JPMorgan is watching: How the nation's largest bank keeps tabs on its workforce — from their office attendance to emails and Zoom calls
- JPMorgan is calling employees back to the office — and keeping tabs on attendance.
- This has reignited a conversation about the bank's surveillance of its employees.
Editor's note: This story was first published in May 2022. It was updated in May 2023 to reflect the bank's latest return-to-office policies.
JPMorgan's push to get employees back to their desks is reigniting a conversation about employee surveillance.
In April, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon ordered the bank's highest-ranking executives to return to the office five days a week and be "visible on the floor." The high-profile CEO ordered everyone else to return to the office at least three days a week or "face corrective action," according to a copy of the memo obtained by Insider.
Since then, the bank's ability to monitor its hundreds of thousands of global employees has become a hot topic fueling conversations on Reddit, Facebook, and on Blind, a forum that allows employees to post anonymously about workplace-related matters. Insider has some answers.
Last year, Insider correspondent Reed Alexander unearthed details about JPMorgan's monitoring systems by speaking to roughly a dozen people currently or recently employed by the bank. They explained how the bank tracks everything from office attendance to time spent on Zoom calls and composing emails. He documented what he learned in a series of stories, starting with the bank's tracking of office attendance and culminating in a story about a proprietary system called the "Workforce Activity Data Utility," or WADU for short, that monitors the bank's computer laptops.
Reed's reporting revealed how JPMorgan filters the data it collects into a dashboard that can churn out reports for managers and other senior leaders. It's how the bank kept track of who was meeting their in-office quotas, sources explained to Reed.
Attorneys and experts on workplace data collection told Insider that firms like JPMorgan are legally within their rights to gather information regarding employees' activities on the job. And regulators often require banks and brokerages to keep track of employees' workplace-related communications and record their fingerprints upon hiring.
But experts said companies also need to consider the ethics of employee monitoring and how it might make employees feel.
Many of the JPMorgan employees Reed spoke to said their surveillance made them feel untrusted by their bosses. If ID swipes were being measured, what else was the bank looking to determine productivity and pay?
For some, looking for work elsewhere was the only solution.
"At JPMorgan, nobody trusts you," a London-based technology staffer said at the time. "The higher-ups don't trust you to do your job if they're not constantly watching you in the office."
An official at JPMorgan Chase told Insider in May 2022 that an explanation of WADU is available to all employees via the firm's intranet and includes language to ease concerns about how data is used.
Employees interviewed by Insider said they were unaware of the disclosures and continued to have questions about how the data might be used to assess their performance.
Dimon, meanwhile, is unlikely to soften his stance on in-office work, which is more liberal than Wall Street rival Goldman Sachs. He has argued that remote work harms young people's growth and impedes creativity and teamwork.
"It doesn't work for young kids, it doesn't work for spontaneity, it doesn't really work for management," Dimon told CNBC's Squawkbox last year.
Are you an employee at JPMorgan Chase? Contact these reporters. Reed Alexander can be reached at ralexander@insider.com or via the encrypted app Signal/SMS at (561) 247-5758. Emmalyse Brownstein can be reached at ebrownstein@insider.com or Signal/SMS at (305) 857-5516.
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