Jamie Dimon says remote work breeds ‘rope-a-dope politics’ and stunts young workers’ growth

Jamie Dimon said younger workers are not fully engaged if they work remotely, adding they won’t be as well-developed because remote work doesn’t foster learning on the job.

Jamie Dimon, who has led America’s largest bank, JPMorgan, for 20 years and through multiple recessions, blasted remote work and offered a stern warning for any younger generations who want to move up the career ladder: Get into the office. 

“If you go to a meeting with me, you got my full friggin’ attention the whole time,” he said earlier this year at the Hill and Valley Forum, which brought together leaders from Washington and Silicon Valley.

During the session titled “Wealth, Power, and the Next American Century,” Dimon said remote work only works well for certain jobs like call centers, but for everyone else, including young people and managers alike, in-person working is best. Young people, especially, need to work in person because they are still learning, he said.

“They learn by going on a sales call. They learn by seeing you make a mistake. They learn by how you deal with the mistake,” Dimon said, adding that remote work also fails to help young people develop their emotional intelligence.

The problem is universal, Dimon said, and managers should also get comfortable sitting in the office. Video calls, which he compared to the game show Hollywood Squares, where participants sit in a real-life tic-tac-toe board, allow for far fewer checkups than would happen in person where you can ask someone directly for an update. Working from home, Dimon said, causes less ownership of a project, less curiosity, and, referencing a Muhammad Ali tactic, tires people faster.

“There’s very little follow-up, a lot more game playing, you know, rope-a-dope type of politics,” he said.

Plus, he added, “a lot of people aren’t paying attention at all,” as many of them are on their phones while on a video call, a trend which he didn’t notice early on, he said.

The remarks are not new for the 70-year-old, who has often protested remote work for early-career employees, advocating for an “apprentice system” in which younger workers learn from more experienced veterans.

“You can’t learn working from your basement,” he said in a Bloomberg interview last year.

Previously, Dimon has complained that remote work has made it more difficult to reach employees, especially on Fridays, which he said is “not how you run a great company.”

Other executives, such as Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri, have also pushed to bring employees back to the office for a full five days a week in the past two years. Still, not every business leader agrees. Shark Tank star and O’Leary Ventures chairman Kevin O’Leary has often advocated for remote work to better attract top candidates. In a video, O’Leary said: “I’d rather hire somebody who can execute and sit in their basement or in their backyard.”

JPMorgan announced its own five-day in-office policy last year, prompting more than 1,200 employees to sign a petition urging the company to keep its flexible hybrid work model. During a town hall meeting last February, Dimon lashed out at employees for signing what he saw as a meaningless petition.

“Don’t waste time on it,” Dimon reportedly said during the town hall. “I don’t care how many people sign that f—ing petition.”

Gen Z pushes back

Despite what Dimon says, not all young people are thrilled by the prospect of working at the office full-time. While employers have leveraged the shaky job market to force employees back, nearly 40% of Gen Z and millennial employees said they would take a pay cut in exchange for more flexibility on where they work, compared with 32% across generations.

The research on remote work also doesn’t quite align with what executives like Dimon have said. A Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis from 2024 found a statistically significant positive correlation across 61 industries between the pandemic-era rise in remote work and productivity growth, among other positive outcomes. At the same time, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report from 2025 found fully remote workers actually report the highest engagement rates at 31%, compared with 23% for hybrid and on-site workers who are remote capable.

While Dimon acknowledged JPMorgan wants to keep its workers happy, he also said the company has to adapt to what its customers want. 

“We’re not in business so my employee’s happy,” he said. “I’m in business so my customer’s happy, and I want my employee to be happy, but not at the expense of the customer.” 

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on March 25, 2026.

More on tech:

• Olympic champion Shaun White says AI is ‘leveling the playing field’ for professional athletes
• Meet the SpaceX employees who are set to become multimillionaires thanks to its IPO: from execs to even welders
• The head of Claude Code hasn’t ‘written a line of code by hand’ in 8 months

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com