JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made headlines last week when he declined to reconsider his return-to-office mandate for the bank’s over 317,000 employees. In a town hall meeting attended by staff, both in person and on Zoom, Dimon candidly said, “I don’t care how many people sign that f***ing petition,” referring to a campaign calling for a reversal of the policy.

Dimon’s sour mood towards remote work during that interaction was triggered in part by a question from the audience.

The employee, who asked and was applauded by his colleagues, claimed he got into trouble with senior management for raising his concern, Fortune reported.

The man was seated on the front row, only a few feet away from Dimon, when he posed the question he had been preparing for weeks.

Abuse during remote work era was 'extraordinary,' says Dimon

The question stemmed from the employee’s personal circumstances. He said he was going through a divorce and hoping he could be given some leeway to balance work and family care obligations.

During the Q&A segment, he clarified that he belonged to a seven-person team in technology operations, working across geographies, from Ohio where he is based, to Buenos Aires and India.

“There is no way that being in an office makes any difference for us specifically. 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,” the employee said at the open forum.

Despite laying out his argument, he received an icy response from the CEO, as evident in the recording of the meeting reviewed by US media outlets.

“That’s it?” Dimon responded. “There is no chance that I would leave that up to managers. Zero chance. The abuse that took place was extraordinary.”

This was followed by Dimon’s complaint of productivity loss during virtual meetings and how the company’s workforce swelled by 50,000 over the past few years.

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

'Clean off your desk and get out'

Dimon firing back was widely reported. But what many didn’t know was the backlash that that brief Q&A would have on the employee.

While colleagues on site supposedly lauded the effort to challenge Dimon’s views on RTO, the employee later said he was reprimanded for it.

“I don’t know what the f*** you just did, but come to my desk immediately when that town hall ends. Please,” a text message from a vice president of tech ops read.

In a meeting with the executive, along with another VP from IT support, the employee in question was supposedly told he had “just dragged our whole organisation through the mud”.

One of the VPs purportedly said: “Go and clean off your desk and get the f*** out of here.”

After the encounter, the employee notified his line manager who replied: “Thanks for letting me know.”

The direct report also asked his line manager to connect him to his own boss, but the line manager said: “She is currently out of the office; I will inform her in our next meeting.”

Smoothing things over with senior management

By 4:30 p.m., an executive director who managed the VPs and the line manager reportedly reached out to the employee to say she had “smoothed things over” with the senior leaders in IT.

“I appreciate you, Nic, and I am really proud about how you responded to a pretty unfair circumstance,” the executive director purportedly said in a text message to the employee.

One of the VPs also apologised, the worker claimed.

While a representative for JPMorgan Chase clarified that the worker is still employed, the worker said he was dismayed by the treatment he received from the management.

“I want to do the job that I love in the way that I want to do it. That’s what I hope to get out of all this,” he told Fortune.