Everyone remembers the looseness that defined work during the COVID pandemic. While it brought its share of stress, particularly the constant concern about infection, remote work also rebalanced work-life integration. It became easy to fold laundry, run errands, or start dinner in between tasks, all while sipping iced coffee with a cat curled in your lap.
But that lifestyle has fallen out of fashion for some business leaders, or at least for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. In a recent interview on CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil, the billionaire 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.”
JPMorgan reinstated a five-day in-person work policy in the beginning of 2025. Many other firms have instituted similar policies since the end of the COVID pandemic, including Amazon and Google. Today, 65% of U.S. job postings require workers to be fully on-site, according to employment firm Robert Half. Dimon has been particularly vocal about the value of the return-to-office move, saying in an interview last week at the Hill and Valley Forum that remote work breeds “rope-a-dope type of politics.” But Dimon’s assertion of the importance of in-person work clashes with the preferences of the majority of U.S. workers, including some of the most talented employees.
Top talent’s flight from in-person work
A 2025 Gallup poll found that 52% of workers prefer a hybrid work setup, and 26% wish to be fully remote. Just about one in five (21%) prefer to be entirely on-site.
Those preferences are impacting where top talent ends up. Recent research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that employees who work from home earn, on average, 12% more than workers fully in-office. Much of that pay bump, according to the research, is thanks to the seniority of the remote workers (real estate giant JLL dubbed high-performers who leverage their seniority to override office policies “empowered non-compliers”). Moreover, a working paper from 2024 found that tech and finance companies that implemented return-to-office policies lost their most skilled and senior employees.
Full-time in-person work is a redline for about a third of U.S. workers, according to a recent study from employment platform Monster. And some workers are even putting money on the line, as many report they’re willing to take a massive pay cut to stay at home, according to a 2025 Harvard study.
But it’s not just worker preferences; remote work could actually boost performance, too. A 2024 study from Great Place To Work found that fully remote workers report the highest employee engagement (31%) compared to hybrid and fully in-person workers. A 2022 study from the same company “found stable or improved productivity after transitioning to remote work.”
The workplace ‘neural network’
When Dokoupil asked Dimon what his sources were for the benefits of in-person work, Dimon said it’s part numbers, part feeling. However, for Dimon, productivity isn’t the only concern. He emphasizes the professional development opportunities in-person contact provides for younger workers.
“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.
The CEO maintains that companies function better in-person than online. “We think we’re going to run a better business, do a better job for customers, share more information,” he said. He adds that in-person work is particularly important for communication. Without it, the company’s structure breaks down. “JP[Morgan] is a neural network and that neural network starts to break down a little bit when you can’t get a hold of people.”
Dimon said he isn’t completely against remote work. He notes JPMorgan Chase has always had about 10% of staff working remote, including presently at virtual call centers in Baltimore and Detroit. “I’m not against remote work, and it works,” he said. He adds the company allows flexibility, particularly for caregivers, like those workers caring for aging parents.
But he suggests remote work isn’t a one-size-fits-all method to management. “I’m against it where it doesn’t work for the company and the clients or the individual involved.” It’s unclear if he’s against it for his most talented empowered non-compliers, too.
