JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon defended his position against remote work to a group of college students, telling them that telework “doesn’t work in our business.”
Dimon, 68, said he “had enough” of virtual working when speaking to students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business last week.
A student asked the bank executive about his leaked and expletive remarks from a company town hall addressing the firm’s end of hybrid work, which has become a common workplace practice in recent years, particularly after the coronavirus pandemic.
He was asked by the student for advice on how to address the issue of virtual work.
Dimon responded that the only group of people frustrated with the return to the office are “the people in the middle,” such as corporate office workers.
“If you work in a restaurant, you’ve got to be in,” he said. “You all may not know this, but 60% of Americans worked the whole time.”
“Where did you get your Amazon packages from? Your beef, your meat, your vodka? Where did you get the diapers from?” he continued, referring to people who have never had the option to work remotely, even during the pandemic.
Dimon added: “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.”
Some workers in both the government and the private sector who have been permitted to work remotely since the pandemic have been critical of return-to-office mandates in recent years.
There have been some who have even quit over the return to the office requirement, which Dimon said he respects.
“We have 10% of our people working at home full-time,” Dimon said. “We put virtual call centers in Baltimore and Detroit. We did it to see if they’d be effective. They’re highly effective. They work from home. They’re mostly minorities. That’s why we did it. It’s a home run. So I’m not against it where it works … I also completely defend your right to say, ‘I don’t want to.’”
“But I don’t defend your right to tell me what JPMorgan’s gonna do,” he added. “So you have a free market. You can do one thing, I can do another. That’s what’s called a free market.”
JPMorgan Chase had earlier announced that employees must return to the office five days a week, beginning this month.
Dimon also said he wanted people back in the office because “younger people are being left behind.”
“It’s not like the first month you’re working,” he said. “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 in the cafeteria. So it’s leaving them behind. I won’t do that. And to have the younger people coming in but not their bosses, I have a problem with that too. And then people say to me always, ‘well, it works for me.’”
He also stressed the importance of communication with coworkers in the office that may not be possible with remote work.
“As a management tool, when we meet in the morning, we talk, we have these debates, all day long we’re talking. ‘Hey, no, I checked on that, you’re right about that, here’s what I think we should do.’ All day long, constant update, constant share of information. So I tell you, it doesn’t work in our business. And for culture, you talk about culture, it’s impossible to do culture,” Dimon said.
Dimon also said people are often distracted by their phones during Zoom meetings.