Morning Coffee: Is Bank of America becoming less cuddly? Why Jamie Dimon objects to DEI
Bank of America has typically had a reputation for being a slightly … nicer place to work than the rest of the bulge bracket. The perception has always been that Goldman Sachs is intense, Morgan Stanley is political, Citi is dysfunctional, JPMorgan is snobbish but Bank of America is … chill? Possibly even a little bit complacent? Like all such stereotypes, these are for the most part garbage, but there’s always a little bit of truth that makes them persist. They do make a point of promoting nice guys like Jim DeMare, after all.
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But has it lost its chill? Over the last week, we’ve seen BoA carry out small surprise job cuts , a few days before bonus announcements. Compensation expectations have been rebased downward. And now they’ve sent out a bunch of officious letters to people who haven’t mustered the correct number of card swipes to be compliant with the work-from-home policy . Is this the new Goldman? Will we see BoA junior bankers doing a Powerpoint presentation about how badly treated they feel?
The letters certainly seem pretty Orwellian. They are apparently titled “letters of education” and accuse employees of breaching the “Workplace Excellence Guidelines”, despite “requests and reminders”. Someone is bound to do an online quiz inviting people to guess “Bank of America or North Korea?”
On the other hand, BoA certainly doesn’t have the only human resources department in the world that sometimes accidentally overdoes the business prose and veers from “stern euphemism” to “sounds a bit Soviet”. Someone presumably intended to express the message “get back in the office or else”, but thought that it looked a bit blunt and unprofessional in precisely
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