The New York Post cites sources claiming the firm’s official hybrid policy doesn’t align with reality.

JPMorgan’s chief Jamie Dimon may have relaxed his stance on working from home in public, but what he's conveying inside office walls is a different story, according to news reports.

“The worry is if people aren’t in their seats five days a week, those seats could be moved from our team,” a source close to the situation told the Post. “If someone’s not there it makes it a pretty easy decision to fire them first.”

And there are a lot of seats to fill, with the firm building a new Manhattan headquarters estimated to cost $3 billion have room for 15,000 workers, sources tell the Post.“In the 80s we had a saying on Wall Street: They can’t take your desk away from you if you’re sitting at it.” Unnamed JPMorgan Banker

As the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to wind down last year, Dimon first insisted that the vast majority of JPMorgan’s 250,000 employees would need to return to the office, on the grounds that people working from home were less productive.

Then, in April this year, Dimon said his annual letter to shareholders that only about half of the firm’s staff would need to work “at a location” full time. About 40% would be able to work in a hybrid arrangement and 10% would be permanently remote, he indicated.

But while JPMorgan doesn’t require staff to come in every day of the week, almost all senior executives at the firm’s temporary headquarters at 383 Madison Avenue have been doing just that, sources tell the Post.

In addition, the senior employees have been “nudging” junior bankers to come in more frequently than the three days they’re required to be at the office, the publication writes.

“In the 80s we had a saying on Wall Street: They can’t take your desk away from you if you’re sitting at it,” one banking source told The New York Post. “Junior bankers would be wise to remember that.”

According to the publication, Dimon’s purported insistence on employees working from the office may have to do with JPMorgan’s planned new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, which is expected to cost around $3 billion.

When it opens in 2025, the 70-story building will be able accommodate up to 15,000 workers — and having fewer than that would be “essentially driving down the assets they have as a bank and that’s a knock-on effect of the shareholder price,” Mike Mayo, bank analyst at Wells Fargo told The Post.

A spokesman for the firm told the publication that it doesn’t have plans to change its hybrid work policy and pointed to an earlier statement.

“Generally speaking, we envision a model that will find many employees working in a location full-time, some working in a hybrid model (e.g. some days per week in a location and the other days at home), and some employees possibly working full-time from home for very specific roles,” the company said, according to The Post.