JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon is not a fan of hybrid working—so much so, that he’s even taking issue with the few days Washington, D.C. federal employees work from home.
While speaking on stage about the state of politics in America at The Atlantic Festival in the nation's capital, Dimon said he’d “make Washington, D.C. go back to work.”
“I can't believe, when I come down here, the empty buildings. The people who work for you not going to the office,” Dimon added. "That bothers me. I don't allow that at JP[Morgan].”
“Well, we know what he would do on day one as president,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic responded.
“Yeah, you’re all going back to work,” Dimon joked.
In reality, JPMorgan employees and D.C. federal workers have been subjected to similar return-to-office mandates lately.
Currently, workers at most agencies have to be in the office at least three days a week.
According to a report to Congress from the Office of Management and Budget last month, only about half of federal employees even have the option to work remotely—the other half are already working entirely in person.
Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, who has repeatedly called out the government's lax RTO, has even ordered her own city workers to return to the office four days a week.
Likewise, JPMorgan workers are expected to work from the office three days a week—except for those in leadership roles and in certain divisions like trading, who are required to work from their cubicles full time.
Fortune has reached out to Mayor Bowser's office. JPMorgan declined to comment.
The finance industry isn’t a big fan of working from home
It’s hardly surprising that Dimon thinks D.C.’s federal workers should be subject to stricter RTO mandates. The CEO—and the finance industry, for that matter—have been among the loudest opposers of remote working.
After over a year in and out of lockdowns, JPMorgan was one of the first major employers to start ushering its employees “back regularly” to their desks in June 2021.
Since then, the investment bank has taken an increasingly strict stance against working from home including using badge swipe data to enforce in-office quotas.
Meanwhile, its CEO Dimon has consistently berated remote working for suppressing “spontaneous idea generation” and being incompatible with managing a team.
"I completely understand why someone doesn't want to commute an hour and a half every day, totally got it," he told The Economist. "Doesn't mean they have to have a job here either."
Likewise, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon famously referred to remote working as an “aberration,” and has insisted employees return to in-person work full-time.
Meanwhile Citigroup, HSBC and Barclays have all ramped up their in office requirements and made it tricker for Wall Street to dial in from home—partly because of new Finra rules.
Even banking giants which promised to keep flexible working forever, including Santander and Nationwide, are backtracking and launching RTO mandates.
Dimon and D.C.’s federal office have the same issue: RTO dodgers
If D.C.’s federal office buildings are as “empty” as Dimon says, despite the government’s in-office mandate, then it points to one thing: RTO dodgers—and it’s a conundrum Dimon, the government, and many CEOs share.
In London, employers are asking staff to come in to the office for 3.1 days a week on average—employees are actually showing up only 2.7 days.
Likewise, in New York workers are being asked to work from the office for 3.7 days of the week—but are only showing up for 3.1 days.
The report from the think tank Centre for Cities highlighted that this pattern is followed in most major global cities, including Toronto, Singapore and Sydney.
To that end, Dimon himself has had to send out numerous exasperated reminders to JPMorgan's workforce about his own company’s in-office policy, while threatening “corrective action” for workers who were still failing to comply with the mandate some years after it was announced.
