Return-to-office edicts aren't always what they seem
What a busy life Filippo Gori must lead. The
JPMorgan
banker used to live in Hong Kong, where he headed the Wall Street bank's Asia-Pacific business.
He moved to London last year after he was given two big new jobs, co-head of global banking and head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, or EMEA as it is known in business speak.
You might think that move made sense, considering his EMEA responsibilities. But as FT readers learned last week, Gori is about to up sticks again and guess what: he is not going anywhere in Europe, the Middle East or Africa. He is heading to New York.
I found this news arresting for several reasons, starting with a dilemma that those of us who are not international bankers rarely need to consider.
READ MORE
How does one stay across affairs in, say, Lagos, Dubai and London when one wakes up in Manhattan, or whichever bit of New York Gori ends up in?
People familiar with the situation have told my colleagues that Gori will spend at least half of his time in EMEA for the rest of this year and will 'continue to be highly visible among employees and clients in the region'.
I can believe them. I can also believe Gori will do his best to oblige his boss,
Jamie Dimon
, a loud critic of
remote working
practices.
In keeping with Dimon's view that such practices sap efficiency, creativity and the development of young people, thousands of JPMorgan employees were this year told to get back to the office five days a week.
We must imagine Gori will also be aiming to do this at whichever office he is near on any given day.
Alas, not everyone agrees. One popular online reader response to news of Gori's move was this: 'RTO for thee, work from NYC for me.'
That may be unfair to Gori. Certainly there is a logic in his global banking role being based out of New York.
But one thing is clear: highly valued executives have always been able to negotiate deals that give them more freedom than the average employee. And the average employee is still a big fan of the freedom remote working offers.
Add these two facts together and you come up with yet another reason why working from home is far more persistent than one might think from all the headlines about big employers ordering their staff back to the office.
For a lot of smaller organisations, it promotes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people or, put another way, it's easier – especially if you don't run a big Wall Street bank with the market power to take its pick of talented would-be staff.
I suspect this helps to explain a puzzle I wrote about at the start of the year: the lack of data showing that
return-to-office
rules are producing a big fall in remote work.
Researchers who have spent years tracking the share of work US employees do at home say rates were well below 10 per cent before Covid pushed them up above 60 per cent. But they have stayed at about 27 per cent since late 2023, with the latest data out this month showing the same figure.
So much for my theory that 2025 might be the year remote working rates finally started to fall as tighter in-office rules came into effect at companies such as Amazon and PwC in January, the same month Donald Trump began ordering federal workers back to the office full-time.
The data does suggest such orders are increasing, and worker resistance to them may be softening.
It shows that 43.5 per cent of people who still work from home reported in June that their employer had issued an RTO mandate in the past six months, up from 39 per cent at the end of last year.
And the share of those working at least one day a week from home who said they would comply with such rules rose from 46 per cent at the end of last year to 49 per cent.
But this still suggests half of those facing such mandates would be ready to quit or look for another job. And I would bet a lot of them would be even keener to jump ship if they worked for a boss who didn't have to obey the same rules as they did. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
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