JPMorgan returns to the office. Will other banks follow?

Five years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, banks are rethinking the work-from-home revolution.

The latest example is JPMorgan Chase . Last week, the nation's largest bank said it was requiring almost all of its hybrid workers — who already account for less than half of its total 300,000-employee workforce — to work on-site five days a week, starting in March.

For those workers, the new policy means a change in work-life balance. But for the banking industry, experts say, it also represents a much broader shift: a slow, collective return to the office after years of allowing remote work.

"It's gone in a cycle," said Alan Johnson, president of Johnson Associates, a consulting firm for some of the world's largest financial companies. "At first you could work anywhere, anytime, whatever, and then people realized that we went too far with that. So over the last several years, there's been a gradual movement back to the office."

Only two years ago, things seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. In 2023, about 76% of employees at U.S. financial firms worked fully in-person — down from 92% in 2018, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

"We won't put the genie back in the bottle," James Gorman, then the CEO of Morgan Stanley, told Bloomberg in 2023. "Five days in the office for everybody is not going to happen again."

But in 2025, some think the genie is finding its way back in. Banks, like other members of corporate America, have been calling their employees back to the office for most weekdays, and in some cases all week.

And it's not just banks. Amazon now requires its employees to work on-site five days a week. So do AT&T, X (formerly Twitter) and the computer company Dell.

Among the big banks, Bank of America requires five days a week on-site for client-facing employees and at least three days for everyone else, while Citigroup has set a minimum of three days per week for most of its staff. Goldman Sachs brought its workers back to the office full-time back in 2021 and hasn't looked back.

Wells Fargo , meanwhile, requires a minimum of three days per week on-site for most employees, or four or five days for senior leaders and those who work directly with customers.

"We believe that being together, in person, is a key part of our success and that collaboration and a strong culture allow us to better serve our customers and communities," Beth Richek, a spokesperson for Wells Fargo, told American Banker in an email.

There are some exceptions. About six months after the start of the pandemic, credit card issuer Synchrony Financial in Stamford, Connecticut, allowed all of its employees to begin working from home five days a week. Today, it still doesn't require anyone to come into the office, but it does provide certain incentives to do so.

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But banks that have revised their COVID-era policies are far more numerous. At Charlotte, North Carolina-based Truist Financial, most employees are back in the office four or five days a week. U.S. Bancorp's workers spend at least three weekdays at the office. So do employees at Citizens Financial Group. Those at the company's Rhode Island-based headquarters have access to a full-service cafeteria, a Starbucks cafe and an onsite fitness and wellness center.

Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp's current policy has been in place since 2022 and applies to employees located in the bank's 20-plus hub markets, a company spokesperson said in an email. U.S. Bancorp does have fully remote employees, the spokesperson noted.

Overseas, some banks are taking a carrot-and-stick approach. Media reports say Lloyds Banking Group will take into account how often its most senior employees work from the office when it calculates their bonuses.

"There's been a gradual movement back, because I think the pendulum probably swung too far" toward remote work, Johnson said.

A complex landscape

For those who want to follow JPMorgan's example, the question is how. Adam Eckels is the founder and CEO of AJ Consultants, an executive search firm that fills high-level roles at banks, credit unions and fintechs. Several of his clients, he said, are trying to figure out how to bring their workforce back into the office full-time.

"All of these groups are having these conversations publicly or privately," Eckels said. "The problem is … when you give people freedom, it's hard to take it all back."

The fact that some banks are calling workers back to the office five days a week — and that others haven't yet — is an opportunity to grow talent, Eckels said. While JPMorgan and others might lose some employees to jobs that do offer remote-work options, they might also attract employees from other companies that haven't fully returned to the office, he said.

"For every person who says, 'I am now going to consider leaving my employer' … I also come across people who say 'I'm considering leaving because not enough people are in the office and I like to get away from my house for a little bit,'" Eckels said.

Other large and regional banks that haven't called workers back to the office five days a week may be biding their time to see how the situation unfolds at JPMorgan, said Phil Simon, an expert on workplace technology who has written 14 books, including The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace.

"It will be interesting to see if other banks fall in line or take a fast follower approach," he said.

Meanwhile, there could be challenges in finding enough room for returning employees. In a memo to JPMorgan employees announcing the policy change, CEO Jamie Dimon and the rest of the bank's senior leadership team warned that not all locations currently have capacity to house returning workers. The group said that it is evaluating locations and will communicate with employees about sites with capacity constraints and how those constraints will be handled.

Employees were told to continue with their existing work arrangements until office readiness is confirmed. In addition, some teams "whose work can be easily and clearly measured" will keep working remotely or in a hybrid format, according to the memo.

Challenges ahead

This counterrevolution has not always gone smoothly. Over the past few years, many employees have appreciated the chance to skip their daily commutes or spend more time on their lives outside of work. So when JPMorgan announced its new policy, it anticipated a backlash.

"We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision," bank leadership said in the memo.

And then the backlash came. According to The Wall Street Journal, dozens of JPMorgan employees protested the decision on an internal webpage, citing concerns over childcare schedules, commuting costs and other hardships. Comments on the page were eventually disabled.

There is also the challenge of enforcement. Many banks may say their policy is five days a week back at the office, but making that happen could require some difficult conversations with employees, Johnson noted.

"If you're a software developer that we really want to keep, and you can work really well from home, am I going to fire you because you're only willing to come in three days a week?" Johnson said. "Or am I going to dock your pay and say every day you're not here, we're going to treat that as a vacation day?"

Many banks, Johnson suspects, will choose not to force such confrontations. But that means their "headline" policies may end up being different from what actually happens — and that can be corrosive.

"I think the worst thing you can do is have a policy that people cheat on, because that hurts morale and everything else," Johnson said.

Another question is whether every bank is equally equipped to compel its workers to do something that, in many cases, they don't want to do.

Liz Gujral, a senior consultant at Cornerstone Advisors, works with banks with $20 billion of assets or less. A global giant like JPMorgan might have the leeway to alienate some employees or job applicants with an unpopular policy, she said.

But for smaller banks working hard to recruit skilled professionals, it's a different story.

"If you're a bank that's two hours outside of Minneapolis … you might have to offer that remote or hybrid policy for specific roles in order to gain the talent," Gujral said. "I think a lot of the community bank executives are going to be thinking, 'If we do say every single person has to be in-office Monday through Friday, what impact will that have on our hiring and retention?'"

Simon made a similar point, but from the employee's perspective.

"It stands to reason that if you're a rock-star banker or salesperson, and you don't want to go back to an hour-and-a-half commute when you've been pretty productive in the last four-and-a-half years in hybrid, if not remote, capacity, I do think you'll start poking around," he said.

The office requirement could also affect banks' ability to hire women or younger workers. A recent Pew Research Center survey of 2,315 remote workers without regard to industry found 49% of women and 50% of workers under 50 years old said that if their employer no longer allowed them to work from home, they would be unlikely to stay at their current job.

So will other banks follow JPMorgan's lead? Perhaps, Gujral said — but not right away.

"I think they're going to wait and see what the results are," she said.