Jamie Dimon has fired a shot heard ’round the world in the escalating battle over work-from-home policies. In Ohio a few weeks ago to open a new branch, the JPMorgan Chase CEO delivered a blistering indictment of remote work while doubling down on his return-to-office mandate.
“A lot of you were on the f--king Zoom, and you were doing the following, okay?” he said. “Looking at your email, sending texts to each other over what an asshole the other person is. Not paying attention, not reading your stuff. And if you don't think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness, it does, okay?”
The clincher: “And don't give me this shit that work from home on Friday works,” he added. “I tried to call a lot of people Friday, not a goddamn person to get a hold of…That’s not how you run a great company.”
A recording of this leaked online, as if he were sending a message to his 316,000 employees, who must return to the office five days a week starting next month. Dimon has since expressed regret over the tone of his rant, but he’s sticking with his RTO mandate.
What RTO mandates can't fix
Other companies are similarly hellbent on forcing employees to return to the office. At Dell, this takes effect next month. In January, AT&T ordered corporate staff to work on-site five days a week, as did many others.
They hope to restore what existed before the pandemic: what I call “serendipity bonding,” or people bumping into each other and collaborating more organically.
Yet, there is a better way: Ease up on RTO and undertake a purposeful reengineering of the old ways of work and collaboration that are ill equipped for today’s world.
Dimon is absolutely right to be so upset about some of the things he mentioned: The backbiting and goldbricking are debilitative and ridiculous. But this has little to do with “work from home” and everything to do with most companies’ broken cultures.
The sin lies not in the virtual but in the design of the social contract that should guide a business and its teams. Most teams, in fact, are mediocre. Their forms of collaboration are even worse, and their meetings are ineffective—the bane of their existence.
In a typical session with a dozen colleagues, only four people feel they are heard, my firm’s research reveals. It takes three meetings to land an executable strategy. Asked to give a 0-to-5 rating for the level of courage and candor in meetings, workers assign an average of a mere 2.4.
Some of the greatest erosion of shareholder value comes from one bad habit: conflict avoidance. This is especially true in-person, with 70% of team members avoiding conflict at work. Often, they speak critically in discreet conversations only afterward in a “meeting after the meeting.” This yields the candor and transparency that should happen in the meeting itself.
Workplace culture revamp
Bringing people back to the office will fall short of fixing this. We must start with reengineering the mediocre culture that afflicts many companies and repairing how we collaborate. Here are three steps to get started—and, for each one, remote work offers an advantage over RTO:
Full Candor. Have an open dialogue to set the right social contract for working together. Ban talking behind anyone’s back because this reduces shareholder value, which is as bad as stealing from your employer. Most important is a full degree of candor: the right, and obligation, to speak up, criticize, and troubleshoot as part of a shared commitment to the mission of ensuring one another’s success. I call it teamship.
The Power of Three. In a virtual meeting of a dozen people, break it down: Split them up into breakout rooms of three persons each for a primer before engaging the whole group on a sensitive topic. The psychological “safety” level increases by 85%, our research indicates. Team members feel heard, and better ideas arise.
The Shift. Start shifting to asynchronous collaboration, which can let your people avoid most meetings altogether. Let them tackle projects and problems by working separately, posting updates and waging more thoughtful, less rushed debate on a shared platform (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Dropbox, Google Workspace, etc.).
As this tapestry of comments and responses emerges, more team members have the chance to speak up and make themselves heard. This reduces meeting size, and it can let teams get done in one meeting what usually requires three.
These simple changes in practice are among the 10 shifts that companies should make to upgrade and modernize the way their people work, communicate, and collaborate, as detailed in my latest book, Never Lead Alone. The world of work has changed vastly with the rise of collaborative software, apps, remote connectivity, and now AI. Corporate America would do well to catch up.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Read more:
- Stop romanticizing in-office watercooler talk. As a fully distributed company of 12,000 people, here’s what really works
- I’m a CEO and former Google exec who spent decades in the office. Here’s why I’m conflicted about return to office vs. remote-first
- RTO mandates aren’t for everyone. Here’s what we did instead—and it’s working: Synchrony CEO
- Beware of ‘intergalactic committees’—small, focused teams are the best way to get work done
