It started with the swipes.
JPMorgan has asked half of its workforce to return to the office five days a week, and another 40% to come in a few days a week.
In an effort to enforce its return-to-office policies, the company has taken to compiling special “reports” and dashboards that managers can use to call and email staffers who fall short of their in-office mandates, bank workers said.
The reports — fueled by employees’ ID swipes — infuriated some employees who spoke to Insider. Seven current and former employees shared their stories with Insider. Some said they’ve had their bonuses and promotions threatened. Others said they were afraid that demands to work from the office were putting their loved ones’ lives at risk.
Of course, JPMorgan doesn’t just track ID swipes. From the moment employees log into JPMorgan Chase’s workplace portal each day, a powerful system begins pulling in data about what they’re doing — from how long they spend on Zoom calls to writing emails to talking on the phone.
Attorneys and experts on workplace-data collection say that firms like JPMorgan are legally within their rights to gather information regarding employees’ activities on the job. And regulators often require banks and brokerages to keep track of employees’ workplace-related communications and record their fingerprints upon hiring.
But in the more than two years it has been used, the company’s internal data-collection system, called WADU for short, has come to inspire rumors and fear throughout the ranks of America’s biggest bank, according to interviews with more than half a dozen current and former employees.
Employees say this is because the reasons the bank tracks how much time they spend on Zoom calls or composing emails are vague — and they fear the data is being shared used to assess their performance and productivity.
An official at JPMorgan Chase told Insider that language on the firm’s intranet, which is made available to all employees, is meant to allay concerns over the purposes of the data collection.
Employees interviewed by Insider said they were unaware of the disclosures, and that they continue to have questions about how data the is being used to assess their performance.
Source: Business Insider
