‘We’re going back to the office’
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon on Monday expressed regret about the expletives he used during a recent employee town hall, but he didn’t back down from his core message that employees need to return to the workplace five days a week.
“I should never curse, ever,” and “I shouldn’t get angry,” Dimon told CNBC when asked about a heated Feb. 12 exchange with employees that centered on JPMorgan’s recent return-to-office order.
However, “We’re not going to change,” he said. “We’re going back to the office.”
The JPMorgan policy that all workers need to be back in the office five days a week by early March has prompted a petition from a group of employees calling for the nation’s largest bank to keep a hybrid work policy in place.
“Don’t give me the s*** that ‘work from home Friday’ works,” Dimon said during the town hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, according to a recording that was leaked afterward and reviewed by Yahoo Finance.
Of the petition calling for the bank to keep a flexible policy in place, he said, “I don’t care how many people sign that f***ing petition.”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in 2022. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz · REUTERS / Reuters
Dimon on Monday also had some more to say about another topic he covered during the Feb. 12 town hall: the bank’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
He told workers at the event that legal changes along with Dimon’s own desire to cut down on bureaucracy would lead to alterations for some DEI programs.
“Obviously, we have to accommodate the law. So the law changed. We can’t have quotas,” Dimon said in the recording obtained by Yahoo Finance, adding that he “was never a firm believer in bias training” and had questions about money being spent on certain DEI programs.
“I saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid s*** and it really pissed me off … I’m just going to cancel them. I don’t like wasted money in bureaucracy,” Dimon said.
When CNBC asked Dimon on Monday what he found wasteful, he said, “It’s things like trainings that don’t work or too many of them, meetings that don’t work.”
He added that “there’s a whole bunch of stuff like that, a lot of small programs that kind of just grew over time. So we’re going to kind of consolidate them. They’re all very rational.”
Still, “we’re still going to reach out to the Black, Hispanic, LGBT, veteran, disabled communities. That, we’re not changing that,” he said.
Last week, JPMorgan published its annual report, removing nearly all mentions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” when compared to its 2023 annual report.
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The JPMorgan Chase logo is displayed at their headquarters in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File) · ASSOCIATED PRESS
The phrase still appeared in the section describing reputation risks.
“JPMorganChase has been and expects that it will continue to be criticized by activists, politicians and other members of the public concerning business practices or positions taken by JPMorganChase with respect to matters of public policy (such as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives),” the company report stated.
Other big banks have also made some recent adjustments to how they talk about DEI.
At Citigroup (C), CEO Jane Fraser announced in a memo to company employees that the New York banking giant would no longer require new hires to be selected from a diverse set of job applicants.
Goldman Sachs (GS) also said this month that it would drop a requirement for its IPO clients to include women and minorities on their board of directors.
David Hollerith is a senior reporter for Yahoo Finance covering banking, crypto, and other areas in finance.
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