Apple CEO Announces Hybrid Return To Office As Some Employees Protest

This will be an interesting test of tech employees willingness to fight against work rules they dont like, even against one of the most sought-after employers in the tech world. 

The question is whether more flexible work from home arrangements are worth giving up a job at a premier brand known for compensating their employees well and providing excellent benefits. It seems prudent to assume that a few will choose to leave but that most will accept the company's dictates. JL

Aaron Tilley reports in the Wall Street Journal and Zoe Schiffer reports in The Verge:

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, in an email, told office employees they are expected to return to their workspace three days a week starting in September. It wants most office workers to show up Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the option to work remotely Wednesdays and Fridays. (But) Apple employees are pushing back against (the) policy that would require them to return to the office. Staff members say they want a flexible approach where those who want to work remote can do so. (The response) started in a Slack channel for “remote work advocates” which has 2,800 members.

Wall Street Journal Appleis telling office staff to prepare to return to the workplace at least most of the time, joining the growing pool of companies adopting hybrid work.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, in an email to staff, told office employees that they are expected to return to their workspace three days a week starting in September. The iPhone maker said it wants most office workers to show up Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the option to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays.

Technology news outlet The Verge earlier reported the back-to-office plans.

Apple already has gradually been reopening its retail stores around the world. In March, all of its 270 U.S. retail outlets welcomed back shoppers. In his note to employees, Mr. Cook said all stores in other markets would open their doors again by the end of the month.

Companies across industries are adopting plans to go back to the office, but many offering staff greater flexibility than pre-pandemic.

Technology rival Alphabet Inc.’s Google last month notified employees of its hybrid work plans, with employees going into an office three days a week and some likely to work remotely permanently. Microsoft Corp. in March said it was welcoming employees back to its headquarters, while offering them the ability to work from the office or home.

Hybrid-work arrangements are becoming not just a way of working for some companies, but in several cases a business opportunity, fueling appetite for tools and equipment to facilitate having some employees in the office while others work remotely. Zoom Video Communications Inc. this week reported surging sales for some of the tools it offers to facilitate hybrid work.

Not all companies are ready to embrace hybrid work. JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit last month that “We want people back at work and my view is some time in September, October, it will look just like it did before.”

Some other companies aren’t pushing employees to go back to the office at all. Spotify Technology SA in February adopted a “Work from Anywhere” model letting employees choose whether they want to return to an office, work from home or somewhere in between. And business-software provider Salesforce.com Inc. told employees they could choose if they wanted to return to the office again. “The 9-to-5 workday is dead” Brent Hyder, Salesforce’s chief people officer said in a blog post earlier this year.

The Verge; Apple employees are pushing back against a new policy that would require them to return to the office three days a week starting in early September. Staff members say they want a flexible approach where those who want to work remote can do so, according to an internal letter obtained by The Verge.

“We would like to take the opportunity to communicate a growing concern among our colleagues,” the letter says. “That Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit. Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple.”

The move comes just two days after Tim Cook sent out a note to Apple employees saying they would need return to the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays starting in the fall. Most employees can work remotely twice a week. They can also be remote for up to two weeks a year, pending manager approval.

It’s an easing of restrictions compared to Apple’s previous company culture, which famously discouraged employees from working from home prior to the pandemic. Yet it’s still more conservative compared to other tech giants. Both Twitter and Facebook have told employees they can work from home forever, even after the pandemic ends.

A CLEAR DIVIDE

For some Apple workers, the current policy doesn’t go far enough, and shows a clear divide between how Apple executives and employees view remote work.

“Over the last year we often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored,” the letter says. “Messages like, ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office,’ with no messaging acknowledging that there are directly contradictory feelings amongst us feels dismissive and invalidating...It feels like there is a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote / location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees.”

The letter, addressed to Tim Cook, started in a Slack channel for “remote work advocates” which has roughly 2,800 members. About 80 people were involved in writing and editing the note.

Apple employees say that embracing remote work is paramount for the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts. “For inclusion and diversity to work, we have to recognize how different we all are, and with those differences, come different needs and different ways to thrive,” they say.

Here are the specific asks outlined by employees in the note:

We are formally requesting that Apple considers remote and location-flexible work decisions to be as autonomous for a team to decide as are hiring decisions.

We are formally requesting a company-wide recurring short survey with a clearly structured and transparent communication / feedback process at the company-wide level, organization-wide level, and team-wide level, covering topics listed below.

We are formally requesting a question about employee churn due to remote work be added to exit interviews.

We are formally requesting a transparent, clear plan of action to accommodate disabilities via onsite, offsite, remote, hybrid, or otherwise location-flexible work.

We are formally requesting insight into the environmental impact of returning to onsite in-person work, and how permanent remote-and-location-flexibility could offset that impact.

The letter was sent out for Apple employees to sign late Friday afternoon.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge.

Read the full letter below:

Dear Tim and Executive Leadership,

Thank you for your thoughtful considerations on a hybrid approach to returning to office work, and for sharing it with all of us early this week. We appreciate your efforts in navigating what has been undeniably an incredibly difficult time for everyone around the world, and doing so for over one hundred thousand people. We are certain you have more plans than were shared on Wednesday, but are following Apple’s time-honored tradition of only announcing things when they are ready. However, we feel like the current policy is not sufficient in addressing many of our needs, so we want to take some time to explain ourselves.

This past year has been an unprecedented challenge for our company; we had to learn how to deliver the same quality of products and services that Apple is known for, all while working almost completely remotely. We did so, achieving another record-setting year. We found a way for everyone to support each other and succeed in a completely new way of working together — from locations we were able to choose at our own discretion (often at home).

However, we would like to take the opportunity to communicate a growing concern among our colleagues. That Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit. Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple. This is a decision none of us take lightly, and a decision many would prefer not to have to make. These concerns are largely what prompted us to advocate for changes to these policies, and data collected will reflect those concerns.

Over the last year we often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored. Messages like, ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office,’ with no messaging acknowledging that there are directly contradictory feelings amongst us feels dismissive and invalidating. Not only do many of us already feel well-connected with our colleagues worldwide, but better-connected now than ever. We’ve come to look forward to working as we are now, without the daily need to return to the office. It feels like there is a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote / location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees.

For many of us at Apple, we have succeeded not despite working from home, but in large part because of being able to work outside the office. The last year has felt like we have truly been able to do the best work of our lives for the first time, unconstrained by the challenges that daily commutes to offices and in-person co-located offices themselves inevitably impose; all while still being able to take better care of ourselves and the people around us.

Looking around the corner, we believe the future of work will be significantly more location and timezone flexible. In fact, we are already a distributed company with offices all over the world and across many different timezones. Apple’s organizational hierarchy lends itself towards offices that often follow the same structure, wherein people in the same organization are more likely to be co-located in an office. At the same time, we strongly encourage cross-functional, cross-organization collaboration, and our organization’s many horizontal teams reflect this. Such collaboration is widely celebrated across our organization, and arguably leads us to our best results — it’s one of the things that makes Apple, Apple. However, orgs are rarely co-located within walking distance, let alone in the same building, meaning our best collaboration has always required remote communication with teams in other offices and across timezones, since long before the pandemic. We encourage distributed work from our business partners, and we’ve been a remote-communication necessary company for some time, a vision of the future that Steve Jobs himself predicated in an interview from 1990. This may explain how mandatory out-of-office work enabled tearing down cross-functional communication barriers to deliver even better results.

Almost all of us have worked fully remote for over a year now, though the experience arguably would have been better less one pandemic. We have developed two major versions of all our operating systems, organized two full WWDCs, introduced numerous new products, transitioned to our own chipsets, and supported our customers with the same level of care as before. We have already piloted location-flexible work the last 15 months under much more extreme conditions and we were very successful in doing so, finding the following benefits of remote and location-flexible work for a large number of our colleagues:

• Diversity and Inclusion in Retention and Hiring
• Tearing Down Previously Existing Communication Barriers
• Better Work Life Balance
• Better Integration of Existing Remote / Location-Flexible Workers
• Reduced Spread of Pathogens

We ask for your support in enabling those who want to work remotely / in location-flexible ways to continue to do so, letting everyone figure out which work setup works best for them, their team, and their role — be it in one of our offices, from home, or a hybrid solution. We are living proof that there is no one-size-fits-all policy for people. For Inclusion and Diversity to work, we have to recognize how different we all are, and with those differences, come different needs and different ways to thrive. We feel that Apple has both the responsibility to recognize these differences, as well as the capability to fully embrace them. Officially enabling individual management chains and individual teams to make decisions that work best for their teams roles, individuals, and needs — and having that be the official stated policy rather than the rare individual exceptions — would alleviate the concerns and reservations many of us currently have.

We understand that inertia is real and that change is difficult to achieve. The pandemic forcing us to work from home has given us a unique opportunity. Most of the change has already happened, remote/location-flexible work is currently the “new normal,” we just need to make sure we make the best of it now. We believe that Apple has the ability to be a leader in this realm, not by declaring ‘everyone just work from home for forever,’ as some other companies have done, but by declaring an official broad paradigm policy, that allows individual leaders to make decisions that will enable their teams to do the best work of their lives. We strongly believe this is the ideal moment to “burn the boats” — to boldly declare ‘yes this can be done, and done successfully, because there is no other choice for the future.’

We have gathered some of our requests and action items to help continue the conversation and make sure everyone is heard.

• We are formally requesting that Apple considers remote and location-flexible work decisions to be as autonomous for a team to decide as are hiring decisions.
• We are formally requesting a company-wide recurring short survey with a clearly structured and transparent communication / feedback process at the company-wide level, organization-wide level, and team-wide level, covering topics listed below.
• We are formally requesting a question about employee churn due to remote work be added to exit interviews.
• We are formally requesting a transparent, clear plan of action to accommodate disabilities via onsite, offsite, remote, hybrid, or otherwise location-flexible work.
• We are formally requesting insight into the environmental impact of returning to onsite in-person work, and how permanent remote-and-location-flexibility could offset that impact.

We have great respect for Apple and its leadership; we strongly believe in the Innovation and Thinking Differently (from “the way things have always been done” and “industry standards”) that are part of Apple’s DNA. We all wish to continue to “bleed six colors” at Apple itself and not elsewhere. At Apple, our most important resource, our soul, is our people, and we believe that ensuring we are all heard, represented, and validated is how we continue to defend and protect that precious sentiment.

This is not a petition, though it may resemble one. This is a plea: let’s work together to truly welcome everyone forward.