In a private group chat formed after JPMorgan's January announcement that all employees would be called back to the office full-time, a few hundred people have turned to the forum to air their concerns, vent about the changes, and share tidbits of intel from their respective corners of the bank in a bid to understand the bank's plans.
The "extremely active" chat gets upward of 100 messages a day, according to one member, a JPMorgan employee of 8 years, who talked to Business Insider. It is one of many Signal chats and Reddit threads that JPMorgan employees are turning to as unofficial "support groups" for employees.
"There's a depressingly small amount of official information within JPMC," they said, expressing their concern about the lack of emails about what's happening. "We have to go find the information, it is not being broadcast."
Last week, a document with JPMorgan branding was shared with the group and caused an instant hubbub, a different member of the chat told BI, which viewed the contents. It appeared to be an outline of steps of escalation for employees who don't meet RTO mandates, including a lower number of non-attendance warnings before possible termination for some.
BI was unable to verify the authenticity of the document or determine who dropped it in the encrypted chat. It is also unclear if it represents current or future bank policy. What is clear based on chat members' reactions to the 6-page outline is that JPMorgan Chase employees are hungry for any clues to how the bank will enforce its 5-days-in-office policy, which began rolling out March 3.
A JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of the document but said, "If employees are not meeting the expectations, there will be ramifications — just like any other performance issue."
Employees are also eager to understand how their attendance is monitored. Some worry that company tracking methods might not correctly record their hours or productivity — putting them at risk of potential enforcement. Others feel the RTO mandates and attendance recording measures are overkill. The employees were granted anonymity by BI to discuss internal company information without professional repercussions.
One JPMorgan tech VP told BI, sarcastically, that they thought the "babysitting was ending."
People in the aforementioned group chat have been sharing intel about tools for surveilling employee location and productivity. An employee who BI did not speak with shared that their manager had shown them a new tool with a heat map that shows how productive employees are based on the items worked on per hour. A technologist who has direct knowledge confirmed to BI the existence of a tool that tracked productivity per hour. It is unclear how widely it had been rolled out.
"It's impossible to put a number on productivity on a minute-by-minute basis," a software engineer in the group chat told BI. "So much of what we do is about communication, learning, planning, and investing. The only quantifiable measures take weeks to materialize."
JPMorgan said it has "no firmwide heat map that tracks individual production volumes."
"For several years now, we have had a transparent attendance tool that is available for all employees and managers to view and record their time, including vacation days, sick days, work from home, and travel," the bank spokesperson said.
The software engineer and the technologist both described color-coded calendars on manager dashboards that show employees' attendance, highlighting patterns such as requesting to work from home every Friday or calling in sick every Thursday. The chat-group document mentioned such patterns as grounds for managers to open HR cases against workers.
JPMorgan also has a long-standing tracking tool, Workplace Activity Data Utility, also known internally as WADU. While these types of surveilling mechanisms aren't new at JPMorgan, as BI has previously reported, they add tension to an already fraught situation around the return to office.
JPMorgan's RTO roll-out has been met with praise, disdain, and confusion. Bank employees said some offices didn't have enough desks, parking, or conference rooms, and that the messaging felt rushed and unplanned. In its memo announcing the mandate, the bank acknowledged that capacity restraints would mean that some offices aren't yet ready, and are maintaining their hybrid in-office policies, working one or two days from home until further notice.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a February interview with CNBC that he's aware this strict policy could result in employees leaving the company and that he's fine with that attrition.
But not everyone who's unhappy about the 5-day RTO is considering leaving the company. Some employees are exploring the possibility of a union and are working with Communications Workers of America, an organization that led the effort of around two dozen Wells Fargo branches unionizing, as BI previously reported.
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