- Pictures of JPMorgan’s new Park Avenue HQ have been met with praise by architects but derision by many social media users. The workspace has been compared to a sweat shop, bringing the topic of employee wellbeing and happiness to the fore
- The office will be the permanent full time base for 10,000 staff, ending remote working. But research shows that Gen Z might be more keen than we realise to get back to the office
- Research reveals how in-person working can bring significant benefits to organisations and individuals – but only if the individuals are happy
Ask any MBA student what their career ambitions are when they enter business school and there’s a few common answers that will arise no matter which campus or continent you’re on.
Climbing the ladder with one of the Big Four, getting a foot in the door with a global investment bank, or embarking on a career with a multinational consulting firm are all impressive, yet common goals. Names like Deloitte, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey are common parlance in the corridors and lecture halls.
But those starry-eyed MBA students might now be thinking twice after getting a glimpse inside JPMorgan’s brand new headquarters in New York last week.
Social media platforms (and X in particular) can hardly be trusted to give users a balanced or fair view of what’s happening in the world around us these days, but every now and then the thread of public sentiment can weave even the most disparate audiences together. Particularly when they find something lacking.
Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO, Michael Dell found this out when he chose to congratulate JPMorgan on the completion of its new $3 billion HQ in a post on X, complete with a picture of a swish, new, tech-savvy office floor. Dell, of course, had provided all hardware captured in the image.
It seems no expense has been spared on the new 60-storey Park Avenue skyscraper. Publicity shots capture an atrium with high ceilings held up by thick steel beams, plenty of greenery and near panoramic natural light, as well as a pub (Morgan’s) on the 13th floor and a state-of-the-art fitness centre for a 10,000 strong workforce to enjoy.
However, the vibe of the main workspace is a little different. Endless rows of sleek but tightly packed desks, each with imposingly large quadruple monitor displays can be seen, all of which presumably block out the impressive Manhattan skyline which should be visible from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Were X users impressed by this power play? This vision of tech prowess? Apparently not.
Response to Dell’s post was cynical at best. Comparisons were quickly drawn between the office floor and everything from ethically-shaky Chinese sweat shops and battery chicken farms to the pods that the unconscious human race are plugged into in The Matrix, and the rows upon rows of boxed Buzz Lightyear toys at Al’s Toy Barn shown in Disney Pixar’s Toy Story.
“Remember what they took from you” one X user posted, complete with an image of the cramped, cluttered office cubicles from the 90s, which in comparison to JPMorgan’s set-up now seems like the peak of luxury office life.
It wasn’t just X that gave a scathing review. “Are these for cage free or free range analysts?” one user on Instagram user asked.
A return to the daily grind
The new building is part of CEO Jamie Dimon’s pursuit of normalising a return to full-time office-based work. At the beginning of the year Forbes reported that a memo had been shared with the company’s 316,000 strong global workforce stipulating that those still working remotely or in hybrid arrangements as a hangover from Covid must make arrangements to return to their desks. The memo stated that JPMorgan’s committee believed this arrangement to be the best way of running a company.
Professional development too seems to a key consideration, as reported by Bloomberg, Dimon believes that junior bankers aren’t able to learn as much when working from home, “I’m not making fun of Zoom, but younger people are being left behind,” he commented.
Dimon might have a point. In justifying his comments about remote working, which were made during a meeting of the Future Investment Initiative, he goes on to say; “When we meet on Hollywood squares,” referencing the grid set up of digital meetings “it’s not as honest a conversation. You don’t have that constant follow up… Steve Jobs used to talk about the collaboration that’s accidental, because you run into someone in the hall, and they come up with an idea.” Working from home, engaging in pre-planned stilted conversations via video link or a stream of typed messages does little to coax the embers of innovation or idea generation.
There’s also a lot to be said for physical experience. “If you look back at your careers,” Dimon shares with his audience, “you learned a little bit from an apprentice system. You were with other people who took you on a sales call or told you how to handle a mistake, or something like that. It doesn’t happen when you’re in a basement on Zoom.”
The picture he paints of remote work is perhaps bleaker than the reality. A far cry from the crisis work arrangements of Covid, hunched over kitchen tables, many people these days have invested in comfy home office set-ups. But the core of his message is indisputable. People work better when they meet with other people.
Is returning to the office really a step backwards?
Surprisingly, it’s the younger generation – typically thought to be craving the solitude and convenience of remote working – that are driving the charge for a return to the more traditional professional life.
According to a survey from Gallop, Gen Z have become the “loneliest generation,” being twice more likely to than Gen X and nearly three times as likely as professionals in the baby boomer generation to admit to being lonely in their work, and the generation for which fully remote work is the least popular. Only 23% of those born during or after 1997, would choose a fully remote work set-up, compared with 35% of workers from other generations.
Putting further credibility behind Dimon’s words, the Gallup survey shares that remove working arrangements can create barriers to career progression, particularly for younger or less experienced staff, by limiting their interactions with more senior colleagues, missing out on those opportunities for indirect learning, coaching and relationship building.
Academic research does back this up. Looking at the fundamentals of idea generation and professional collaboration, research from Columbia Business School finds that working in person is a better route to idea generation.
The study, conducted by Melanie Brucks, alongside Professor Jonathan Levav of Stanford Graduate School of Management, used both lab experiments involving 600 participants and a wider field investigation of almost 1,500 participants across five continents, to explore how virtual communication can curb creativity.
Participants were assigned into pairs and, working either in person or via a video link, were charged with finding alternative uses for two objects – bubble wrap and a frisbee, in a five-minute period. The researchers found that, in the lab, those collaborating in person generated as much as 20% more ideas than those working together via a video link. A similar result was found in the field experiment.
The reason why? Authors suggest that people can be inspired by their environments. Those in the room together had the additional benefit of using that room, and the things in it, to help expand their thinking.
“Video conferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen,” the study explains. “As virtual communicators narrow their visual scope to the shared environment of a screen, their cognitive focus narrows in turn.”
Something perhaps for Dimon to think about before welcoming 10,000 back into the workplace?
A further study from Cambridge Judge Business School also hints toward this idea of limited cognitive contribution in virtual settings. By assessing data from more than 1,000 UK-based employees at a financial services firm, Professor Thomas Roulet found that whilst remote work drove up the number of meetings taking place between staff, helping them stay connected, the quality of those meetings declined – resulting in lower productivity.
The study found that not only were more people booked in for more meeting-time, but that people often multitasked during those meetings, stalling and limiting conversation quality. “Low-quality meetings often translate into less productivity and high levels of multitasking can increase stress,” Roulet commented.
Additionally, spending more hours on work tasks and in meetings whilst juggling multiple projects led to not only a lower level of work quality but a decline in work-life balance too – something remote working is usually credited as benefitting – decreasing employee wellbeing.
Face time matters
Getting into the office can create more value than a boost to company productivity, profits and a potentially welcome escape from your own four walls. Time spent amongst co-workers and higher-ups can be an asset when it comes to securing a promotion.
Research from Harvard Business School, conducted in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the University of Virginia finds that being physically near to co-workers has a few significant benefits. Proximity can enhance the development of human-capital, even if it reduces output in the short-term.
By studying the working lives of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm, researchers found that, whilst staff sitting together during working hours reduced their programming output when compared to working in solitude (and particularly so for senior engineers), the levels of feedback that staff received on their work when in the same physical space increased. Engineers who were able to work alongside their entire teams received 22% more feedback on their work boosting their professional visibility and capability. Interestingly, this feedback was given not verbally, but online.
In contrast, engineers working with distant teammates received far less, and in instances where teams had even one member working remotely, feedback for members was reduced.
Women in particular were identified as having the most to gain from in-person working arrangements when it came to career progression, by engaging in more mentorship opportunities.
This finding is perhaps not that surprising, as the value of women’s networks have been well-established in both academic and professional circles. Studies from both Durham University Business School and Yale School of Management identified that simply sitting and learning alongside slightly more women than men could provide women with better professional prospects, let alone engaging in any deliberate effort to make connections and career shifts. Research undertaken by the Erasmus Centre for Women and Organisations (ECWO) at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) has pointed to similar findings, sharing that women’s networks that collaborate with others, rather than working in silos, can generate better opportunities not only for individual working women but in tackling the gendered divides that commonly occur in professional spaces.
When it comes to securing that next step up, a survey by Live Data Technologies of more than two million employees found that only 3.9% or remote workers secured promotions over the course of a year, whereas 5.6% of office-based staff were able to make progressions.
Similarly, research from faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, appropriately titled “Get Noticed And Die Trying” concluded that building up the face-time hours and being observed by others at work can lead to many positive outcomes for employees.
Why was this? A belief from higher-ups that physical presence signals commitment to the team, the job and the wider organisation, and the difficulty managers face in assessing those same qualities in staff working remotely.
To overcome this, the researchers advise on behaviours remote staff can engage in to make themselves more visible to physically distant peers, signalling their commitment so that they can gain better work assignments as a result. But this is a lot of additional work for remote employees to take on in order to level the playing field.
Getting the balance right
But is turning the dial back from fully remote to fully in-person working the right way to drive up performance?
Returning to the Columbia study, the researchers ran a second part to their experiment.
The pairs were then assigned an additional minute to agree upon what they felt the best idea was from their collection to put forward.
Interestingly, whilst the quantity of ideas generated was higher in in-person settings, when it came to assessing the quality of those ideas put forward, those discussing via video link performed just as highly as those sharing a physical space.
What do such findings tell us? That work arrangements should not take a “one size fits all” approach. Different tasks and activities should not all be undertaken in the same way.
Similarly, Professor Roulet cautions against taking a “blanket approach” to workplace rules and arrangements, such as stipulating set office-days, times, or working arrangements. To put it bluntly, flexibility is key.
Returning to the prospects for women in particular, as data points to sobering realities that women required to work in person full time tend to lose out more to men, particularly when they have families to look after. Further research from Rotterdam School of Management Erasmus University tracks how parenthood decreases opportunities for women professionally but supports men in their advancement, and data from the Office of National Statistics finds that women are far more likely to cut back at work – reducing hours or sacrificing opportunities for progression due to childcare needs.
Here, flexible working arrangements have proven to be effective for women in other ways. Better balancing responsibilities between work and home, even dedicating more time to their work than would be possible if they were required to commute to a physical office each day, improving organisations’ ability to retain female talent and get the best from their staff. Unsurprisingly, by being able to glean the best from both worlds, women’s wellbeing and happiness improves as a result.
In JPMorgan’s case, one X poster cut through the sarcasm to get right to the point; “I get it, it’s efficient. I have one question, though. Do you think that the employees will be happy working in that environment? It’s proven (scientific studies) that happiness makes you more productive.”
Those studies can be found in multiples. From Dr Amanda Shantz of Trinity Business School finding that employees who can find meaning in their work can deliver additional benefits to their employers, going the extra mile to offer constructive advice on how to improve processes, to Dr Anthony Kyiu of Durham University Business Schoolfinding that happy employees can make a company’s stock price more accurate, provide better information to potential investors and boost the company brand.
Tempting staffers back by offering a glamorous location, the best tech money can buy and a whole host of other office-based perks designed to boost employee wellbeing and career progression is by no means a bad move (though getting Dimon to agree to include facilities such as a gym was reportedly a battle), but offering staff the option to adapt their working practices to best fit their needs as well as the tasks they’re charged with completed seems to provide the best of both worlds.
A further study from Stanford, this time from Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom, drives this point home especially well.
The study, which Stanford dubs as “the largest study yet of working-from-home professionals” finds that employees who work from home just two days a week are just as productive, are as likely to get promoted, and are far less likely to quit than colleagues required to be in the office full time. “The results are clear: Hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention,” Bloom confirmed in an article for the Stanford Report.
And who are we to argue with an economist?
By, Kerry Ruffle
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