The Remote Work Dilemma: Why Jamie Dimon Might Have a Point

Work-from-home isn’t going anywhere—but is it really the future we want?

You may have seen recent headlines of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon taking heat for his comments to a group of employees about work-from-home. The whole thing apparently began when a group of employees started circulating a petition urging the company to drop its return to office policy and allow them to continue working from home. Dimon has long been a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to workplace culture, and he was never really a supporter of work-from-home, so why people who work there thought this would be any different is anyone’s guess, but I’m certainly not surprised by the policy or his comments. That said, I certainly think he could have handled it better, as he basically went on an angry tirade, but I believe he had a lot of good points that could have just been better framed. Let’s discuss!

Dimon’s Comments

First, let’s start with the main quotes from Dimon that drew so much ire:

“It simply doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision making.”

“And don’t give me the s‑‑‑ that ‘work from home Friday’ works. I call a lot of people on Friday. There’s not a g-ddamn 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.”

Now, as I said, some of this is a bit more fiery than I think is appropriate for a workplace town hall meeting, but I do think his basic points are sound for a lot of businesses. I run my various businesses as entirely remote work, and I’m writing this very article from the comfort of my own home office while wearing sweatpants and an undershirt, but I’m also not running a multinational publicly traded company that employs 300,000 people like Dimon is. Every business is different, and not every business will do well remotely. Businesses that require a high degree of creative collaboration between workers will struggle in a remote environment.

“It Simply Doesn’t Work”

We’ll look at each of his comments individually, starting with his overall claim that work-from-home “simply doesn’t work.” I do think this claim is a little bit too emphatic, given that every business is different, and what doesn’t work for JPMorgan can work quite well for another business.

The property management industry started experimenting with remote work quite a while ago, including with remote workers internationally. Many PM companies started as home-based businesses, and remained that way even as they grew, so working from home was just the normal course of business for them. Other PM companies started delving into remove work with international team members about 10 years ago when the “VA” (virtual assistant) craze started getting talked about pretty heavily at NARPM conferences for the first time. After Covid hit, many PM companies that were still largely working in office environments had no choice, at least for a short time, to figure out how to work remotely. In a great many cases, they found that it actually worked just as well for them, if not better, than in-office work. That was certainly my realization in my own business. Time that I was wasting going to and from the office, going to a restaurant for lunch, etc. was replaced by more efficient use of time just walking from my bedroom to my home office. By effectively implementing KPIs to track performance, we found that we could be just as in-tune with how everyone was performing without the need to be in the same place.

That said, this doesn’t work for every business. Dimon is right when he says that creative work doesn’t adapt well to a remote environment. Teams that need to be highly creative generally need to be highly collaborative, and sitting in the same room and brainstorming is just not the same when it’s done by Zoom call. The same degree of camaraderie is just not there, the same level of focus isn’t there, and you just don’t get the same “energy” that exists in that team as it does when they’re all in a conference room putting up ideas on the white board together.

I believe he may also be right when it comes to decision making. My PM business is effectively a benevolent dictatorship, to be quite frank. I make decisions and they get executed. There is no Board of Directors, there are no shareholders I need to answer to, not even an advisory board to give advice. I have controlling ownership of the business, and that makes it rather easy for me to make quick decisions for what path the business will take. But things are very different for businesses that don’t have that level of control vested in one person. For businesses that need to collaborate among various executives, board members, or advisors before making major decisions, it is incredibly difficult to get that level of decision making done remotely. Decision making is ultimately a creative endeavor, with lots of ideas and feedback needing to be shared, so the same rule applies as applies to creative work: the best results will happen when the creatives are in the same room hashing things out together.

“There’s Not a G-ddamn Person to Get Ahold Of!”

Dimon went on to complain that even “work from home Friday” was a terrible idea, as business still needs to get done on Fridays, and he can’t get anyone to answer a phone then.

I think there’s some truth to this statement, but I think in this case it can be solved using other methodology. Are people less reliable when working remotely? Yes. That phone call that would get answered on the first ring in the office is going to voicemail if the remote worker is playing with their dog at home. Don’t tell me that this isn’t happening, we all know better, and the gaslighting isn’t helping your case.

But getting rid of remote work for this reason is like taking a flamethrower to a pillow fight. A little bit overboard there, Jamie. If people aren’t answering their phones, the simple way to solve that problem is to monitor phone answer rates, bonus high performers who answer every call right away, and discipline workers who are performing below standard. This is 2025. A major corporation like JPMorgan certainly has state of the art VOIP phones and can monitor the call answer rates of each employee. I can do this with RingCentral as a lowly small business, so you certainly can as CEO of one of the largest companies on earth. It’s just easier for you to force people to come to the office. But there are downsides to that approach, such as not being able to get the best and brightest, because they may not want to show up to the office in Manhattan where it costs $500 just to park for the month.

KPIs (key performance indicators) solve a lot of problems in business. What gets measured gets managed is the old adage, so if you’re concerned about phones not getting answered, start tracking it and talking about it during team meetings. And yes, bonuses and discipline are also appropriate based on these KPIs. Control behavior through carrots and sticks, not mandated office time.

“The Young Generation Is Being Damaged By This”

I think there is a LOT of truth to this comment. And what is most problematic is that this is the same generation that was harmed by Covid-era school closures and social distancing policies. We have an entire generation of people who had their social development stunted because they spent their most formative years separated from other people. In parts of this country this went on for 18 months. For those who were in the last couple of years of high school during this time, they are now entering the workforce, with many of them also taking part in college via distance learning, which has become increasingly popular. Imagine your junior and senior years of high school being completed entirely by Zoom, then getting your undergrad degree via distance learning, and then getting a remote job out of college. If you aren’t an extremely extroverted person who went out of your way to go out to bars, concerts, parties, etc. during this time, then your social skills are likely atrocious. And this is coming from someone who is probably on the spectrum and compares human interaction to what Dick Cheney once called “enhanced interrogation methods.” I’m not big on people, in other words. But my social skills, as bad as they are, are likely lightyears ahead of the average person who has gone through years of their most formative time in life largely separated from other people and not working in collaborative environments in-person.

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When it comes time for someone at JPMorgan to get a promotion to a more senior leadership role, who do you think has the leg up? The person who’s 45 years old and has spent their entire life interacting with other people in a shared work environment, or the 25 year old who has never once worked in an office and has to be pressured to turn on their camera in Zoom meetings? This isn’t a hard question, folks. We all know the answer. And that means that this has become a defacto form of age discrimination. Older employees with more in-office experience will get those promotions while employees who might have been better fits for the role if they didn’t work entirely remotely will get passed up and stagnate in their careers.

By the same token, when it comes time to offer a raise, or give performance-based compensation, who has the advantage? The worker that management sees working at their desk every day in the office, or the worker that they’ve literally never met in person and only see occasionally on a Zoom call for a team meeting? Again, these are not tough questions to answer. We all know the answers intuitively, even though some of you may not like those answers.

“In Fact, My Guess Is Most of You Live In Communities a Hell of a Lot Less Diverse Than This Room.”

This was the most damning of his comments, in my view, and not damning in the sense that it made him look bad, but damning in the sense that it was a highly effective rebuke to the supposedly more progressive young people who are advocating so vociferously for continued work-from-home policies. This is the generation that has put “diversity, equity, and inclusion” at the top of their collective priorities, yet the population is more segregated than ever.

What happens when people are forced to come to the office to work? Generally, people choose to live close to their office to reduce their commute times. As a result, people congregate in or near urban centers, which effectively forces communities in those areas to be diverse, as companies are hiring diverse workforces. But when people are no longer required to come to the office, they are free to live wherever they’d like. And research has clearly shown us that given a choice, people almost always segregate themselves into communities that look exactly like them. Despite more than half a century of civil rights laws that have aimed to remove segregation as a part of a American life, a recent research paper from the American Sociological Review found that while America overall is more diverse than ever, individual communities themselves are just as segregated as they were during the heights of Jim Crow. When people can choose where they live, instead of having to live near where they work, white people live amongst white people, black people amongst black people, etc.

Now, if you’re a white nationalist, this might sound like heaven to you, but if you’re not a despicable human being, this should be raising some serious alarm bells in your mind. A more segregated society is just going to lead to more conflict, not less, as people become more and more isolated and living in their own little echo chambers. This isn’t good for society, but this is a business publication, so I’ll emphasize that it’s not good for business, either. Strong businesses have diverse work forces that understand a broad cross-section of their potential client/customer base, and when you end up with a company full of remote workers who live in highly segregated communities, you have a workforce of very closed minded people who aren’t well equipped to serve your diverse customer base.

Worse, this can force companies that do have to hire locally (and PM firms do need local boots on the ground for leasing, business development, and maintenance) to hire completely homogenous workforces. If you have a PM firm with an office in a community that is almost entirely white, but you manage properties across a wide geographic area that includes other communities that are majority black, asian, or hispanic, then your office workers may not be all that adept at interacting with your diverse tenant population. Diverse populations living and working together helps people to understand one another, and by shifting to remote work, we have gone in the other direction and essentially reverted to a more segregated society.

Remote Work is Killing American Job Prospects

Now let’s get away from Dimon’s quotes and instead talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart as a former labor union leader in my prior life as an airline pilot before I joined this wonderful industry many years ago: what is actually best for rank-and-file employees.

If you ask the average employee, they’ll tell you that remote work is one of the best things that’s ever happened to them. But five minutes later they’re appalled and shocked when they read a headline that says some company just laid off 10,000 workers who refused to come in to the offie and replaced them with remote workers in India. Somehow, those employees aren’t making the connection here, so I’ll make the connection for you.

Thomas Friedman wrote a book about 20 years ago called “The World is Flat.” No, he wasn’t some flat earth nutter, he was using the term as a metaphor for what happens when technology and trade levels the playing field across the planet and allows countries and workers outside of the industrialized west to start playing their part in worldwide commerce. While Friedman was writing about this 15 years before Covid, the reality is that the core principle of what he was talking about really came into its own when the world shut down for a virus and businesses were forced to figure out how to survive in a remote world.

In a “flat” global business environment, it doesn’t matter where you live, because a business on the other side of the planet can utilize your labor, ideas, innovations, etc. just as easily as if you were right there in the office with them in Manhattan. What this means is that a worker in Bangladesh who is skilled at coding and can speak fluent English is MORE valuable to an American company than a worker who lives here in America, because the equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes 1/60th of what the American would be paid. That company can hire 60 software engineers for the price of one in Silicon Valley. That is an enormous competitive advantage over a company that insists on hiring only Americans.

What this means as an employee is that if your company is placing a high value on working in the office, then you should be GLAD about that rather than fighting it. Because the second that you win your fight and get your company to let you work from home, you’ve now put yourself in a position where you are still expecting to make 60 times what your competition in another country expects to make, but now your only advantage over them (your in-person presence) is gone. What incentive does that company now have to continue employing you? They can get a person with the same skillset, knowledge, education, experience, and language fluency for 1/60th the price, and since both of you would be working remotely, there is nothing to differentiate yourself. Your only hope is to find some company to hire you who refuses to hire any foreign workers just out of principle (and that business isn’t likely to survive very long).

If American workers were smart about this, they’d be pushing for MORE in-office work. Your proximity to the office is your main advantage over your competition in this new “flat” earth where a remote worker 7,000 miles away is just as easy to interact with as a remote worker 70 miles away. Essentially, by advocating for purely remote work, you have been advocating for the abolishment of your own employment, because you are literally the most expensive workers on earth. Barring some sort of radical new legislation that outlaws the hiring of international workers completely, you are literally fighting for your own unemployment.

Now, I know this publication is almost entirely read by business owners and senior leaders, so this message probably isn’t going to reach a lot of rank-and-file employees, but it is something that not enough people are talking about in this debate, and as a labor union kind of guy, I think it needed to be said. I want to see Americans employed, but they can only be employed if it makes economic sense for employers.

Conclusion

I employ mostly remote workers, so I obviously see the value. However, I also see a lot of detrimental outcomes that have come from this remote work renaissance, and I think Jamie Dimon has gotten a lot more hatred directed his way than is deserved from his comments which were largely just common sense, albeit a little less tactful than they should have been for a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As with most things nowadays, we have eschewed nuance and rational thought and have instead become entrenched in dogmatic positions, with many workers acting as though remote work is a god-given right and that nothing bad can come of it. We need to be more reasoned in how we approach these issues. What you think is good for you might not really be what is in your best interests upon closer examination, and you would be well served to not just lash out at an executive that pushes back on your sacred cow. Have an open mind and weigh the facts. You might find that remote work is what’s going to send you to the poor house.

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