Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, recently told his global workforce of 137,000 employees that they’d have to return to the office beginning early September. It’s expected that employees will spend about three days a week at the office and the other two at home or remotely.
In an open letter to Cook, some employees of Apple voiced their concerns about returning to an in-person office setting stating, “We feel like the current policy is not sufficient in addressing many of our needs.” The letter pointed out that workers delivered “the same quality of products and services that Apple is known for, all while working almost completely remotely.”
Despite protests from workers, Apple is remaining resolute in its position. Remote-work positions will be limited and decisions made “on a case-by-case basis with any new remote positions requiring executive approval.”
Software developer Cher Scarlett is one of the Apple employees who wrote the letter to Cook. In an hour-long interview with her, it’s clear that Scarlett loves her job at Apple. To her it’s a dream role that offers incredible intellectual challenges and the opportunity to pursue, interesting, exciting purposeful work. She’s a loyal employee and devoted to her colleagues and company.
Scarlett, like many others living with mental illness, requires accommodations. She is open about her bipolar disorder. One of the positive outcomes of the pandemic was the public discourse surrounding mental and emotional health matters.
As a single mother with a nontraditional Silicon Valley background, she signed up to the company as a remote worker. The decision of Apple to restrict remote work was heartbreaking—and not just for her. Scarlett was concerned about other people who will face challenges with the new policy. She was surprised to learn of the news through the media instead of hearing directly from the company. “I was so distraught. It really upset me. I found out from 9to5Mac,” she said.
Scarlett wanted to find out what the options were for herself and co-workers. “I went through so many channels—employee engagement and my people business partner.” Scarlett was disappointed that she wasn’t provided with a “personal response, even in the form of a mass email.” She pointed out that remote work was highly successful for the company. Apple had an amazing year and the stock price hit record highs. “We spent a year working remotely. Look at all these great things we delivered.”
There are flaws with the hybrid method for all companies. When people go into the office two or three days a week, what are the odds that the co-workers you need to collaborate with onsite are on the same schedule? After a long commute, you may find out that the folks you need to work with aren’t there. You’ll end up video conferencing them, making the trek into the office a complete waste of time. There are also office constraints. According to Scarlett, “In Cupertino, there’s a lot of fighting over meeting spaces, where people end up on WebEx meetings anyway—either because they can’t find space within the office or they’re meeting with people who are in different offices, whether it’s in China or the United States.”
“There are people who work with other teams in different parts of the world, different parts of the United States, even different parts of California. There is nothing really that happens within Apple, that only happens in one place. It’s alarming that that is the crux they’ve chosen to set their idea on—that it’s all happening being physically onsite,” Scarlett said highlighting the flaw in the system. This is one of the reasons why Gitlab’s CEO Sid Sijbrandij said, “Hybrid remote work offers the worst of both worlds.”
A requirement to seek a manager’s permission for remote work seems reasonable at first. When you dig deeper, there are flaws in that logic. Each manager may have a different perspective, which would result in unfair treatment. For instance, a manager with an “old-school” mindset may automatically default to telling people to return to the office, whereas a progressive forward-thinking supervisor would likely be more sensitive to the individual needs of their staff.
Scarlett brings up a conversation she had with a peer. “I had someone reach out to me that doesn’t want to go into the office and she’s the only woman on her team. I started thinking about the fact that for a lot of women, they’re the only women on their teams. Of course, a lot of them are uncomfortable. It’s scary. There is a lack of empathy and insight.” This highlights the awkward position some women will be placed in when going to management for remote approval. It’s not easy nor comfortable to share personal mental, emotional and physical challenges to a supervisor.
Employees will be forced to share highly personal information. There has to be a worry and concern if a manger will now look at the person differently. It would be understandable for an employee to fear that by disclosing personal matters, it may harm the progression of their career. Could this information leak out to others within the organization? “Apple is doing themselves a disservice by not recognizing that people—especially about disabilities—are coming to somebody who they don’t know who is a colleague, but not anywhere near their team, to say, ‘Hey, I trust you with this information. Can you help me navigate this situation?’ But they’re not going to the team literally designed to do that.”
Scarlett voices concern for others. “Apple cares so much about your data, so you should think automatically I could go to them and let them know I have a disability, let them know I need to be able to work from home and I am going to be treated with kindness, fairness and privacy, but people don’t feel that way.”
She said, “They need to recognize that people feel that way and go head on in addressing it. A part of the reason people feel that way is when they put out videos like this, pleading with them about their personal life circumstances, whether it’s health related—physical or mental—they’re taking care of sick family members, ones that got sick during the pandemic or have had to move because they were struggling financially because they lost their jobs during the pandemic. Do you think within three months they’re supposed to say, ‘Oh, sorry! I can’t take care of you anymore.’?”
Scarlett added, “Employees feel scared they’ll be retaliated against no matter how many times you tell them there’s a non-retaliation policy. You’re protected by the law. You can talk about workplace issues.”
Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people said in a company video, “We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future.” She continued, “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.”
The future of work will see friction between companies and their employees. CEOs may contend that it is easier to manage people if they’re all herded into one or several central locations. The employees have a different agenda. They want to have a work-life balance. A two-hour, round-trip commute becomes debilitating after a while. After working from home since March 2020, it’s hard to comprehend losing this autonomy.
According to the letter to Cook, there was concern for losing talent due to the requirement of going back to an office. “Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit.” It forces people “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.”
“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,” the letter said.
The participants in the letter say that the following is not a petition, “though it may resemble one. [It] is a plea: 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, organizationwide level and teamwide 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.”
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.”
This issue is larger 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, thank you very much. 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 more at 69%, and Salesforce employees at 76%.”
At the time of publication, Apple had not returned requests for comment.
Source: Forbes
