Employees are waiting to hear how JPMorgan Chase will carry out its office-to-office duties. They are looking for clues. In one example, you share a leaked document in a group chat. Employees shared information about locations and productivity tracking tools.
In a private group chat, formed after JPMorgan’s January announcement, after the announcement that all employees will be called back to the office full time, hundreds of people aired concerns, vented the changes and relied on the forum to share a bite of Intel from the bank’s corner to understand the bank’s plans.
According to one member of an 8-year-old JPMorgan employee who spoke to Business Insider, “very active” chats raise 100 messages a day. This is one of many signal chats and Reddit threads where JPMorgan employees are turning to an informal “support group” of employees.
“There’s a depressingly small amount of official information within JPMC,” they said, expressing concerns about the lack of emails about what’s going on. “We have to find information. It’s not broadcast.”
Last week, a document containing JPMorgan branding was shared with the group, causing instant hub bub. Another member of the chat told BI. It seemed like an overview of the escalation steps for employees who did not meet the RTO delegation.
BI was unable to verify the authenticity of the document or determine who dropped it in the encrypted chat. It is also unclear whether it represents a current or future bank policy. What is clear based on chat members’ response to the six-page outline is that JPMorgan Chase employees are hungry for clues as to how banks will implement the five-day office policy that began rolling out on March 3rd.
A JP Morgan spokesman declined to comment on details of the document, but said “if employees do not meet expectations, it will have an impact, just like any other performance issue.”
Employees also want to understand how to monitor attendees. Some people worry that how companies track their jobs may not record time or productivity correctly. Others feel that RTO orders and attendance records are over-scaled. Employees were given anonymity by BI and discussed internal company information without occupational impact.
One JPMorgan Tech VP told Bi ironically that he thought “babysitting is over.”
The people in the group chat mentioned above share Intel about their employees’ location and tools to monitor productivity. Employees who BI didn’t talk to me shared that managers were showing new tools with heat maps showing how productive employees are based on items per hour. The technician with direct knowledge confirmed with BI for the existence of a tool to track productivity per hour. It is unknown how widely it was developed.
A group chat software engineer told BI, “It’s impossible to put numbers into productivity every minute.” “A lot of what we do is about communication, learning, planning and investment. The only quantifiable means takes weeks to come true.”
“There is no solid heat map to track individual production volumes,” JPMorgan said.
“For several years, there have been clear attendance tools that all employees and managers can use to see and record their time, whether it’s holiday days, sick days, work from home, or travel,” a bank spokesperson said.
Software engineers and technicians described a dashboard color-coded calendar that highlights patterns such as requesting work every Friday or making sick calls every Thursday in a manager dashboard. The chat group documentation mentioned patterns such as the rationale for managers to open HR cases to workers.
JPMorgan also has the long-standing tracking tool, the Workplace Activity Data utility, also known as Wadu. As BI previously reported, these types of monitoring mechanisms are not new in JPMorgan, but they add tension to the already difficult situation around the return to the office.
JPMorgan’s RTO rollout encountered praise, sloppy and confusion. Bank employees said some offices didn’t have enough desks, parking or meeting rooms, and they felt the message was rushed and unplanned. In a memo announcing the delegation, the bank has confirmed that capacity restrictions mean that some offices are not ready yet, maintaining policies within the hybrid, and working from home for 1-2 days until notification.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a February interview with CNBC that he recognizes that this strict policy could leave the company, saying that attrition is fine.
However, not everyone who is unhappy with a five-day RTO is considering leaving the company. Some employees are exploring the possibilities of unions and, as reported previously by BI, are working with American communications workers, an organization that led the efforts to unify around two dozen Wellsfago branches.
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