There have been a few high-profile instances of CEOs being a little too heavy handed in their approach. WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani’s attempt to rally a return-to-the-office campaign came across as cringey and tone-deaf. Mathrani intimated that the best, brightest and most motivated people will go back to the office. Losers, however, will stay at home. “Those who are uberly engaged with the company want to go to the office two-thirds of the time, at least. Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home,” he said at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival. Mathrani added, “People are happier when they come to work. The bigger issue is do you come to work five days a week or do you come to work three days a week? That’s the bigger issue. There’s no issue of not coming to a common place.”

Cathay Merrill, the CEO of Washington, D.C.-based magazine, the Washingtonian, wrote a tone-deaf op-ed piece for the Washington Post, “While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like.” She ominously said that if the employee is rarely around the office, then there is a “strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor.’” Merrill seemingly threatened that if her staff didn’t return to the office, they’d run the risk of being demoted and losing their full-time, permanent employment status. “Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics,” wrote Merrill, indicating a not-so-subtle threat to their livelihoods.

The participants in the missive claim, “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 dissenting employees assert, “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.”

In the last few months, we have seen a large number of top corporations issue their plans. The consensus, including the likes of Microsoft and Google, coalesced around a flexible hybrid model of having workers in the office for two or three days a week—similar to what Apple announced.

On the other side of the spectrum, top-tier investment banks Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, along with Netflix, required all of their workers to return to their respective offices. McKinsey, the large management consulting firm, said that a survey of  corporate executives shows that “nine out of 10 organizations will be combining remote and on-site working.” There are some outliers, like Spotify and Twitter, that will allow their people to work remotely “forever.”

The participants in the letter say that the following “is not a petition, though it may resemble one.” Rather, it is a plea to the company: “let’s work together to truly welcome everyone forward.”

• “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 companywide recurring short survey with a clearly structured and transparent communication/feedback process at the companywide 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.”

This may be bigger than Apple. Blind, an app that provides a platform for anonymous career-related posts, conducted a survey of employees at top-tier companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. The survey asked workers if they’d prefer to permanently work from home rather than get a $30,000-a-year raise.

The survey of 3,000 employees at these well-respected companies overwhelmingly—64%—responded that they wanted to continue staying at home. Only two companies out of the 45 sampled, JPMorgan and Qualcomm, had a higher percentage of their staff go for the $30,000 option.

According to the study’s findings, “About 64% of Amazon workers who answered the question preferred permanent work from home, as well as 62% of Microsoft employees and 67% of Google employees. Apple employees would rather take permanent work from home over $30,000 were at 69%, and Salesforce employees at 76%.”

To some, this may sound surprising. These corporations are held in high esteem and are exceedingly hard to get into. People aspire to work at these organizations. You’d think that since they worked so hard in school and in the workforce to get into these good jobs with high-status companies and the potential to quickly advance, they’d happily go back to the office. From the survey, that’s not the case.

The response from Apple workers, along with surveys and public sentiment, shows a strong desire by a significant percentage of employees who vehemently want to remain working remotely.

Source: Forbes