- JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently dismissed employee pushback on a return-to-office mandate.
- RTO pushes from some employers come as worker engagement is at its lowest in a decade.
- Experts argue that flexibility, not strict office mandates, is more likely to boost engagement.
Jamie Dimon wants employees focused on work, not sending snarky texts.
The head of JPMorgan said recently he also wants workers who pay attention in meetings — and to be able to get colleagues on the phone on Fridays.
In short, what Dimon seems to be seeking is staffers who are engaged in their jobs.
Many CEOs no doubt want the same. Gallup found that worker engagement in the US slipped to 31% in 2024, the lowest level in a decade.
Some leaders appear to see RTO as one way to help remedy the situation.
Workplace observers told Business Insider that bringing workers together can usher in a host of benefits. Yet, they said, returning to the office isn’t a surefire way to improve lackluster worker engagement — and could even drive it lower.
“There isn’t going to be this silver-bullet fix,” Kelly Mendez-Scheib, chief people officer at the data platform Crunchbase, told BI, referring to RTO orders. In part, she said, that’s because engagement was a challenge even before the pandemic lockdowns sent office workers home.
“Engagement is something that organizations have been trying to crack forever,” she said.
For some CEOs, having workers back together is more appealing than sticking with pandemic norms. Asked about JPMorgan’s plan to have most workers back in the office five days a week starting in March, Dimon on Wednesday dismissed pushback from some workers during an employee town hall in Columbus, Ohio.
“A lot of you were on the fucking Zoom, and you were doing the following,” Dimon said in a recording obtained by BI and first reported by Barrons, “looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an asshole the other person is, not paying attention, not reading your stuff.”
Most of the firm’s workers are already back in the office five days a week. JPMorgan has said in-person work is the best way to run the company and that the benefits of being together are “substantial and irreplaceable.”
A spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for additional comment on the motivation for the bank’s tighter RTO policy.
Crimping flexibility can hurt engagement
Tempting as it might be, ratcheting up control over workers by removing flexibility often “drives down engagement,” Brian Elliott, a former executive at Slack who is now CEO of Work Forward, an advisory firm on future-of-work issues, told BI.
“You’re going to get what you asked for if you’re not careful, which is disengaged employees who are there to punch a clock,” he said.
That might already be happening. Gallup data from late 2024 found that workers who could do their jobs remotely but were on-site each workday showed the biggest drops in engagement since 2020. Both hybrid and fully remote workers reported higher levels of feeling connected to their work.
Nicole Kyle, who researches the future of work, told BI that it’s not accurate to assume that engagement levels are higher when workers are in the office. Yet, often, that’s something leaders often gravitate toward.
“The RTO lever is the easy one to pull,” she said.
Remote or hybrid arrangements can give workers a stronger sense of autonomy, said Kyle, who is cofounder of CMP Research.
“Nothing is less engaging to employees than not having flexibility and choice,” she said.
‘Predictable flexibility’
Ginnie Carlier, Americas vice chair for talent at EY, told BI that the firm’s employees tend to work with their team leaders to plan days in the office — an approach she refers to as “predictable flexibility.”
It’s one that’s proven fruitful, she said.
“Our most engaged and highest-performing individuals are the ones that are on a hybrid work arrangement,” Carlier said.
For most EY workers, that means spending two to three days a week in the office, she said. The focus is on how teams can work best together, not solely on how much gets done.
“We’ve really gotten away from this discussion around this illusion of increased productivity by being in the office,” Carlier said.
She said that when EY surveys new hires about why they accepted a job with the firm, flexibility reliably is one of the top reasons.
Studies from numerous settings show that giving people flexibility in how they work — and allowing them to work remotely part of the time — raises productivity, retention, worker satisfaction, and engagement, Siri Chilazi, a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the coauthor of the book “Make Work Fair,” told BI.
Flexibility can also bring challenges
John Rossman, a business strategist who was an early exec at Amazon and is the author of the book “The Amazon Way,” told BI that it can be easier for workers to be disengaged when they don’t face the “peer pressure” of being observed by colleagues.
He said trying to increase engagement shouldn’t be the main reason employers require workers to be in the office, though he said the move could reveal which workers feel most connected to their work.
“Those people who really want to be there are going to figure out how to do it,” Rossman said.
One way to boost worker engagement is through training, Joe Galvin, chief research officer at the executive-coaching firm Vistage, told BI.
He said helping workers build their skills — especially in an environment where technology like artificial intelligence promises to reshape many jobs — can result in employers having more “highly engaged A players.”
“They do it as best they can. They’re focused on quantity. They focus on quality. They do all the right things,” Galvin said.
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