JPMorgan Chase Freezes Employee Comments Amid Return-To-Office Backlash

On Friday, JPMorgan Chase informed its 300,000 employees that the firm is poised to eradicate almost all work-from-home arrangements. The employee response was apparently so voluminous and negative that JPMorgan quickly blocked the comment feature on an in-house article explaining the policy change, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

According to Friday’s memo from JPMorgan’s operating committee – Chairman/CEO Jamie Dimon and 14 other officers — hybrid schedules comprising a mix of days at home and days in the office will vanish in a matter of weeks:

“Developing effective teams and maintaining a vibrant, healthy culture are clearly key for our success — and we believe best achieved through working together in person. This is why starting in March, we’ll be asking most employees currently on a hybrid schedule to return to the office five days a week…We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision. We think it is the best way to run the company.”

The executives said affected employees would be given 30 days notice before they’re expected to retire their workday pajamas and join their colleagues in JPMorgan offices. That wasn’t sufficient to head off a backlash, with employees venting via the article-comment feature on an in-house news site. In comments tied to their names, employees bemoaned the looming impact on their child-care and commuting expenses, or their work-life balance, according to the Wall Street Journal.

At least one employee of the country’s largest lender brainstormed that the solution was to form a union to resist returning to the office. JPMorgan quickly turned off the comment feature, but left many of the already-posted comments intact. 

JPMorgan’s Friday announcement is the latest step in the firm’s gradual extrication from Covid-era work-from-home arrangements. JPMorgan started bringing employees back to offices — at least on a partial basis — in June 2021. “[Work-from-home] doesn’t work for people who want to hustle, doesn’t work for culture, doesn’t work for idea generation,” Dimon told a conference in May of that year, throwing out a timeline that would prove inaccurate by more than three years: “By September it’ll look like just it did before. We are getting blowback about coming back internally, but that’s life.”

It wasn’t until 2023 that JPMorgan compelled all managing directors to come in five days a week, but it sounds like close to half of all employees are still spending some working hours at home. “As it stands, more than half of our workforce already comes into the office full-time,” JPMorgan leaders wrote in Friday’s internal announcement, which extolled the advantages of office working environments: