Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has finally addressed his rant adamantly defending his decision to bring his employees back to the office five days a week.
Dimon apologized for cursing during the viral tirade at his firm’s town hall last month in Columbus, Ohio, but he largely stood by his arguments against remote work at his company.
‘I do town halls all around the world and as you know I mope sometimes. I should never curse, ever,’ he said during a CNBC interview at a recent JPMorgan conference in Miami Beach.
‘I shouldn’t get angry or stuff like that. And the gentleman asked a long question and I answered the question. I tried to give a lot of detail which I think he’s entitled to because I’ve never, ever fired anyone because they asked a question like that,’ Dimon added.
‘I completely respect people who don’t want to go to the office all five days of the week. That’s your right, it’s my right, it’s a citizen’s right,’ he continued.
‘But they should respect that the company is going to decide what’s good for the clients, the company, et cetera – not the individual. I’m not being mean, they can get a job elsewhere. I understand that. It may make total sense for them to do that.’
‘I’m not against work from home. I’m against where it doesn’t work,’ he said.
JPMorgan employees on hybrid schedules are set to return to the office full time in March. Employees were also given 30 days of notice.
Jamie Dimon, the longtime CEO of JPMorgan Chase, sought to downplay his expletive-laden rant last month trashing remote work. He apologized for cursing in the presence of his employees and said he’s only against remote work ‘where it doesn’t work’
JPMorgan employees on hybrid schedules are set to return to the office full time in March. Employees were also given 30 days of notice (Pictured: JPMorgan building in London, United Kingdom)
Dimon’s more polite take on remote work comes after audio leaked of him shouting down an employee who asked a question about the return-to-office mandate at the February 12 town hall.
Among other things, Dimon was furious that 950 staffers had signed a petition against the new five-day in-office policy.
‘Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that f***ing petition,’ he said.
Nicolas Welch, a tech support analyst at the bank since 2017, was the one who asked the question that prompted this angry response from Dimon.
The self-confessed ‘old hillbilly’ said dragging everyone back to the office went against the firm’s ‘good conscience’.
Dimon responded with the now-notorious eight-minute expletive-laden rant against working from home, and Welch claimed he was briefly fired as a result.
JPMorgan workers nervously laughed as their colleague explained he wanted to dive into the subject that was on everyone’s mind.
‘No problem, no problem! Go ahead, yeah,’ Dimon responded.
JPMorgan techie Nicolas Welch, whose question at a company town hall triggered an extraordinary work-from-home rant by the chief executive, claims he was briefly fired over it
Dimon responded with a long rant against working from home, and defended his earlier order dragging all employees back into the office five days a week
Welch began by touting the success the bank had navigating the Covid pandemic from home and how effectively his team functioned during that time.
Then about two years ago, Welch explained, a hybrid work mandate came in and he and his team were brought back into the office three days a week.
The employee said that the return order seemed pointless as his team had members scattered from India to Argentina and never interacted in person.
‘I had difficulty at the time because I couldn’t in good conscience support my team, which did not really need an office to operate,’ he said.
‘My team had no reason to do so, but I knew that if I couldn’t support it, I couldn’t in good conscience manage this team to do so.’
Welch said the biggest issue was that the demand to come back to the office part time wasn’t justified in a way that made sense, and went against the longstanding culture of JPMorgan.
‘My managers also couldn’t manage that, they could not speak to it either. The answers that we got at the time were effectively “because I said so,”‘ he said.
‘In ten years of working here, that’s not an environment that’s ever even been close to it. Our work here has always been work by your conscience rather than by a directive.
Welch was sitting front row at the meeting in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday and asked the third question of Dimon, prompting his now-infamous response
‘And I have to say that is because of your leadership as well, the times that you’ve just over the years stood up to tyrants in the way that you operate.’
Welch outlined his own circumstances, with his team of seven spread across several time zones.
‘There’s just no way that being in an office makes any difference for us specifically,’ he said.
‘So, all I’m asking is that – I’m not suggesting you rescind such an order – but suggesting it be left up to managers of individual teams themselves on the necessity of an office workplace.’
The room burst into applause as Welch finished his speech, before Dimon cut in to ask curtly: ‘That it?’
‘I’m going to give you a complete answer,’ the CEO responded. ‘There is no chance that I would leave that up to managers. Zero chance.
‘The abuse that took place is extraordinary. You may be a great manager, but… I’m going to give you examples of how bad it got. OK?’
Welch laughed about the saga on Reddit the day after, saying: ‘I was in the front row, I was the one who asked the question. It was AMAZING.
‘I am satisfied that he was goaded in to dropping F-Bombs on a recorded meeting.’
But Welch also revealed that he was briefly fired by a furious vice president who accused him of embarrassing the company.
JPMorgan’s offices in Columbus, Ohio, where Welch works
‘When I got back to my desk, I was screamed at (with witnesses) to “get the F**K out of this office!”‘ he wrote.
Welch elaborated to Fortune magazine that after the town hall, he was summoned to a meeting with his former boss, Garrett Monaghan, now a vice president but still in the same division.
‘I don’t know what the f**k you just did, but come to my desk immediately when that town hall ends. Please,’ the text read.
Welch said when he arrived at the office, he was pulled into a meeting with Jeffrey Merrill, another of his former bosses from 2018 to 2021 who was now a VP.
He claimed Monaghan told him he ‘just dragged our whole organization through the mud. Go and clean off your desk and get the f**k out of here’.
Welch texted his direct boss, IT support Customer success manager Richard Cundiff, from the parking lot – who, like Dimon said in the town hall, had moved to Florida.
He told him Monaghan had ‘threatened my job, so I’ve been ordered home’, to which Cundiff replied, ‘Thanks for letting me know.’
Welch asked to speak with Welch’s boss, but she was on vacation and Cundiff told him ‘I will inform her in our next meeting’.
CEO of Chase Jamie Dimon (L) and wife Judith Kent arrive for a State Dinner in honor of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, at the Booksellers Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 10, 2024
He went home and assumed he no longer had a job.
But hours later he got a call from Megan Mead, who heads up all of global IT support as part of the Technology Employee Support Services division, and outranked Monaghan, Merrill, and Cundiff.
Mead told him he wasn’t fired and she had ‘smoothed things over’ with Monaghan during a 45-minute conversation.
‘I appreciate you, Nic and I am really proud about how you responded to a pretty unfair circumstance,’ Mead wrote in a follow-up text message.
Monaghan, chastened by his boss, sent a text to Welch to apologize for overreacting and admit he owed him a beer.
‘I agree with your message, if not the delivery. We good?’ he wrote.
JPMorgan insisted Welch was never actually fired, regardless of Monaghan’s outburst.
‘He didn’t say anything wrong in the town hall,’ the firm told Fortune.
Actually firing Welch would have required filing paperwork and executing other procedures that appeared never to have happened.
Brief clips of Dimon’s long, expletive-laden answer to Welch’s question were leaked within hours and widely reported by news outlets.
The longtime boss clarified that he was not against working from home as a concept, and 10 per cent of JPMorgan staff worked remotely in a way that worked.
However, he said he came to the realization that hybrid working wasn’t working for the rest of the company, and was causing huge inefficiencies.
‘Now, your manager moved to Florida. We never made a promise that it would be forever. That’s their problem, not mine,’ he said.
‘So people said, “We moved, we didn’t move” – we always told people that we were going to be a work-from-the-office type of company.
‘And so we allowed three days and two days. But here are the problems, OK? And they are substantial…the young generation is being damaged by this.
‘They 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.’
Dimon also railed against the ‘rudeness’ of staff fiddling with their phones and not paying attention during Zoom calls, which he said ‘slows down efficiency, creativity’.
‘When I found out that people were doing that – you don’t do that in my goddamn meetings. If you’re going to meet with me, you’ve got my attention, you’ve got my focus, I don’t bring my goddamn phone, I’m not sending texts to people,’ he said.
‘It simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for creativity, it slows down decision-making.
‘And don’t give me this s**t that work-from-home-Friday works. I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there’s not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.’
Dimon speaks to the media after the townhall on February 12, before clips of his rant leaked
Dimon acknowledged the need for flexibility, particularly for mothers and caregivers, but said managers failed to manage to properly and it got out of hand.
‘They didn’t manage, they were making exceptions, and people making exceptions for exceptions, and meanwhile, head count has gone up by 50,000 people in four, five years,’ he said.
‘We don’t need all those people. We were putting people in jobs because the people weren’t doing the job they were hired to do in the first place. It simply doesn’t work.
‘I will not be responsible for a company like that, OK, and I’m sorry. Now – you have a choice. You don’t have to work at JPMorgan. So the people of you who don’t want to work at the company, that’s fine with me.’
Dimon then went off on a tangent about the firm having too much bureaucracy that needed to be reined in, and asked for suggestions from staff.
‘We’re going to build a great company, and we’re going to be disciplined and detailed and factual and honest and hardworking, and that’s how we’re going to do it. And honest with each other,’ he said.
‘So, anyway, the bureaucracy stuff – if you have brilliant ideas, send them to me.’
At another point in the town hall, Dimon was questioned about a petition against his WFH policy change that garnered more than 1,550 signatures.
In a separate recording reviewed by Reuters, Dimon said: ‘Don’t waste time on it. I don’t care how many people sign that f**king petition.’
JPMorgan’s profits surged to a record in 2024, and its share price roughly doubled in the past five years.
The strong performance prompted some workers to question why they needed to spend more time in the office.
