Jamie Dimon, who has led America’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, has been vocal about scepticism towards remote work and has stated multiple times that he does not advocate for ‘work from home’ culture. In a recent interview on CBS Evening News, the Wall Street mogul said leaders who maintain remote work policies are falling behind, and could be failing their youngest workers.
“You could build a company one way and I could build another company one way,” he said. “But I’ll tell you one thing: We would crush you.” Jamie Dimon has always argued that when people work from office spaces, it drives productivity and innovation.
Jamie Dimon blasts work from home
Recently, Jamie Dimon again blasted work from home policy and offered a strict warning for any younger generations who want to become successful in their careers: Get into the office. “If you go to a meeting with me, you got my full friggin’ attention the whole time,” he said at the Hill and Valley Forum, reported Fortune. He was speaking at the session titled “Wealth, Power, and the Next American Century”.
Jamie Dimon said that remote work is effective only for certain roles, such as call centre jobs, but for most positions—including managers and young employees—in-person work is more beneficial. He emphasised that younger professionals, in particular, should work from the office as they are still in the learning phase of their careers.
The tech billionaire compared video calls to the game show Hollywood Squares, where participants appear in a tic-tac-toe-style grid, noting that such setups allow far fewer check-ins than in-person interactions, where updates can be sought instantly. Dimon also argued that working from home leads to reduced ownership of projects and lower curiosity, and said it can tire people out more quickly.
“They learn by going on a sales call. They learn by seeing you make a mistake. They learn by how you deal with the mistake,” Dimon said, adding that remote work also fails to help young people develop their emotional intelligence.
‘Little follow up’
“There’s very little follow-up, a lot more game playing, you know, rope-a-dope type of politics,” he said. Plus, he added, “a lot of people aren’t paying attention at all,” as many of them are on their phones while on a video call, a trend which he didn’t notice early on, he said.
“We saw people when they weren’t coming in, younger kids kind of being left behind,” he said. “They weren’t developing their EQ as much. They didn’t have as many friends. They didn’t have much knowledge. They weren’t being assigned stuff.” For Dimon, the workplace provides an “apprenticeship system,” a critical resource for skill development that doesn’t exist without in-person work.
“You can’t learn working from your basement,” he said in a Bloomberg interview last year.
JPMorgan Chase reinstated a five-day in-office work policy at the start of 2025. Since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, several other companies, including Amazon and Google, have introduced similar return-to-office mandates. However, Jamie Dimon’s strong push for in-person work contrasts with the preferences of many U.S. workers, including some of the most sought-after talent.