Return to the Office or Else!

“Currently, nine in 10 remote-capable employees prefer some degree of remote-work flexibility going forward,” according to Ben Wigert, a director at Gallup.

How would you like to fight that?

Ask JP Morgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman or Citadel’s CEO, Ken Griffin who want everyone back to their desks. They are happy to fight you.

Whose side are you on?

Employer

There is a lot of ego and in-betweens wrapped up in CEOs coaxing their employees back to work. Dimon, Gorman and Griffin command 370,000 employees. That’s more than a battalion, brigade, division, corps or even a field army – what four-star generals command.

But it’s hard for others to see the stars on their shoulders if they are the only person in the office.

Comparison with the military is fitting, since it is the corporate entity that wields the most power.

For example, when Ben Rich, inventor of the stealth fighter, revealed in Skunk Works, A Personal Memoir of my Years at Lockheed why stealth tech worked well with aircraft, but not with large Navy vessels, you get a sense of comparison:

Sea Shadow (a proposed Navy stealth ship) …had a four-man crew – commander, helmsman, navigator, and engineer. By contrast, a frigate doing a similar job had more than three hundred crewmen… A future commander resented having only a four-man crew…Too few to do anyone’s career much good in terms of power or prestige.

Power or prestige?

And the in-betweens? JP Morgan leases 8.7 million square feet in NYC alone. Do you think Dimon and his senior officers care about this space, their footprint, the building owners, the REITs that hold them, and brokers who keep all that together? Would you guess many are bank customers or personal friends? Are Dimon’s customers and personal friends important?

A key motivator to bring workers back to the office is the new $3 billion JPM headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, scheduled to open in 2025. The 60-story building will be the second-tallest office tower in Manhattan, housing 14,000 employees, and will have yoga and cycling rooms, meditation spaces, outdoor areas, and a state-of-the-art food hall.

It will be like a nice, uh, home office.

Additionally, beyond ego and in-betweens, these are major financial institutions.

The security and custodial operations duties alone should drive most employees back into the office. JPMorgan Chase managed $3.7 trillion in assets at the end of 2022 – that’s $13 million per employee. You good with them managing that from their back yard hammocks and iPhones?

Dimon is aware that not every job at the bank carries such sensitivities and has said that it’s reasonable for those in research and coding to work remotely.

Employee

Why do you want to work from home? A recent Post-Ipsos poll gave the following reasons in order:

• Cutting out commutes;
• Easier for childcare;
• Allows better focus;
• Easier to balance work and personal life; and
• More productive at home.

Then, from Digital.com, another poll, the real reasons people want to work from home:

• 72% want to be able to take a nap or exercise during the day; and
• 73% want to be able to watch TV while they work.

Whether the boss has seen this study or not, they are thinking it.

Even so, 55% of fully-remote workers said they would accept a lower-paying job to stay remote. This makes little sense because it doesn’t count the money WFH saves the company in office staff, utilities, phone/computer usage, etc., by not having to provide space. But it demonstrates the fervor of the WFH population.

Are there any other constituents? What about us?

Us

Think about the wheels of commerce in a philosophical sense, how they turn, and upon what they turn. This is a bigger question than, “May I work from home every Friday?”

The come as you are home manner is an enemy of dress-code office. Maybe not so much technically, since we are more casual now; instead, more of an attitude or behavior. One brings a sharper bearing to the office, colleagues, and work, than one brings into the den or back yard.

To this point, JP Morgan sent a 700-word note on April 12 to all its employees urging most to come back to work:

Our leaders play a critical role in reinforcing our culture and running our businesses. They have to be visible on the floor, they must meet with clients, they need to teach and advise...We need them to lead by example, which is why we’re asking all managing directors to be in the office five days a week.

Is this wrong?

By the bye, not that it matters, but the average SVP pay at J.P. Morgan is $428,333 per year. Maybe you can appreciate it if Mr. Dimon wants them to pick up that check from the office?

Dimon also said in his EOY 2020 report:

Performing jobs remotely is more successful when people know one another and already have a large body of existing work to do. It does not work as well when people don’t know one another.

Most professionals learn their job through an apprenticeship model, which is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world. Over time, this drawback could dramatically undermine the character and culture you want to promote in your company.

Is Dimon wrong? Maybe at age 55 you don’t need that formation, but you likely did at age 20.

The ultimate answer to WFH versus RTO is not so much what is good for you, or even your boss, but what is good for us – for society.

It has always been upon those wheels that commerce has turned.

Andy Martin is author of Dollarlogic: A Six-Day Plan to Achieving Higher Returns by Conquering Risk, foreword by Arthur B Laffer, Ph.D.

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