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Citigroup CEO: ‘We do want people’ back at work — but flexibility is ‘also very important’

In a new interview with Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser said the bank wants workers back in the office in some capacity, noting the "tremendous value" that comes from in-person connections. However, she said Citigroup will offer workers more flexibility than they had before the pandemic.

Video transcript

JANE FRASER: We do want people back. We do think there is tremendous value in being together. It's important for apprenticeship. We can see it with our kids. Anyone has been doing home schooling, it's just-- the kids learn more in school than they do in the home environment. They learning other things, important things at home. But it's just easier. I think it's the same way for, you know, in the work environment, we learn a lot from each other.

Helps for coaching. It helps for collaboration. It helps others. But flexibility is also very important to our people. And so for us, it's a balance of the two that we want to give folk. Come back together, but we're going to give you more flexibility than it was before. And I would say that that seems to be working.

I know, it worked for me when I was a working mother. I needed that type of flexibility myself. And I didn't feel that it needed to interfere with my effectiveness as a professional. So I think that that's how we're looking at it. I would say that's been successful for us in being a magnet. And some were attractive for people to work.

That said, right now, the labor supply is incredibly tight. And so when we're looking at-- we look at people who are working in an operations center, they've haven't had to commute, they haven't had the costs of that. They don't necessarily want to come in every single day. And they've got the setup for a call center right at home. And, you know, we can see whether they're being productive or not or need to come in for more efficiency.

So I think, again, by mid-next year, some of the supply-- some of the labor supply will have worked its way through. But it's a very tight market at the moment. And it is-- one topic we talk about when I jump on the phone with our CEO clients which we do all the time, we're no longer talking return to office, we're talking tight supply chain. And I think it will be the first topic for a while longer.