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JPMorgan's anti-WFH crusader Jamie Dimon lets top Europe chief work 3,000 miles from his team
A top JPMorgan Chase executive has been allowed to work remotely from his team - while CEO Jamie Dimon continues to crack the whip on employees with his return-to-office mandate.
Filippo Gori, the banking behemoth's CEO of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), will be moving to New York City while continuing to run the European business, reported the Financial Times.
He is ditching the company's London office - the epicenter of his workload - less than a year after relocating from Hong Kong to take the top job.
This means that Gori is free to run the EMEA division five hours behind, and 3,400 miles away from, the bank's managers, staff, and clients whom he is in charge of.
While Gori is expected to spend at least half of his time in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, he'll be living and working from the Big Apple - despite Dimon's incessant belief that managers and bankers ought to work together, in-person and in-office.
By contrast, for example, Pablo Garnica, the bank's top executive of EMEA Private Bank, is based in Madrid, Spain - who stressed in an interview last year: 'We believe that being close to the clients and being part of that community is really important.'
It's understood that Gori, who is also Co-Head of Global Banking, will be working from the bank's headquarters on Madison Avenue five days a week during his move.
CEO Jamie Dimon (pictured) has felt the ire of his staff following his incessant belief that work from home is not effective for running a business
Gori's move to the States comes amid CEO Dimon's heated criticisms of remote work, which have made him a champion of the return-to-office culture shift.
The Wall Street veteran's ironclad anti-remote work stance has caused a seismic backlash ever since he first announced his plan in the years following the pandemic.
'[Return-to-office] for the serfs, work from home for the aristocracy. Yep, sounds about right,' one person previously said.
'Rules for thee but not for me. I despise these double standards,' said another. 'Trash policy from a trash company run by a trash CEO,' added a third.
'Billionaires virtue signaling about "work" while they make 5000x more per hour than average wage is always hilarious,' said a fourth.
Earlier this year, the JPMorgan Chase CEO announced that the company would require employees to return to the office five days a week starting in March.
Dimon also said one reason he wanted people back in the office was that 'younger people are being left behind.'
'To have the younger people coming in but not their bosses - I have a problem with that too,' he said.
He also noted that the benefits of in-person office conversations will help younger people to succeed in their careers.
'All day long we're talking,' he said. 'Constant updates, constant share of information.'
Remote work means young people miss out on these conversations, essentially 'leaving them behind,' Dimon said. 'I won't do that.'
Dimon further added that remote employees tend to not pay attention on company Zoom calls.
His strong-armed stance on remote work went viral after one of the company's employees asked a question during a company town hall back in February.
The question, posed by Nicolas Welch, a tech analyst at the bank since 2017, triggered an extraordinary rant from the chairman.
'Don't waste time on it. I don't care how many people sign that f*****g petition,' Dimon said.
'It simply doesn't work. It doesn't work for creativity, it slows down decision-making. And don't give me this s**t that work-from-home-Friday works. I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there's not a goddamn person you can get a hold of.'
But his rampant anti-work-from-home mandate has infuriated many bankers.
According to insiders, the discontent swirls across departments and seniority levels, with employees sharing concerns about surveillance, privacy, and the feasibility of a five-day office mandate, particularly in offices that don't even have enough desks or parking spaces to accommodate everyone.
In March, Dimon obliterated a young crowd asking why they can't work from home while speaking at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.
He got onto the controversial topic after a graduate student asked a question regarding his leaked, expletive-loaded remarks from a company town hall about the finance firm's end of hybrid work.
Dimon claimed the only group of people disgruntled with the move are 'the people in the middle' - like corporate office workers.
'If you work in a restaurant, you've got to be in. You all may not know this, but 60 percent of Americans worked the whole time,' he said.
'Where did you get your Amazon packages from? Your beef, your meat, your vodka? Where did you get the diapers from?'
Dimon appeared to be referring to people who continued to work in person during the pandemic.
'You got UPS and FedEx and manufacturers and agriculture and hospitals and cities and schools and nurses and sanitation and firemen and military. They all worked,' he continued.
