From Zoe Schiffer’s “Apple employees push back against returning to the office in internal letter” posted Friday on The Verge:
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:
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- 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.
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- 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.
My take: Pushback from Apple employees is extraordinarily rare. I blame Slack for this one.
Sacto Joe
PS – I’d be more than happy to talk with Apple at any time and revisit my points back then. All they need to do is contact PED and ask for my contact info.
Or check their ex-Volt employee records for the Elk Grove, CA facility….
Or check their records for my wife, Donna, an ex-Apple employee who worked at the Elk Grove facility as a call center lead and later in sales for Powerschool.
The less connected an employee feels the easier it is to move on and get recruited. Parenthood & Child Care goes unspoken here but is an elephant in the room. I suggest Tim use the freed up office space for a state-of-the-art day care facility.
“Apple’s focus on secrecy regarding new products alone precludes WFH in too many cases.”
You can’t keep people locked up and under the staring eye of gatekeepers all the time. If this really is being considered a major issue within Apple, it’s actually a problem that’s ripe for finding a solution. Keeping people caged unnecessarily is not going to get optimum productivity out of them.
Besides, they’ve already said that they actually increased productivity, so there’s your test case done and dusted.
I have no beef with the employees’ concerns, many are valid. BUT, they function at the individual and small group level, while overall company security issues would expand exponentially for many sensitive areas. All it takes is ONE careless, sloppy, disgruntled employee or a family member to breach the security Apple creates and needs. Employees think like employees, not managers, group leaders, or senior VP’s of corporate security. Is there a workable compromise? Maybe, maybe not. Yes, the tech work world has changed a lot, but maybe not all for the better from perspectives other than the employees’.
If it were any other firm than Apple ID give this “non-petition” more credence. As it is there are few companies on Apple’s scale (are there any?) that are more humanistic and in search of optimal performance wherever the search takes them.
The last couple of years was on a successor project. Many of the co-workers transitioned from the previous project, so we had that ‘team’ partially built. But we never achieved the cohesion from the earlier project, and in part that was because there wasn’t the same investment in face-to-face meetings. (Also, the leadership was much less inspiring/competent, and the work was a lot more frustrating.)
No doubt everyone wants to have what they think is best for their own personal situation, however, any organization or professional sports franchise sets the ground rules under an employment contract.
Should all voices be heard? Yes. But that doesn’t mean the subordinates get to run the show. Ultimately, go back to work or don’t go back to the office. There are consequences that will be imposed. When someone else signs your paycheck, they get to set the rules.
I assume workers are not asking the Employer to accommodate workers with disabilities on accessibility issues in their own homes’ & at off-site work areas of the employee’s choosing. Employers are required by law to make their work facilities accessible, but if an employee chooses a different location to work then I do not see Employers picking up the expenses of renovating off-site work areas for accommodation purposes. That can become a huge cost factor involving thousands of dollars & what happens if the worker decides to relocate later in a short period.
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This is a difficult issue for me since I promoted employee work from home & had official responsibility with select others in a 12,000 employee organization to implement a WFH flex-plan.
First, not every job is appropriate for WFH. We analyzed every job position in our organization to decide if it was appropriate for classifying as WFH.
Second, we decided it was needed for employee teams to come into the office one day a week to strategize, meet as a group & get that spontaneous reaction & creativity juices flowing that comes from being together. That may not be needed today with all our new, unique & innovative communication technologies. But, still, even watching the communications live on various business talk shows I see how off-site work delays spontaneity in conversed exchanges with missed communications & loss words, not to say about the occasionally dropped connections or frozen screens. So, I do not believe technology has quite arrived to fill completely that need for personal on-site team exchanges for strategizing.
Third, we ran into problems once WFH became official that worker out-of-sight led to worker out-of-mind when it came to promotions, bonuses, career opportunities & choice job assignments. This is something that employees WFH must understand. If a worker is on site where the action is unfolding, where contacts with superiors happen frequently, then when an issue arises or a choice job assignment opportunity suddenly springs forth it is often the employee on-site who is in a propitious position to get first choice and nod-of-approval.
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Lastly, we all know that the Apple campus was designed specifically to establish an environment for worker interaction. That is the way Steve Jobs designed the campus & saw it going forward.
Summary: I support workers whose jobs are appropriate to WFA, but they must understand that there are downsides career-wise to doing so & know they run a high risk of being passed over for choice job assignments & even promotions because employees often are promoted not only based on their skills & abilities, but on the rapport & working relationship they have cultivated with management personnel. It is difficult to cultivate such working relationships when one is out-of-sight and often out-of-mind.
“And who are these people who took jobs at Apple not knowing the company’s on-site culture? Do they think Apple built a new $4 billion campus on a lark? Three days a week on site and two days remote is a huge change for Apple.”
My take: Clearly, I was born too long ago to enjoy the perks of today’s employees w/superior rights, working conditions, stock options, flexibility w/hours and career choices at Apple, Inc.
Another way to sum up the current generation of employees: Lucky and indulged.
FACT
Apple’s ramping up and ramping down their employees each year with every successive new product or service launch, is a well established business model. That’s not going to change.
MY OPINION
In brief, 80 people working from home wrote a letter to publicly embarrass their employer – a famous multinational company with hundreds of thousands of employees. Frankly, this whole thing sounds like a group of young people who grew up on social media – and don’t have a clue about how the real world works. Sorry, but going public is no way to communicate to your employer.
Whether they are temporary or full-time “employees”, or independent contractors makes a big difference too. If they are independent contractors they are essentially each their own business, so acting as a lobbying group is just unprofessional.
But as temp or full time employees, some requests seem reasonable enough. I’d be surprised if the Teamsters or AFL/CIO didn’t read this and scratch their heads.
Frankly, to grandstand in public posing as benevolent lobbyists… sorry, they come across as immature with lousy communication skills, not as employees who should feel lucky they even have a job during the worst global pandemic in a lifetime.
FULL DISCLOSURE
I’m a (now retired) former full-time freelancer, that also worked on staff on and off, for advertising agencies, for over 40 years. As well as for my own clients. All told I’ve worked at 76 ad agencies – from both sides of the desk.
The golden rule: Never bite the hand that feeds you. You will go hungry. AKA: ruin your reputation.
I’d love to see project presentations presented on Zoom and the groups wonder why they get cut off or denied. In person meetings and presentation allow growth of personal interaction skills both ways that IMO, can’t be duplicated with electronic communications.
But THIS I worry about. I’m not investing in great products and services. And I’m sure as hell not investing in a big as$ round building. I’m investing in the best human capital in the world. Apple attracts the best, challenges them and compensates them handsomely. Apple’s truly awesome ecosystem is built on top of a truly awesome company of people.
Some speculate this is a few spoiled whiners. Gallup says 54% of workers in the computer field would prefer to continue working remotely. Apple’s and others’ technology allowed much of the US economy to continue to chug ahead to record profits in the middle of a pandemic. The same technology could facilitate the reconfiguration of the U.S. work force in short order.
But of course Cook understands Apple is its employees. He will figure out how to make it work. I’m betting on it. But watching closely.