JPMorgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank, is following through on its return-to-work mandate. Many of the bank’s more than 300,000 workers are expected to be in the office five days a week starting on March 3, even though the bank is still wrestling with where to put them all, according to several JPMorgan employees.
Phil de Josselin, JPMorgan Chase’s chief administrative officer, alerted employees on Thursday that many of the company’s banks and offices will be ready to accommodate five-day-a-week work starting in early March. Other employees will apparently get a reprieve from the RTO for now.
“Many of our locations globally will be ready to welcome employees back in early March; other sites will need more time to get ready,” Josselin wrote in a Jan. 30 email that was viewed by Fortune.
JPMorgan Chase has created a listing, which it called a lookup tool, that showed the approximate time that work sites will be ready for employees to use, Josselin said. The list was available on the bank’s internal intranet. Many of the sites have a March 3 return date while some have March 10, according to six employees who viewed the list. (All JPMorgan Chase workers questioned by Fortune refused to speak on the record for fear of retaliation.)
JPMorgan Chase did not return requests for comment.
Some bank locations are getting more time to comply with the RTO. Two JPMorgan buildings in Plano, Texas, are listed as “not yet determined,” as is a site in Greenwood Village, Colorado. JPMorgan Chase’s Polaris regional headquarters in Ohio, which houses more than 12,000 employees, is also not yet available. The four-story, 2 million-square-foot building was listed Thursday as “not yet determined.” JPMorgan spent about $200 million on the redesign and renovation of the Polaris location, which is located at the McCoy center in Columbus, according to a 2017 report from Columbus Business First.
“That implies they do not yet have a strategy to accommodate everyone from the teams in those buildings or they need to reshuffle the floors,” one of the employees told Fortune.
On January 10, JPMorgan Chase set off a firestorm when the bank informed its more than 300,000 employees that all staff would be required to return to the office five days a week, possibly as early as March. Roughly 40% of the bank’s employees are currently on a hybrid schedule, where they are in the office three days a week.
About 60% of JPMorgan Chase’s staff, including many traders and retail branch workers, currently come into the office five days a week.
Many workers remain unhappy with the RTO. One employee, who works from home two days a week, had already told their fiancé to accept a job that was three hours away when they found out about the RTO mandate.
“It really sucks for me,” they said. The five-day RTO “works for quite a lot of people, [those] who live close, who have no caretaking duties,” they said. “It's lacking empathy for the people who really needed and valued [the] flexibility,” said the employee.
Another employee said time was their most valuable commodity. “Forcing us to waste it commuting for no benefit besides real estate value feels demeaning,” they said.
“The company just doesn’t care,” added a third employee who is already working in the office five days a week.
