The chair of Lloyds of London is encouraging workers to come into its City of London building for at least three days a week, and not only from Tuesday to Wednesday.
Bruce Carnegie-Brown, the chairman of the world’s largest insurance market, said he wanted to avoid the scenario in which brokers were taking “long weekends” every week, and Mondays and Fridays weren’t properly covered for clients.
He said: “We’ve got to make sure that we still work across the working week and that we don’t impede our ability to serve customers by the bookends of the week, defaulting to being a long weekend for everybody every week.
The current average for Lloyds of London staff is two-and-a-half days a week, but it is anticipated that the newly refurbished underwriting room, with more modern furnishings and improved technology, will attract more staff into the office when it comes online later this month.
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Carnegie-Brown said his aim was for representatives of all 85 members of the insurance market to be present throughout the week on the main floor.
He did, however, acknowledge that there had been real gains in working from home “in terms of people’s sense of wellbeing and fulfilment” and underlined he was not trying to encourage a return to five days a week in the office working.
He said: “What we’re trying to do now is to make sure that everybody who is an underwriter at Lloyd’s has at least one box on the ground floor … it should make the ground floor much busier and buzzier as a result.”
Amazon, Google and Zoom have been among the companies pressing employees to return to the office for more time in recent months. Prior to that banks such as Lloyds Banking Group and Citigroup had been asking for more office attendance. HSBC has announced plans to relocate from Canary Wharf because of the reduced need for office space.
Carnegie-Brown said Lloyds of London was entering a very active period because of global risks associated with climate change. “What we’ve identified is a huge range of risks out there that seem to be greater at the moment than the average. And so we are seeing our clients buying more protection,” he said.
“I see quite a lot of natural catastrophe protection being bought, particularly wind storms, but increasingly around things like wildfires, and renewable energy is increasingly a big part of our business as more and more infrastructure for renewable energy are being built and therefore being insured on the transition to net zero.”
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