Apple has asked its employees to spend more time in the office as pandemic restrictions continue to ease, but it has again encountered organized backlash and an internal petition calling for more time to work from home, according to a report from the Financial Times. .
A week ago, Apple announced another deadline for when its corporate employees must return to the office at least three days a week. This time the date is September 5. From that day on, the company will require its employees to work on site on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as an additional weekday determined per team.
This wasn’t Apple’s first time making such an announcement — although the previous effort mandated Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday rather than offering one team-dependent flex day — but company leadership has had to repeatedly postpone the shift in light of new developments in the pandemic since the first announcement of a three-day plan in June 2021.
Currently, many Apple employees go to the office two days a week, not three.
The new mandate comes as the CDC and other organizations have recently reduced safety recommendations for COVID-19 regarding behaviors such as sheltering in the scene after possible exposure to the virus, wearing masks or social distancing. Cases of the virus in most metropolitan areas where Apple has large offices are relatively low, though not always lower than before the initial wave of the ommicron variant earlier this year.
But some company employees have formed an internal advocacy group called “Apple Together” to push back further plans for return to the office. An internal petition circulated by the group for signatures and seen by the Financial Times on Sunday claims Apple employees are “happier and more productive” working from home and that a “uniform senior leadership mandate” ignores “compelling reasons” why many employees should be able to work from home more than three days a week or on the days they deem most appropriate.
However, instead of demanding a general work-from-home policy, the employee group advocates a system where individual employees can talk to their direct managers to determine expectations on a case-by-case basis, without “high-level approvals” or “complex procedures” that make things more restrictive. .
The petition has not yet been formally sent to Apple’s senior management as employee signatures are still being collected.
Fighting the Tides of Change in Technology
While Apple hasn’t been as aggressive in bringing employees back to offices as some traditional, non-tech companies in the more conservative parts of the United States, Apple has pursued a return to the old normal more vigorously than many of its U.S. peers at the time. field of technology. .
For example, Ars has been told that Microsoft is allowing exactly what Apple’s employees are asking for, which is that individual team managers can set their own policies, rather than a top-down, company-wide policy. Some Microsoft corporate jobs require pre-pandemic levels of onsite work, others allow full remote work, and others still provide a hybrid balance between the two extremes.
Microsoft’s no-size-fits-all approach is more or less typical of major US tech companies right now, but some others, such as Twitter, have taken an even more liberal approach, requiring most employees to work full-time remotely and location-independently. options from the start.
But Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that casual encounters and discussions in a physical workplace are essential to Apple’s corporate culture and part of the secret sauce for success. That philosophy underpinned Steve Jobs and Jony Ive’s plans for Apple Park’s circular headquarters in Cupertino, California, which opened in April 2017.
In contrast, Apple employees have previously claimed that with teams spread across multiple office locations in Northern California and in other places like San Diego; Austin, Texas; and Culver City (a borough within the Los Angeles metro), such casual work is already out of the question.
Apple has opened some of these additional offices to make it easier to source competitor talent in companies where Apple plans to expand without forcing these new hires to relocate to the Bay Area. The San Diego office, for example, is where it is in part because it improves the company’s prospects of attracting talent from rival Qualcomm.
But Apple leadership’s resistance to more flexible remote work policies could run counter to the company’s goals of attracting and retaining talent in competitive industries. At the time, a notable machine learning director named Ian Goodfellow left Apple for Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind, citing the remote work policy as the reason for his departure.
