BNP Paribas Role - Work/life balance

Basicilly

Hi,

I'm working in a busy fund administrator as investor relations account manager. There is a culture of working late although I manage to get out most evenings on time with a lot of head turning of my managers.

I am thinking of moving companies as i have young children and want to have time with them. I was wondering if there are any fund administrators that are recommended for a better work life balance. There is a role at BNP which looks interesting. Just wondering if anyone has experience there and what the hours are like or if you would recommend any other companies.

Any comments or PMs would be great

Cheers

Irish_Elect_Eng

Ok, I know nothing about your role and cannot offer options other companies.

But if you enjoy working there, you could change the culture where you work.

There is a mountain of literature on how those with a good work / life balance are much more effective employees and how not getting your work done in normal hours is more reflective of poor planning and time management than productivity or dedication. Working with your manager to improve the culture is a positive approach to the problem, succeed and you will be a very popular person across the team and probably seen as a potential manager by upper management.

It is actually in the interest of the company to sort out this problem. And the expectation should be set from the top-down. As a manager, I make a point leaving on time each evening (Even thought I often have meeting after hrs with US or early with China) In addition to my stated preference for the team to stick to <45 Hrs per week, this gives the team implicit permission through example that they should be leaving on time. If I am in the office after hours and any of my team are still there I ask them why and if I can help complete the task.

Due to the nature of the work we do, my team are all overloaded with more work than they could ever get done in any week, so given that they can never clear their desks, they should go home on time and start fresh in the morning.

Have a think about it, you can be an agent of change, but do so in partnership with you manager, show him the benefits of getting 39 focused & productive hours from a motivated ream, rather than 60 weary hours from a disengaged workforce.

Best of Luck

somesoldiers

I work in hedge fund admin also though not in IR, they guys in our place don't seem to be there that late except maybe at month end. Outside of that and rare occasions there should be no need for people to work late and we value the work life balance. I myself normally work 730-4 but my role suits this.

Can't say about BNP but we are also in IFSC & hiring. PM if interested and I'll have a look at the open positions on Monday if you like

Basicilly

Irish_Elect_Eng wrote: »

Ok, I know nothing about your role and cannot offer options other companies.

But if you enjoy working there, you could change the culture where you work.

There is a mountain of literature on how those with a good work / life balance are much more effective employees and how not getting your work done in normal hours is more reflective of poor planning and time management than productivity or dedication. Working with your manager to improve the culture is a positive approach to the problem, succeed and you will be a very popular person across the team and probably seen as a potential manager by upper management.

It is actually in the interest of the company to sort out this problem. And the expectation should be set from the top-down. As a manager, I make a point leaving on time each evening (Even thought I often have meeting after hrs with US or early with China) In addition to my stated preference for the team to stick to <45 Hrs per week, this gives the team implicit permission through example that they should be leaving on time. If I am in the office after hours and any of my team are still there I ask them why and if I can help complete the task.

Due to the nature of the work we do, my team are all overloaded with more work than they could ever get done in any week, so given that they can never clear their desks, they should go home on time and start fresh in the morning.

Have a think about it, you can be an agent of change, but do so in partnership with you manager, show him the benefits of getting 39 focused & productive hours from a motivated ream, rather than 60 weary hours from a disengaged workforce.

Best of Luck

Thanks for the message. Completely agree about the value of teams not working late unless it is really necessary. Similar to yourself I mostly leave on time and encourage my team to do it also. I have discussed the advantages with my boss on several occasions and she is onboard with the idea as she can see the results. We have taken on 4 more clients with no additional headcount (replaced a senior with an admin in fact) and streamlined processes to manage the workload.

The challenge we have is that my bosses manager seems to pressurise my boss and openly makes an issue of it to my team regularly. The arguement she makes is that if other teams work late it isn't fair on them if we leave on time. I have some sympathy for the argument and we offer to help other teams when we have capacity but i feel for some this has become cultural rather than necessary.

Approaching this in a solution oriented manor sounds like a good direction to take. Its a pity as we feel we have built a strong and motivated team (2 out of 4 are up for promotion) but not staying late is brought up so often.

Thanks for your thoughs on this, i will certainly take them on board.

bilbot79

I work in fund administration and sometimes it frustrates me that people skip out on time instead of staying back to help the team. It's a long hours industry imo. Especially if in a US company.

As much as people think its more productive to leave early I think more often than not they are leaving some particular piece of responsibility to someone else.

somesoldiers

Many people believe that them staying late makes them look good, it doesn't. Most senior management will see through this and it will reflect badly on the team lead's ability to cope particularly if they are deemed to have adequate resources. You need to assess where the bottle necks are and work with support teams to better manage these.

For instance I manage a support team, our role is to identify problems particularly at busy times of the month and work with our existing systems or build our own solutions, reducing both time and risks associated with processes.
A team came to me yesterday, they had received an instruction from their client to send out a letter to each of 500 investors in a fund by the weekend. Their solution would normally have been to get every one in the team to do a few, as they were so busy they would have to come in the weekend to do this or they come to us and I spent 2 hours writing a programme to generate these. Job done, no weekend OT needed.

I have worked in funds for 15 years and I just see people doing so many tasks all the time that there are a dozen better, faster, less risky ways of doing. Instead people get caught up doing something the way they know how rather than stepping back and thinking about better approaches. Often times teams don't get the training or even the time to sit back which is also an issue. Everyone that sits at a computer has the greatest resource they will ever need at their finger tips and many don't know how to use it properly.

kala85

What exactly does fund admin involve on a day to day basis?

bilbot79

@Kala it involves a multitude of things that would take too long to go into on my smartphone. My area is Aml.

@somesoldiers I agree with you somewhat and where system related solutions can be found then they definitely should. However if the job involves, as mine does, forensic scrutiny of lengthy legal documents there is no whizz kid program that can fix it. Furthermore, during normal business hours you are being pulled from pillar to post for everything else and the 'quiet' time becomes invaluable.

listermint

bilbot79 wrote: »

I work in fund administration and sometimes it frustrates me that people skip out on time instead of staying back to help the team. It's a long hours industry imo. Especially if in a US company.

As much as people think its more productive to leave early I think more often than not they are leaving some particular piece of responsibility to someone else.

Wrong.

If you can't complete the tasks set out in the working hours your management are taking on too much work or you need more staff.

Thats a managment issue and frankly shouldnt be tolerated.

Yes we'd all love to live in dream world where you never work late ever but thats not reality. There will be occasions where people need to give a dig out and put some extra in for a project or fire fighting. However if this is regular and also an expectation then someone isn't doing their job properly planning accordingly.

somesoldiers

bilbot79 wrote: »

@Kala it involves a multitude of things that would take too long to go into on my smartphone. My area is Aml.

@somesoldiers I agree with you somewhat and where system related solutions can be found then they definitely should. However if the job involves, as mine does, forensic scrutiny of lengthy legal documents there is no whizz kid program that can fix it. Furthermore, during normal business hours you are being pulled from pillar to post for everything else and the 'quiet' time becomes invaluable.

Do you not have a legal department to do this for you?if you are the legal department then these should be just like reading the newspaper to the rest of us?

ChikiChiki

bilbot79 wrote: »

I work in fund administration and sometimes it frustrates me that people skip out on time instead of staying back to help the team. It's a long hours industry imo. Especially if in a US company.

As much as people think its more productive to leave early I think more often than not they are leaving some particular piece of responsibility to someone else.

Your company needs to hire more resources then. It shouldn't be any concern of yours when someone finishes work on time as agreed per their contracted hours. There is more to life than work.

ligerdub

I hear Standard Life are a good crowd to work for, and have flexitime.

I also hear Mercer aren't pushy on expected hours and have flexitime. I don't think it's considered as good a place to work though.

The key for you seems to be balance so I think a flexitime operations suits you best. That way it's not in the companies interest for you to work beyond your contracted hours.

Basicilly

Thanks for all the posts.

@bilbot, I try to leave on team each day but if my team work late I also work late where creche etc allow but I make a point of having a team goal to get out on team each day. We had a new member on our team from another team over the past 6 months and he regularly mentions the good organisation and encouragement for process optimisation on the team as key differences with the new team. He now gets on time most days also. The issue I have is that this is seen as a negative thing rather than successful at management level, and reflects a cultural stance. I will try to encourage change as long as I am there but feel I'm not getting too far at the moment with this - although my boss did say she was reading an article about leaving on time on friday...

@Ligerdub thanks for the heads up on standard life. I'll keep an eye on roles there.

Sounds like BNP would be ok for work/life balance and as a general rule the american companies may be more likely to expect more overtime

Cheers all

Irish_Elect_Eng

Well done, you are having a positive impact if your boss is informing herself through research.

HBR has a number of good articles on Work-Life Balance / Engagement / Presentisim / Retention that may be useful to share with your manager. As with all such initiatives, focus on what is in it for the company, not just the employee.

Having an engaged team has very tangible benefits for the business, such as improved retention, higher quality work,improved compliance, improved ethical decision making and better bottom line profits.

I had a similar challenge where our company did not allow flexibility in working hours and I had to stick my head out and give it to my team to prove through experience that the world would not stop if a few people were not working 9-5. Now everybody whose role allows it can avail of the option.

Some managers reputations are built on their personal results, other managers build their reputations on building teams that get the results. Managers become leaders when they serve their teams not the goals, and from my experience unsurprisingly they all had teams that met the goals consistantly.