JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon on Monday expressed regret about the expletives he used during a recent employee town hall, but he didn’t back down from his core message that employees need to return to the workplace five days a week.
“I should never curse, ever,” and “I shouldn’t get angry,” Dimon told CNBC when asked about a heated Feb. 12 exchange with employees that centered on JPMorgan’s recent return-to-office order.
However, “We’re not going to change,” he said. “We’re going back to the office.”
The JPMorgan policy that all workers need to be back in the office five days a week by early March has prompted a petition from a group of employees calling for the nation’s largest bank to keep a hybrid work policy in place.
“Don’t give me the s*** that ‘work from home Friday’ works,” Dimon said during the town hall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, according to a recording that was leaked afterward and reviewed by Yahoo Finance.
Of the petition calling for the bank to keep a flexible policy in place, he said, “I don’t care how many people sign that f***ing petition.”
Dimon on Monday also had some more to say about another topic he covered during the Feb. 12 town hall: the bank’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
He told workers at the event that legal changes along with Dimon’s own desire to cut down on bureaucracy would lead to alterations for some DEI programs.
“Obviously, we have to accommodate the law. So the law changed. We can’t have quotas,” Dimon said in the recording obtained by Yahoo Finance, adding that he “was never a firm believer in bias training” and had questions about money being spent on certain DEI programs.
“I saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid s*** and it really pissed me off … I’m just going to cancel them. I don’t like wasted money in bureaucracy,” Dimon said.
When CNBC asked Dimon on Monday what he found wasteful, he said, “It’s things like trainings that don’t work or too many of them, meetings that don’t work.”
He added that “there’s a whole bunch of stuff like that, a lot of small programs that kind of just grew over time. So we’re going to kind of consolidate them. They’re all very rational.”
Still, “we’re still going to reach out to the Black, Hispanic, LGBT, veteran, disabled communities. That, we’re not changing that,” he said.
Last week, JPMorgan published its annual report, removing nearly all mentions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” when compared to its 2023 annual report.
