As JPMorgan Chase enforces a 5-day RTO, staffers complain about too few desks, spotty Wi-Fi, and sneezing, sick coworkers

It’s the first week of JPMorgan Chase’s return-to-office mandate that obliges thousands of people to come back in five days a week, and so far the adjustment has been less than smooth. Tensions are high among the bank’s employees, who are grousing about noisy workplaces, sporadic Wi-Fi, and sick coworkers who cough and sneeze.

One of the biggest problems facing JPMorgan Chase staffers, though, is the lack of desks. The nation’s largest bank has a desk reservation system, but for some sites it doesn’t work, or the policy is “first come, first serve,” according to seven JPM employees who spoke to Fortune. This means that many employees, when they arrive at their workplace, will find all the desks filled, forcing them to hunt for a place to do their work. None of the workers, whose identities are known to Fortune and who are spread all over the U.S., wanted to speak on the record for fear of retaliation.

“There definitely aren’t enough desks for everyone so people have to hope others are taking PTO that day to get a seat,” said one JPM employee who works on the East Coast. This worker’s team had to kick employees to another section after not getting enough desks, they said.

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chairman and CEO, has been a vocal proponent of RTO, claiming that working at the office helps boost teamwork, mentorship, and innovation. But the lack of desks makes it hard for some JPMorgan Chase groups to work together.

“We saw our seats were already occupied by others. We were forced to have to sit apart from one another,” a second JPM staffer, also on the East Coast, said.

The lack of desks has forced many JPM employees to arrive at the workplace early, sometimes by as much as one hour, so they can snag a seat. Others have taken to placing personal items, according to the second source, while some employees in the San Francisco Bay Area are putting “paper tents” labeled with their team’s name on desks to try to “unofficially reserve an area,” a third person added. Sometimes these efforts don’t work, and employees still must search for places to sit.

Dimon’s five-day-a-week mandate was imposed in part to improve team spirit, but, ironically, it appears to have had the opposite effect in some cases.. Not getting a seat, or having a desk scooped up by other workers, has led to increased tension but so far no fights, people said. “You could just tell folks that got there later were feeling a bit off-kilter,” a fourth employee in the South said.

In January, JPMorgan Chase set off a firestorm when the bank informed its 317,233 employees that all staff would be required to return to the office five days a week. Roughly 40% of JPMorgan Chase’s employees had been working on a hybrid schedule, where they were in the office three days a week, since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Many bank employees went back full-time on March 3 while others are scheduled for RTO on March 10. But some sites, like JPMorgan Chase’s Polaris regional headquarters in Ohio, which houses roughly 13,000 employees, were still listed Wednesday as “not yet determined.”