Tag: Federal

When working for yourself, remote working is great.
When working with others, remote work has its place.
When an employer does not offer remote work opportunities that is their choice.
When an employee demands remote work opportunities, they can find another job.

Full disclosure. When I worked for corporate America I was opposed to remote work. I was even tasked with the responsibility of creating a remote work policy. I wrote a great policy. The policy was fair to the employees, it was fair to the company. No one liked it and it was not used.

Why?

I had the vision to put in checks and balances. Remote workers were going to have the same accountabilities as those workers that remained in the office. The technical ability to monitor both remote and on-site staff in the exact same way existed.

The remote workers felt like they would be micro-managed. The managers thought they would have to do more work.

What was discovered was not surprising. No one was being held accountable for a majority of their workday. Managers were not managing. Worker productivity was not what people claimed it to be.

With remote work becoming a thing, my proposal for accountability made everyone aware. All the dirty office secrets were going to come out.

The company pushed forward with remote workers. There was no productivity accountability policy. Productivity suffered. Customer satisfaction suffered. Employee satisfaction suffered. The companies’ bottom line suffered.

I was not surprised.

Many companies and the federal government are recalling their remote workers to the office. This is easy to understand.

Because companies did not and are not going to manage remote workers well.

Recently, the CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon demanded that all 317,233 employees return to work. He said that JP Morgan has had to hire 50,000 people the last 4 or 5 years.

“We just do not need all of these people. We were putting people in jobs because people were not doing the jobs they were hired to do.” Said Dimon.

He blamed remote workers for a decline in productivity. He said he had to bring on 50,000 new people to meet productivity levels.

Let me be clear. Mr. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan is an unfit CEO. He had to increase his staffing by almost 20%. This occurred because he did not ensure his management teams added accountabilities for remote staff. This vital management failure cost JP Morgan well over $10,000,000.
 
Mr. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan added over $5,258,150,000 in just the last year alone. This was done to offset productivity losses due to their remote work policy.

Over the full 5 years, that total number well exceeds $10,000,000,000. These funds are added to payroll as wages and benefits. They are removed from company profits and shareholder value.

* I am using the average salary for JP Morgan analysts.
* I am also taking into account that the 50,000 new hires were not all hired in one. He allowed the problem to grow. Instead of fixing the problem, he just kept throwing gas on the fire instead of putting the fire out.

Bringing in new hires only continued the problem. Those same failed policies were applied to the new hires. This means the new hires were unlikely to be as productive as needed.

In short, JP Morgan was hiring people to replace the lost productivity of the people he hired to replace the lost productivity of those already hired. It was a Russian Nesting Doll of lost productivity replacement.

The simple fact is that before Mr. Dimon approved of remote work he needed to have his management team develop a remote workers policy. By his own admission, he failed. His failure cost his company over $10,000,000.

Why does he still have a job? As soon as he wasted 50,000 employees he should have been given a vote of no confidence and been terminated.

Anyone that mismanages an organization to the tune of $10,000,000 should not be working for that organization anymore. Especially when the cause of such loss was something as easily manageable as a remote work policy.

In recent years, my former company, JP Morgan, and the Federal Government have failed the remote worker test. I would surmise that except for a few that had visionaries (like me) in place, most did.

I do not blame companies for wanting their workforce back in the office. Especially if it is going to cost a company $10,000,00.

I will blame the companies that continue to employ those at the top that own such epic failures.