JPMorgan Chase (^JJQ) CEO Jamie Dimon is making it very clear that he is sick of the complaints regarding the company’s new return-to-office mandate, which went into effect this month.
The new mandate requires employees to work in the office five days a week, which has sparked tension at the company. Some employees even started a petition on coworker.org last month demanding that the company retain its hybrid work model. The petition has so far garnered over 1,900 signatures.
During a company town hall meeting last month, Dimon said that he doesn’t care how many people signed the petition, the return-to-office mandate will not be changed.
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He also said that employees should not be mad at him since they have a choice about whether or not they want to continue working at JPMorgan.
“I’ve had it with this kind of stuff,” said Dimon. “I’ve been working seven days a (expletive) week since COVID, and I come in, and — where is everybody else? They’re here, they’re there, the Zooms, and the Zoomers don’t show up.”
Dimon later apologized in an interview with CNBC for cursing during the town hall meeting, but doubled down on the company’s return-to-office mandate.
“I completely respect people that don’t want to go to the office all five days a week,” said Dimon. “That’s your right. It’s my right. It’s a citizen’s right. But they should respect that the company is going to decide what’s good for the clients, the company, etc., not an individual. And so, I’m not being mean, they can get a job elsewhere.”
Jamie Dimon is not done addressing RTO frustrations
Now that the mandate is in full effect, Dimon has more to say about people having an issue with working in the office five days a week.
In a recent interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Dimon said that the “people in the middle” are the ones often complaining about return-to-office mandates. He also seemingly highlighted that during the COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans were working in person.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., during a Bloomberg Television interview on the sidelines of the JPMorgan Tech Stars Leadership Forum in London on Oct. 2, 2023.
“If you work in a restaurant, you’ve got to be in. You all may not know this, but 60% of Americans worked the whole time,” said Dimon. “Where did you get your Amazon packages from? Your beef, your meat, your vodka? Where did you get the diapers from? You got UPS and FedEx and manufacturers and agriculture and hospitals and cities and schools and nurses and sanitation and firemen and military. They all worked. It’s only these people in the middle who complain a lot about it.”
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He also highlighted that remote work can hinder the ability for employees to focus and learn during meetings.
“It doesn’t work in our business,” said Dimon when speaking about remote work. “And for culture, you talk about culture, it’s impossible to do culture that way.”
Return-to-office is off to a slow start in 2025
As more companies across the country are pushing their employees to make a full return to working in the office five days a week, after allowing them to work from home during the pandemic, it appears that this effort is off to a slow start this year.
More Labor:
- Meta’s recent layoffs take an unexpected turn
- Goldman Sachs defends a work policy shareholders fear
- Dell CEO sends a stern wake-up call to employees
According to recent data from Placer.ai, nationwide office visits in February were 36.3% lower than they were before the pandemic in February 2019.
During that same time period, New York and Miami saw the smallest declines in office visits. Office visits in New York only shrunk by about 17% last month, while office visits in Miami decreased by 20%.
Chicago and San Francisco saw the largest decrease in office visits last month, when compared to February 2019. Office visits in Chicago dipped by a whopping 48.5%, while San Francisco saw a 47.5% decline.
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