Everyone remembers the looseness that defined work during the COVID pandemic. While it brought its share of stress, particularly the constant concern about infection, remote work also rebalanced work-life integration. It became easy to fold laundry, run errands, or start dinner in between tasks, all while sipping iced coffee with a cat curled in your lap.<\/p>\n
But that lifestyle has fallen out of fashion for some business leaders, or at least for JPMorgan Chase<\/a> CEO Jamie Dimon. In a recent interview<\/a> on CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil, the billionaire said leaders who maintain remote work policies are falling behind, and could be failing their youngest workers.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could build a company one way and I could build another company one way,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019ll tell you one thing: We would crush you.\u201d<\/p>\n JPMorgan reinstated<\/a> a five-day in-person work policy in the beginning of 2025. Many other firms have instituted similar policies since the end of the COVID pandemic, including Amazon<\/a> and Google<\/a>. Today, 65% of U.S. job postings require workers to be fully on-site, according to employment firm Robert Half<\/a>. Dimon has been particularly vocal about the value of the return-to-office move, saying in an interview<\/a> last week at the Hill and Valley Forum that remote work breeds \u201crope-a-dope type of politics.\u201d But Dimon\u2019s assertion of the importance of in-person work clashes with the preferences of the majority of U.S. workers, including some of the most talented employees.<\/p>\n A 2025 Gallup poll<\/a> found that 52% of workers prefer a hybrid work setup, and 26% wish to be fully remote. Just about one in five (21%) prefer to be entirely on-site.<\/p>\n Those preferences are impacting where top talent ends up. Recent research<\/a> from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that employees who work from home earn, on average, 12% more than workers fully in-office. Much of that pay bump, according to the research, is thanks to the seniority of the remote workers (real estate giant JLL dubbed high-performers who leverage their seniority to override office policies \u201cempowered non-compliers<\/a>\u201d). Moreover, a working paper<\/a> from 2024 found that tech and finance companies<\/a> that implemented return-to-office policies lost their most skilled and senior employees.<\/p>\n Full-time in-person work is a redline for about a third of U.S. workers, according to a recent study from employment platform Monster<\/a>. And some workers are even putting money on the line, as many report they\u2019re willing to take a massive pay cut<\/a> to stay at home, according to a 2025 Harvard study<\/a>.<\/p>\n Story Continues <\/p>\n