In This Story
JPMorgan Chase (JPM-1.06%) CEO Jamie Dimon is still answering questions about his return-to-office mandate.
In an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business last week, Dimon reiterated his stance, staying remote work “just doesn’t work in our business.” And he said it’s “people in the middle who complain a lot about it.”
Dimon got on the topic after a graduate student asked a question regarding his leaked, expletive-filled remarks at a company town hall about the end of hybrid work — for which the CEO has since apologized. “Obviously I should never curse,” he said, before continuing to explain his reasoning behind the company’s mandate that employees return to the office full-time.
The executive explained that JPMorgan tried to let managers make the decisions for their teams about their work schedules. “The fact is, they simply didn’t exercise managerial skill,” he said. As a result, younger employees were being left behind. “We can prove a little bit of it, and that is cumulative,” he said. “It’s not like the first month you’re working, it’s by the second year you have less people, you’re put on less assignments, you know less what’s going on, you have less conversations at the water cooler or the cafeteria.”
Dimon also shared an anecdote of a recent Zoom call where people were on their phones while he was speaking, which wouldn’t happen if the meeting had been in person.
“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,” he added. “Where did you get your Amazon (AMZN+1.63%) packages from? Your beef? Your meat? Your vodka? Where did you get the diapers from?”
“You got UPS (UPS-3.01%) and FedEx (FDX-1.28%) and manufacturers and agriculture and hospitals and cities and schools and nurses and sanitation and firemen and military” working in person, he continued. “It’s only these people in the middle who complain a lot about it.”
The CEO has said many times that if people want to quit over the policy, they’re welcome to. He repeated those comments at Stanford, saying “You have a free market. You know, you can do one thing, I can do another.
When Dimon called workers back to the office earlier this year, a small group of employees started a petition asking the company to reconsider the mandate. Dimon dismissed the effort immediately, saying he wasn’t budging.
At Stanford last week, he did say he is keeping the company’s call centers remote. “We did it to see if they’d be effective,” Dimon said. “They’re highly effective. They work from home.”