- Google's former HR chief says JPMorgan's new fully-in-person RTO policy is a sign of more mandates to come.
Like clockwork, it’s another year, another mandate. A fresh email from HR lands in employees’ inboxes before they can get the second round of Auld Lang Syne in. Probably not unlike you, Laszlo Bock, consultant and former Google senior executive, isn’t all that shocked.
Five years after the pandemic first hit, some companies have slowly reneged on their previously flexible policies. A swath of executives have moved from issuing incrementally less remote to semi-hybrid and finally fully in-person weeks. It’s a pulling the wool over your eyes strategy that Bock called the “boil the frog method” back in 2022, predicting it would continue over the next couple of years.
True to his prediction, companies like Amazon, AT&T, WPP and now JPMorgan have recently turned their backs on remote work. The latest big fish to go fully in-person, JP Morgan, is a natural domino to follow given the company’s leadership.
“Jamie Dimon's been very consistent in his dislike of remote and hybrid work, so the biggest surprise is that the announcement took so long to arrive,” Bock tells Fortune, adding that the move is “100% consistent with the finance world” given that “banking in general has been at the forefront of bringing workers back to the office.”
Dimon has consistently expressed distaste at federal employees and managers of all sectors working from home. Responding to some of his own employees’ displeasure at being forced to work from the office, Dimon previously said that workers “can not do it elsewhere.”
Given Dimon’s clear stance on remote work, Bock “expect[s] most of the WFH fans have already left.” Although, he notes that these mandates can be a way of secretive layoffs and doesn’t think “JPMorgan would mind if a few more people quit.”
JPMorgan did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
A four-day week in the office is coming
The workforce is starting to reach its new stasis when it comes to remote work. We’re a couple of years from “a new normal,” figures Bock, adding that the number of WFH days has dwindled by 2% each year since it was at 32% in July 2022 to its current hovering of 26 to 27%.
Likely, the more traditional world of finance, big tech, and consulting will land at 20% eventually, “still more than pre-pandemic, but a far cry from pandemic peaks.” That's all to say, it's not just JPMorgan that will continue to usher employees back into the office. Though not all companies in the sector will probably be as hard on remote work and might be more receiptive to hybrid options.
Bock notes that hybrid work has stabilized at 25% across the economy, especially in white-collar fields. “But tech and finance will continue ‘boiling the frog’ and rolling out return to office mandates,” he adds.
The 3 factors spurring CEOs to issue RTO mandates
It's not just Dimon getting impatient about the office in 2025. In Bock’s eyes, three factors fuel the rewind to office-based working for executives: CEOs' insecurity that people are not working when not watched, pressure on businesses for heightened performance, and the election results, which make companies “feel more secure in pushing their people around.”
CEOs feeling the siren’s call of the old ways of work have yet to be convinced by the data. And as Bock asserts, there’s a “lack of massively overwhelming evidence in favor of hybrid or remote work.” Looking at a collation of research, Bock says that fully remote has a range of +13% to -30% productivity while proving better for retention and well-being. Hybrid work is largely neutral when it comes to productivity, he adds.
That being said, it's not enough “universally, overwhelmingly positive enough to compel CEOs to deviate from tradition.” Maybe if there was a windfall of productivity from hybrid work, that would be satisfying, “but CEOs don't read academic journals and academics don't proselytize, so we'll continue to see a creeping triumph of traditional management over innovation.”
“To be clear, hybrid work is better for the people at no cost to the companies,” he concludes. “But the CEOs aren't bought into it.”
