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JPMorgan Chase CEO: Back to the Office for Everyone!

So what happens when the pandemic is over? Do lots of us continue working from home? Or do the bosses want us back in the office? JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who has a quarter of a million people working for him, knows what he wants:

Coming out of the pandemic, Mr. Dimon is eager for other signs of normalcy. More JPMorgan employees will return to the office starting this month, though Mr. Dimon acknowledged they aren’t all happy about it. But the remote office, he said, doesn’t work for generating ideas, preserving corporate culture, competing for clients or “for those who want to hustle.”

“We want people back at work and my view is some time in September, October, it will look just like it did before,” Mr. Dimon said. “Yes, people don’t like commuting, but so what?”

To Mr. Dimon, commuting is better than the alternative. “I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings,” he added. “I’m done with it.”

Only time will tell, but I suspect there are more bosses like Dimon than we think. Dimon wants people back in the office by October, and in the year following that I'll bet that more and more bosses will come to agree with him.

50 thoughts on “JPMorgan Chase CEO: Back to the Office for Everyone!

  1. Jasper_in_Boston

    Easy for Jamie to say. He lives in $30 million co-op 2 miles from the office and has a company-provided driver. Also, this is about the least-surprising pandemic news I've read since learning that the Trump states are leading the country in vaccine defiance.

    1. Brett

      Reminds me of company owners who expect their workers to work as hard as they do, even though the owners get equity from their work and the workers just get their pay.

    1. Clyde Schechter

      Women I know who have worked for JPMorganChase tell me that there is very little harassment there. I have heard complaints of a glass ceiling, but not harassment.

    2. cld

      I was thinking it was a kind of Lawrence Welk version of Da Butt and was finding a whole new perspective on JP Morgan.

  2. Clyde Schechter

    I think we'll see a lot of variation on this. Some bosses will feel like Dimon. Others will feel that being present doesn't actually do the things that Dimon does, or that those things aren't so important for their particular business. And what boss wouldn't enjoy not having to pay rent on all that office space? There are lots of tradeoffs involved.

    Similarly for the employees. Some have loved working from home; some have hated it. Some say they would like to continue doing it, but not all the time. I think we're going to see a lot of variation and things will, over time, sort themselves out.

    I'd be very surprised if, a couple of years from now, things actually look like they did before the pandemic. It'll be an interesting mixture of in-office and at-home work, both within and across firms.

    1. doktorwise

      Yeah, this sounds about right to me. My company is taking the pandemic as an opportunity to reassess many aspects of the business, from their travel budget and work from home policies to their real estate footprint. They'll be downsizing and consolidating their NYC offices and deemphasizing individual workstations to make room for more meeting rooms and collaboration spaces. The idea is that there will be fewer people in the office at any one time, but they'll be more engaged with each other when they are.

    2. Jasper_in_Boston

      I'd be very surprised if, a couple of years from now, things actually look like they did before the pandemic.

      I'd be very surprised, if, five years from now, things don't look very much like they did before the pandemic. That's not to say I don't believe the pandemic will have created some lasting changes; it's just that I've been a skeptic of the narrative that says these changes will approach the societal, epochal sea change the Second World War brought about. There's been lots of breathless, hope-infused prognostication in recent months ("The office is dead!" "Cities are kaput!"). Meanwhile firms are beginning to formulate plans to get their workers back to the office, and homes in hot urban neighborhoods are once again seeing sharp price spikes. And traffic has returned with a vengeance (which will take the bloom off the rose from the idea of moving to the deep exurbs, at least for people who can't fully switch to remote work, which is to say "most of us").

  3. Brett

    No surprise there. Working in person does have its value (it builds camraderie and reduces loneliness at work), but it's also because a lot of bosses are insecure. If they can't keep their eyes potentially on all their workers in the same building, are they really working?

    I think it's age, too. I remember an older lawyer telling me once that he found longer hours less a burden the older he got, and those guys force it on everyone below them.

    1. JonF311

      Both my current boss (mother of two young kids) and my previous boss (a youngish single guy) have come around on the working from home thing and they've said that as long as the higher-ups are OK with it, they're OK with people having WFH days. Heck, even our department head has hinted at such leniency. Don't discount the fact that the people who actually supervise the rank and file have also found working from home a good deal.

  4. Salamander

    I'm somewhat concerned about the political factor. Folks who come into the office again are in a better position to schmooze the bosses, brown nose, make themselves visible. If you're at home getting things done, you're relatively invisible. For those aspiring to management positions, being seen actively MANAGING people face to face is important (unless you really mess it up.)

    And yes, my last out of the house-type job was in a toxic workplace.

  5. cmayo

    I suspect we'll see a lot more like this... from bosses who aren't good at being bosses.

    Note: being the public face/CEO is not really the same as being a boss. Too often, the roles are merged because that's how it was always done. It's usually a dumb model in real-world situations. In this particular example, why is Dimon the one making the decision? It should be the COO, even if Dimon has substantial say. (It's entirely plausible that the COO wants this, and that Dimon has veto powers; the normative "should" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence).

  6. Vincent Sheffer

    It is truly important to have people in the office together to spit ball face to face the latest banking scam. Definitely not something you can or, more importantly, should do over Zoom, what with all of the electronic tracks that leaves.

  7. rick_jones

    I look forward to a return to the office. I feel is facilitates maintaining the work/life split. And while I empathize with my colleagues with them, I also grow weary of hearing small children in meetings.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      Unless my employer wants to pay my rent, July home is not zoned for professional use.

      Also, what of people in the service industry who can't work remotely? Mechanics, baristas, nursing home aides... are they chopped liver to the combined bougie abilities of MAGA & OurRevolution?

  8. lawnorder

    I suspect that we will see a lot of sorting going on. Those who like working from home will tend to seek jobs with employers who encourage it, while those who don't want to work from home will apply to companies like JPMorgan.

    We will see who ends up with the better workforce.

  9. samgamgee

    The WFH year further exposes the lack of need for much of management. Constant virtual meetings peeled back the curtains from many management meetings which were about hanging out, flexing, and talking. Not as much fun when done remotely. The amount of talking required to keep middle and upper management busy is staggering.

    1. realrobmac

      For me daily, loosely structured virtual meetings were essential to keeping my team together during the pandemic. We needed time to talk about movies, TV shows, video games, whatever, like we would have when we got together in the office. But as I say below, I'm part of a very small company. In larger companies things can be very different.

      1. samgamgee

        All fair points, but as you noted it's for a small group. In those cases some facetime is good, in addition to the other meetings.

        Meetings are fine in many case, but the large corp I worked for seemed to have a layer of management for which we spent a lot of time prepping to review work so one group of management could talk to another, but nothing really change. A bunch of talking about talking. With the required large Powerpoint decks to provide slides they forgot in a day or two.

  10. realrobmac

    I'm a manager of a 6 person team at a small company. I also work remote most of the time myself. So my attitude about in-office time is quality over quantity. I would like my team to all show up for at least a few days a month (on the same days!) but on those days we are not going to all be working with our heads down and our office doors closed. We'll focus on collaboration, planning, and also (silly as it sounds) "team building" stuff like going out to lunch together and goofing off. My feeling is that is where the office is heading in our culture, but we'll see.

    1. illilillili

      Why is team-building important? I can't trust my co-worker to do their job unless I eat lunch with them?

  11. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    School districts will act similarly, I think. Having proved that for many students in-person attendance is not necessary for every student to achieve academic results at the high school level, they will persist in using the butts-in-seats definition of enrollment and granting credit. Enrollment, grading and credits are inequitable in every high school in the country, but no one really wants to change them. Too much institutional entropy.

    1. Leo1008

      "Having proved that for many students in-person attendance is not necessary for every student to achieve academic results at the high school level"

      not sure what I missed, but I thought the pandemic had gone a long way towards proving .... the opposite of this statement. I can't begin to recall the # of articles I've read or the # of radio/news segments I've heard talking about the damage that has been done to students through this year of the pandemic ....

      1. lawnorder

        It's clear that quite a few students benefit from regular school attendance and their progress suffered when they were forced into learn-from-home. On the other hand, there were also quite a few students who did just fine with learn-from-home. It's the all important distinction between "some" and "all" that makes it true both that students lost ground badly when they couldn't go to school and that students did just fine learning from home.

    2. Loxley

      Actually, I work for a school district and the pandemic has definitely hurt instruction. Some teachers adapt well to a virtual classroom, and motivated students ALWAYS do well, no matter the approach.

      But marginal and special needs students (Tiers II and III) took a nose dive, drop out rates went up, enrollment went down, as attendance became harder to take and enforce, and the personal interaction that some kids need was lessened.

      And we are a district that was actually pretty well prepared for virtual learning.

      But I also did not support bringing students back to face-to-face learning before ALL were vaccinated.

  12. ProgressOne

    We have massive facilities >95% empty of people, yet our revenue and profitability are at record highs. It's been quite an experiment, and it's amazing how things keep working out fine.

    Our management is encoraging people to go back to the office now. But walking around with a mask on at work all day is unappealing to me. I'd rather WFH, and I will continue to.

    If management would say to get in the building you have to prove you have a vaccine, then we could skip the masks. But businesses won't do this.

    Before long it will be almost only the unvaccinated people getting covid. Are we all going to continue to wear masks to protect those who refuse to get vaccinations? This quesiton is not just for work, it pertains to everywhere.

    1. golack

      Eventually, especially once the common foe is gone, communication will break down. That doesn't mean everyone should go back to pre-covid work settings, but lockdown rules won't be sustainable. It varies by situation, and it will take awhile to adjust.

  13. golack

    Just a reminder--for all of those who can work from home, a lot of people are out there to allow you to do that.

  14. Loxley

    “We want people back at work and my view is some time in September, October, it will look just like it did before,” Mr. Dimon said. “Yes, people don’t like commuting, but so what?”

    Dimon is a self-entitledAssHat who been a parasite on America for years- who cares WTF he thinks? If you work for his firm, I assume that get up every day and prepare for a good reaming....

    Dimon is the perfect example of someone (like Trump) who thinks that because he made bunches of money in America- a nation built on making exploitation easier thanks to people like Dimon- somehow makes you smart.

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