JPMorgan Chase Monitors Employee Workloads With New Tool

JPMorgan Chase is piloting a programme to monitor the working hours of its junior investment bankers, marking the latest effort by a major financial institution to address concerns about overwork in high-pressure roles.

The tool will track video calls, keystrokes and meetings alongside employees' self-reported working hours to help the bank build a more accurate picture of staff workloads. The move reflects growing awareness among financial leaders that traditional methods of monitoring working hours could be failing to capture the reality of junior banker schedules.

While the company has introduced caps on working hours in recent years, employees often underreport their hours to avoid being told to take breaks or be taken off deals, according to the Financial Times.

A representative from JPMorgan Chase said: "Much like the weekly screen time summaries on a smartphone, this tool is about awareness – not enforcement. It's designed to support transparency, wellbeing and encourage open conversations about workload."

Managing employee workloads

In 2024, JPMorgan Chase announced it was limiting working hours to 80 per week for staff, with exceptions allowed for those working on live deals. This was done was to improve the wellbeing of employees, according to the company, with staff sometimes working over 100 hours a week during high-stress periods.

Before this, JPMorgan Chase had introduced new measures to improve employee wellbeing, such as a 'Pencils Down' period lasting from 6pm on a Friday to 12pm on a Saturday and the guarantee of one weekend off per quarter.

The 80-hour cap stands at double the standard full-time working hours and often involves employees working more than 12 hours a day or seven days per week.

Growing adoption of monitoring technology

According to findings from the Chartered Management Institute, a third of employers in the UK are using 'bossware' – employee monitoring software that can track employees' computer usage.

Bank of America rolled out a timekeeping tool in 2024, where junior investment bankers are required to log their hours and information about the deals they are working on and their ability to take on more work. According to the bank, this software helps its team "more efficiently serve our investment banking clients."

The return to office equation

As banks such as JPMorgan Chase look to improve employee wellbeing through monitoring policies, they are also driving large-scale return to office mandates that could appear to contradict flexibility aims.

According to a survey from KPMG, almost half of financial service leaders said they planned to monitor attendance through office card swipe systems, while 29% said they would install digital cameras.

Jamie Dimon, Chief Executive of JPMorgan Chase, has said that encouraging employees to return to the office could help to improve their wellbeing in the long term. In 2025, the company ordered its employees to come back to the office five days a week, after nearly half of employees had been working on a hybrid schedule.

Close to 2,000 employees signed a public petition to maintain the hybrid model, but Jamie told Bloomberg that he believes employees "will be happier over time," as "you can't learn working from your basement."

He said: "I gave a very detailed answer about why [work from home] doesn't work for young people, why it doesn't work for management, why it doesn't work for innovation. I completely applaud your right to not want to go to the office every day. But you're not going to tell JPMorgan what to do."