good for individual work and focused time, but face-to-face interactions and our CBD offices remain vital,” Mr Wright said at the time.

“The new offices are designed for team meetings, strategy sessions and meetings with our customers. They are also designed to allow maximum flexibility, so we are set up for success today and for decades into the future.”

While hybrid working has become a new normal across many businesses it has required a nuanced approach, particularly among staff that have made big life decisions during the past three years such as buying homes in regional areas while keeping their city jobs to enjoy a more balanced lifestyle.

In a tight labour market, businesses have had to tread carefully in how they deploy their workforce, with more employees willing to sacrifice their jobs as part of a phenomenon known as the “great resignation” if they feel their work/life balance has become skewed.

To this end, some employers have been trialling four-day working weeks, with no cut to remuneration, to keep staff motivated and maintain a competitive edge in the war for talent.

Earlier this year, this masthead revealed that Telstra, Medibank, NIB, Grant Thornton and others have either drafted plans involving shortened working weeks with no loss of productivity or cementing their shift to hybrid working, sparked during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It comes as thousands of workers at 100 companies in the UK have started working a four-day week as the workplace revolution gathers pace across the world.

While it cuts work hours 20 per cent, an employee’s pay remains the same as if they were spending five days a week in the office, with the focus shifting to outcomes rather than presenteeism.

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady told this masthead in January that the “conventional Monday to Friday, nine-to-five isn’t required in a lot of situations anymore” and the company’s approach aimed at supporting people to work “where, when, and how they are the most engaged and productive”.

“For many, this is a combination of working from home, from our major hubs, even from a local office or anywhere,” Ms Brady said. “We know our people are at their best when they have choice. So, there is no talk of returning to previous ways of working at Telstra – we don’t waste time debating who should be in the office and when. We are all-in on hybrid. For us work is a thing you do, not a place you go.”