Jamie Dimon continued his crusade against remote work this week, launching another verbal barrage against the Zoom legions.
Working-from-home gurus told Business Insider that JPMorgan’s CEO made some good points — but didn’t justify a full return to the office.
Dimon told the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday that WFH simply “doesn’t work” for many younger employees, as they require in-person training from more senior colleagues.
“They learn by going on a sales call with you,” he said. “They learn by seeing you make a mistake. They learn by how you deal with the mistake.”
The billionaire banker also said that interacting and collaborating in person helps to develop emotional intelligence, and effective management is virtually impossible over video calls.
“There’s very little follow-up, a lot more game playing, you know, rope-a-dope type of politics,” Dimon said. “A lot of people aren’t paying attention at all.”
Miming someone looking down at their phone, he said that “people on the Zoom, they’re texting each other.”
“If you go to a meeting with me, you’ve got my full friggin’ attention the whole time,” he added.
The boss of America’s largest bank by assets issued a pointed reminder that a company’s first priority should be to make its customers happy, not its employees.
“How would you feel if it was all about making the employee happy, as opposed to getting your well-cooked steak or your martini on time?” he asked.
Best of both worlds
Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor and cofounder of WFH Research, told Business Insider by email that Dimon made “some good points.”
When it comes to “younger employees in an apprenticeship business like finance, you probably want them in three or four days a week,” he said.
Yet Bloom argued that outside a few specialist roles like traders, five days in the office isn’t necessary.
Many workers, especially those who are five-plus years into their career, “need a day a week to read, think, write performance reviews, presentations, client pitches, etc,” he said.
“This stuff is best done in a quiet environment, and that is typically at home,” he added.
Bloom said WFH skeptics often pick on fully remote work as a “straw man to destroy,” and fail to explain why hybrid work isn’t a viable compromise.
“Elon Musk is a master of this,” he said, adding that hybrid is a “pretty amazing system and hard to beat.”
“It’s like saying you don’t drink because if you drink 10 beers you pass out — well, you can drink one beer and enjoy it,” Bloom said.
Ravi Gajendran, a leadership and management professor at Florida International University, agreed that some of Dimon’s concerns are “perhaps less relevant in a hybrid world.”
Gajendran said the bank chief’s comments were too focused on the downsides of remote work. He cited research showing the “benefits of flexibility outweigh the costs of isolation for key outcomes such as job satisfaction, commitment, performance, and turnover intentions.”
“If remote work makes employees more satisfied, committed, and productive, that should ultimately benefit customers,” Gajendran added.
Long-running battle
Dimon has been railing against remote work for years now. He’s warned that it hinders innovation and information sharing, slows decision-making, reduces efficiency, and fosters politics and bureaucracy.
“Remote work eliminates much spontaneous learning and creativity because you don’t run into people at the coffee machine, talk with clients in unplanned scenarios, or travel to meet with customers and employees for feedback on your products and services,” he wrote in his shareholder letter for 2021.
Dimon — who ordered a firm-wide, full-time return to the office roughly a year ago — issued a colorful tirade against WFH in a leaked audio recording obtained by Business Insider early last year.
“I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of,” he said.
Dimon is far from the only business leader to oppose remote work.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last year that he learned a great deal from listening to older coworkers argue in the early years of his career. “How do you recreate that in this new thing?” he queried.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said it’s unfair that the “laptop classes” expect to stay at home while others go into work to make their cars, deliver their food, and fix their homes.
The world’s richest man said the WFH crowd is so “detached from reality” that it gives “Marie Antoinette vibes.”
