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A busy life that Filippogoli has to take the lead. The JPMorgan banker lived in Hong Kong, where he led the Asia-Pacific company on Wall Street Bank.
He was given two big new jobs last year, and then the co-head of global banking and head of Europe, EMEA known for the Middle East, Africa or Business Speak.
Considering his EMEA responsibility, you may think the move makes sense. But as FT readers learned this week, Goli is about to speculate that he is trying to lift the stick again. He’s heading for New York.
I started with the dilemma that this news has been arrested for several reasons and that we are not international bankers rarely need to consider.
How do you stay in Lagos, Dubai, London, for example, when you wake up in Manhattan or when either the New York gori is finished?
Those familiar with the situation told my colleagues that Goli spent at least half his time at EMEA for the rest of the year and “continue to become very visible among local employees and clients.” I can believe them. We can also believe that Goli will do his best to mandate his boss, Jamie Dimon, to critics with a loud voice of remote working practices.
In line with the view that such practices practice SAP efficiency, creativity and youth development, thousands of JPMorgan employees have been told to return to the office five days a week this year. Also, Goli has to imagine that he aims to do this at any time in the office where he is nearby.
Alas, not everyone agrees. One of the popular online leaders’ reactions to the news of Gori’s move was “RTO for RTO, work for NYC.”
That may be unfair to Gori. Certainly, there is a logic behind his global banking role as a New York-based company. But one thing is clear. A highly valued executive was always able to negotiate a transaction that gave them more freedom than the average employee. And the average employee is a huge fan of the freedom that remote working offers.
Adding these two facts together gives us another reason why working from home is considered to be far more sustainable than all the headlines that you order staff back to the office.
For many small organisations, it promotes the greatest happiness for the most people. Or, put it another way, it’s easy, especially if you don’t run a big Wall Street bank with market power to choose talented staff.
I think this will help explain the puzzle I wrote about earlier this year. Lack of data showing that a return to office rules is causing major falls in remote work.
Researchers who have spent years tracking the share of work our employees do from home say Covid was well below 10% by the time they exceeded 60%. However, they have only been at about 27% since the second half of 2023, showing the same numbers this month.
For my theory, 2025 might be the year when remote working rates finally began to fall as in-office rules were more closely enacted in January at companies like Amazon and PWC.
Data suggest that such orders are on the rise, and workers’ resistance to them may be softened.
In June, 43.5% of people still working from home reported that their employers had issued RTO mandates over the past six months.
And the share of people who work at least one day a week from their homes who say they will adhere to such rules has increased from 46% to 49% at the end of last year.
But this suggests that half of those facing such missions are ready to quit or look for another job. And if they worked for bosses who don’t have to follow the same rules as them, I would bet that many of them would be even more keen on jumping over the ship.
pilita.clark@ft.com
