The boss of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, has railed against Gen Z employees who work from home and “bulls**t” bureaucracy at the investment bank in a leaked recording. The Telegraph has the story.
In a rant to the Wall Street giant’s staff, Jamie Dimon complained of slow decision-making, phone calls going unanswered and younger recruits who were being “left behind” because of the shift to remote working.
He criticised “zoomers” – a term for people born between the late 1990s and early 2010s – for spending all their time on the video app Zoom instead of physical offices.
Mr Dimon said: “Don’t give me this s— 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.
“I’ve had it with this kind of stuff.”
The expletive-laden outburst, revealed in an audio recording obtained by Barron’s, followed grumbling by JP Morgan employees about an order to return to the office five days a week.
It underlines tensions between executives and their underlings at major companies as bosses take a tougher approach to remote working arrangements that were originally introduced during the Covid pandemic.
Mr Dimon told JP Morgan staff that he had concerns about the “damage” working from home was doing to young recruits who needed training up, and on company culture.
But he also accused managers of failing to keep the practice under control and of abusing the privilege to slack off.
He said: “There is no chance that I will leave it up to managers. Zero chance. The abuse that took place is extraordinary.
“A lot of you were on the f—— Zoom… and you were doing the following: looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an a—— 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.
“When I found out that people were doing that – you don’t do that in my goddamn meetings.
“If you’re going to meet with me, you’ve got my attention, you’ve got my focus. I don’t bring my goddamn phone, I’m not sending texts to people. It simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision-making.”
Mr Dimon added that employees who did not want to come to the office should quit.
He said: “I will not be responsible for a company like that, okay?
“You don’t have to work at JP Morgan. So the people of you who don’t want to work at the company, that’s fine with me.
“I’m not mad at you, don’t be mad at me. It’s a free country, you can walk with your feet. But this company is going to set our own standards and do it our own way.
“I’ve had it with this kind of stuff. I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since Covid, and I come in, and where is everybody else?
“They’re here, they’re there, the Zooms, and the zoomers don’t show up… That’s not how you run a great company.”
He dismissed a staff petition objecting to the new requirement for office attendance, arguing that the bank had always been clear they would return eventually and that it was tough luck for people who had moved home to live further away.
Mr Dimon said: “I don’t care how many people sign that f—— petition.”
Worth reading in full.
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