Leaked Audio Reveals JP Morgan CEO Going OFF on Young Staffers Wanting to Work from Home
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JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon torched young staffers for wanting to work from home, tearing into employees who opposed the bank’s mandate requiring all hybrid workers to return to the office full-time by March.
The Wall Street firm has been ahead of peers in bringing workers back. The bank called traders back to their desks as early as late 2020, well ahead of rivals. Managing directors were required to be in full-time by April 2023.
The firm’s aggressive push for in-person work hasn’t exactly hurt its bottom line, per Fox Business — JP Morgan recently reported a record $43.74 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, with profits soaring to $14 billion.
Nevertheless in a recent petition around 950 employees was an attempt to challenge JP Morgan’s latest move to scrap hybrid work.
Dimon, who has long been vocal about his disdain for remote work, doubled down on his position in a rant now exclusively made public by Barron’s, making it clear there is no room for debate:
A lot of you were on the fucking Zoom and you were doing the following, okay? You know, looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an asshole the other person is, okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff, you know? And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness, it does, okay?
And when I found out that people are doing that — you don’t do that at my goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention, you got my focus, I don’t bring my goddamn phone, I’m not sending texts to people, okay? It simply doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision making. And don’t give me the shit that work from home Friday works. I call a lot of people on Friday. There’s not a goddamn person to get a hold of.
The young generation is being damaged by this. That may or may not be in your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They’re being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people — In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. Every area should be looking to be 10 percent more efficient. If I was running a department for 100 people, I guarantee you if I wanted to, I could run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you. I could do it in my sleep. And the notion of these bureaucracies, “I need more people, I can’t get it done.” No, because you’re filling out requests that don’t need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don’t need to go to —
I can’t stand it anymore. Now, you have a choice. You don’t have to work at JP Morgan. So the people of you who don’t want to work at the company, that’s fine with me. I’m not mad at you. Don’t be mad at me. It’s a free country. You can walk on your feet. But this company is going to set our own standards and do it our own way. And I’ve had it with this kind of stuff.
I come in, you know, I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since Covid. And I come in and I’m like, where’s everybody else? But they’re here and there and the Zooms and the Zooms don’t show up. And people say they didn’t get stuff. So that’s not how you run a great company.
We didn’t build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi-disease shit that everybody else does.
