Jamie Dimon has a very specific image of the WFH employee

JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, said a lot about work at home.

The banking executive has repeatedly explained why he thinks that workers are not as effective when they are not at the office and how it can have a negative impact on business culture.

Take all its comments together, and a very specific image of the home work employee emerges: they work widely in corporate jobs, are inattentive and are sometimes difficult to reach.

“I think our employees will be happier over time,” said Dimon in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday, referring to the mandate to return to the JPMorgan office. “And the youngest will learn the right way, it’s a learning system. And you can’t learn to work on your basement.”

He added the warning that WFH can be effective in certain areas, such as virtual call centers. However, this reflects how skeptical of a coveted advantage – for some, a requirement – that many employees are looking for in their work.

JPMORGAN published a mandate of return to work of five days for most of its employees in January, and Dimon said in the interview with Bloomberg TV that 10% of JPMorgan was distant.

In his annual shareholder letter last year, Dimon said that JPM had experienced significant growth in the last decade while allowing certain “bad habits to develop”.

“Home work has exacerbated the situation by hampering innovation, slowing decision-making, inhibiting information sharing, reducing efficiency and creating more policy and bureaucracy,” he wrote.

A JPMorgan spokesperson did not respond to a request for comments.

Here is what Dimon said else about home work.

WFH suffocates innovation

Dimon said that remote work does not allow a flow of exchange of ideas that work in person can, and that it ultimately slows innovation in a business.

“Remote work eliminates a lot of spontaneous learning and creativity because you do not meet people on the coffee machine, talk to customers in unforeseen scenarios or do not travel to meet customers and employees to have comments on your products and services,” he wrote in an annual shareholder letter in 2021, explaining the “serious weaknesses” to work in the “virtual world”.

Remote work is bad for young professionals

Remote work is particularly bad for emerging professionals, according to the Banking CEO.

In an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business at the end of February, Dimon said that WFH did not work in his business and that “young people are left behind” because of this. The effects are not immediate but “cumulative,” he said.

“It is not the first month you work. It is by the second year, you have fewer people; you are putting less missions; you know less what is happening; you have fewer conversations with water cooler or cafeteria – so that leaves them behind,” said Dimon. “I won’t do that.”

In the 2021 shareholders’ letter, the CEO declared that professionals learn through mentors or learning, which “is almost impossible to reproduce in the world of zoom”.

WFH workers are unexpected during meetings

One of Dimon’s apparent frustrations to work at home is the way his employees seem to be inattentive during virtual meetings.

“Many of you were on the fucking zoom and you were doing the following,” said Dimon in a disclosed audio recording that was obtained by Bi. “Looking at your mail, sending you SMS to what an asshole is, without paying attention, not to your belongings.”

He again echoed the feeling during the event in Stanford.

“While I was talking, there were 12 people in the room and four people on the screen, and the four people on the screen were on their phone,” he said about a zoom meeting in which he was. “And you think you are focusing and learning?”

Only office workers complain of RTO

Dimon declared during his cat Stanford that the majority of American workers had never worked far away, pointing to doctors, firefighters and liberators, among others.

“It is only these people in the middle who complain a lot,” he said, referring to white passes.

What about a hybrid schedule?

“And don’t give me this shit that work at home works,” said the CEO in the leak Audio recording. “I call a lot of people on Friday, and there is no fucking person you can get.”