JPMorgan Chase is summoning all staff back to the office, becoming the latest corporate giant to call time on era of remote and hybrid working sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The US’s largest bank, which has some 316,000 employees worldwide, announced on Friday that all workers on hybrid work schedules will be required to return to the office five days a week from March.
Five years after Covid-19 emptied offices across much of the world almost overnight, prominent employers are now seeking to draw a line under a prolonged period of hybrid work and draw staff back to their desks full-time.
While leading Wall Street firms have led the charge, the debate over the merits and pitfalls on remote work – for employers, employees, customers and communities – continues across multiple industries.
Related: The great divide: are office workers more productive than those at home?
Amazon required employees to return to the office five days a week from last week. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Andy Jassy, its CEO, said.
Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for working from the office than Jamie Dimon, the veteran CEO of JPMorgan, who – as early as 2021 – sought to restore pre-pandemic working habits. “And everyone is going to be happy with it,” he told a Wall Street Journal event that year. “And yes, the commute – you know, people don’t like commuting. But so what?”
Even before Friday’s announcement, more than half of employees at JPMorgan had already been required to work from the office full-time.
In an internal memo to staff, seen by the Guardian, Dimon and other executives acknowledged that “some of you prefer a hybrid schedule” and said they “respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision”.
“We are now a few years out of the pandemic and have had the time to evaluate the benefits and challenges of remote and hybrid working,” they wrote. “We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach.
“We think it is the best way to run the company. As we’ve discussed before, the benefits of working together in person are substantial and irreplaceable, and as we spend more time together, the more advantages we gain.”