JPMorgan says it’s going to do something about its desk problem.
America’s biggest bank, which called its roughly 320,000-person-strong global workforce back to the office five days a week last year, has previously experienced internal tensions over desk availability and parking at some sites, like its major tech campus in Columbus, Ohio.
Now, the firm says it will tackle its office woes head-on.
“If you think about what’s happened to the head count of the company over, say, the last five or six years, it’s grown a lot,” Jeremy Barnum, the firm’s chief financial officer, told shareholders during the bank’s Tuesday earnings call.
“There was the whole return to the office, hot desking, remote work, all the stuff,” he added. “The amount of real estate square footage over that period grew a lot more slowly than headcount.”
But the lack of ample space didn’t deter the company from pushing ahead with its full-time office mandate.
“We’ve realized that it’s obviously the case that we need to provide employees a reasonable in-office experience and that, in some cases, means a little bit of de-densification and catching up on some space renovations around the world,” Barnum continued.
On the call, CEO Jamie Dimon chimed in.
“Don’t scare them,” he told Barnum, presumably about alarming analysts about rising spending. “Real estate,” Dimon said, “is very small numbers.”
The firm has already opened a new state-of-the-art headquarters at 270 Park Avenue in Manhattan — a cutting-edge skyscraper featuring a bevy of restaurants, a luxurious fitness center, and tech that even remembers how you like the temperature when you reserve a conference room.
The bank’s five-day-per-week return-to-office policy proved a heated flashpoint last year, with Dimon famously telling some of the 12,000 staffers at the Columbus site that he suspected remote workers were texting one another during meetings and not completing tasks.
Last spring, a JPMorgan spokesperson told Business Insider that the firm was “working hard to ensure our sites have the capacity and amenities employees need to return full-time.”
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