JPMorgan Chase

Good benefits: backup childcare service that also allows you to book several days per year at holiday camp for free, premium subscription for childcare search service, support groups, and programs for parents.

• Very poor office environment. Open office plan, not enough conference rooms, and no private/quiet space where you could go to take a family call or just decompress throughout the day. All the colleagues around are on Zoom the whole day, which makes the office a quite noisy place to work and doesn't allow you to focus on your tasks properly. The cleaning standards are poor. There are "hot desk" and "clean desk" policies in place; however, peers do not leave their desks tidy, which makes the experience quite unpleasant. No one is interested in improving it.

• Very difficult to get flexible work arrangements to work more days from home than required in general. The approval is done by higher management and takes 2+ months. The application needs to be renewed at least every 6 months. Given the length of the approval process, it makes it useless. It looks like management is not willing to approve, and diversity and inclusion are not a priority anymore.

• Very outdated technologies are used. Still working using ancient versions of OS/coding languages.

• Project management/planning is very poor. Software engineers are mostly busy fixing issues caused by recent incidents instead of strategically modernizing products; there is almost no greenfield development.

• Work in distributed teams makes collaboration difficult and makes you work long hours, as teams have members in APAC/EMEA/NA zones at the same time, and you are supposed to join team meetings which can be during inconvenient hours.

Listen to the employees that you would like to keep. Try to improve their work conditions, which helps to raise their motivation and efficiency. It's more costly to hire new people and train them than to help existing employees stay.

Look into modern research about making the work environment effective and what helps to foster collaboration. And how a 5-day in-office policy impacts the company long-term.