JPMorgan worker risks everything by ambushing CEO Jamie Dimon at town hall over work from home… and WINS

A JPMorgan techie whose question at a company town hall triggered an extraordinary work-from-home rant by the chairman claims he was briefly fired over it.

Nicolas Welch was sitting front row at the meeting in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday and asked the third question of chairman and chief executive Jamie Dimon.

The self-confessed ‘old hillbilly’ said he, a tech analyst at the bank since 2017, worked in a team with members across four time zones from India to Argentina.

‘There is no way that being in an office makes any difference for us specifically,’ he said, in audio that lit up the internet this week over Dimon’s response.

‘So, all I’m asking is that – I’m not suggesting you rescind such an order – but suggesting it be left up to managers of individual teams themselves on [the] necessity of an office workplace.’

Dimon responded with a long rant against working from home, and defended his earlier order dragging all employees back into the office five days a week.

‘That’s it? I’m going to give you a complete answer. There is no chance that I would leave that up to managers. Zero chance,’ he said. ‘The abuse that took place was extraordinary.

‘We don’t need all those people. We were putting people in jobs because people weren’t doing the jobs they were hired to do in [the] first place.’

Welch told Fortune magazine that after the town hall, he was summoned to a meeting with his former boss Garrett Monaghan, now a vice president but still with the same division.

‘I don’t know what the fuck you just did, but come to my desk immediately when that town hall ends. Please,’ the text read.

Welch said when he arrived at the office, he was pulled into a meeting with Jeffrey Merrill, another of his former bosses from 2018 to 2021 who was now a VP.

He claimed Monaghan told him he ”just dragged our whole organization through the mud. Go and clean off your desk and get the f**k out of here’.

Welch grabbed what little he left in the office, which as he worked remotely two days a week was just a coat and headphone, and walked outside. 

He texted his direct boss, IT support Customer success manager Richard Cundiff, from the car park – who, like Dimon said in the town hall, had moved to Florida.

He told him Monaghan had ‘threatened my job, so I’ve been ordered home’, to which Cundiff replied, ‘Thanks for letting me know.’

Welch asked to speak with Welch’s boss, but she was on holiday and Cundiff told him ‘I will inform her in our next meeting’.

He went home and assumed he no longer had a job. 

But hours later he got a call from, Megan Mead, who heads up all of global IT support as part of the Technology Employee Support Services division, and outranked Monaghan, Merrill, and Cundiff.

Mead told him he wasn’t fired and she had ‘smoothed things over’ with Monaghan, during the 45-minute conversation.

‘I appreciate you, Nic and I am really proud about how you responded to a pretty unfair circumstance,’ Mead wrote in a follow-up text message.