Apple’s efforts to get its employees back into the office have met continued resistance from an organized group of employees, and at least one prominent person has resigned over the matter.
The Verge reporter Zoë Schiffer tweeted on Saturday that Ian Goodfellow, director of machine learning at Apple, will leave the company. He cited the return-to-office plan as the reason for his departure. “I am convinced that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team,” he said in a note to his colleagues, according to Schiffer’s tweet.
Current policies sometimes vary by team and role, but in general Apple has already asked employees to come to the office one or two days a week. On May 23, many Apple employees will have to go to the office at least three days a week.
Some employees are dissatisfied with the gradual return to the office. They have coordinated their efforts in a group called ‘Apple Together’. The group recently published an open letter addressed to the company’s board of directors.
Apple Together lists several reasons why they think Apple’s return to the office doesn’t make sense for the company and its employees. The group tries to disprove the idea of being together in the office for casual moments of collaboration and creation. The group says the company is already in a silo, so collaborating with colleagues is more manageable when you work from home (when video calls to other offices or departments are sometimes easier to arrange) than in the office.
Apple Together notes the effect that commuting in high-traffic cities where Apple has its offices, such as the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or Austin, Texas, affects employees’ personal lives, energy, and availability at work. The group also points out that requiring employees to live in the commute of offices limits what kinds of employees join the company.
And the letter concludes by citing what the authors consider “the main reason” that Apple should allow more flexible working arrangements. It points out that Apple’s marketing messages are positioning products like the iPhone, iPad and Mac as ideal tools for remote work, even as Apple tells the employees who design those products to return to the office.
The letter suggests that Apple’s marketing is hypocritical, noting that employees who work to create these products will better understand customers’ needs if they share the same work lifestyle.
As Apple gradually moves employees back to an office culture, it is effectively using remote collaboration tools where it has no other choice.
For example, a Wall Street Journal article on how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Apple’s operations in China outlines how Apple has used technologies such as live streams, video calling and augmented reality to enable California engineers to collaborate with colleagues in China during travel restrictions. Previously, many of these interactions required international travel to meet in person.
Meanwhile, several other tech companies have taken a more permissive approach to remote working. Microsoft still encourages some employees to come to the office, but this varies from case to case. Others, such as Dropbox, Twitter, and Lyft, have announced that most employees can remain completely remote indefinitely if they wish.
As it stands, Apple plans to move forward with the updated three-day-a-week policy on May 23.
