“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” -- Steve Jobs
From "Thoughts on Office-bound Work" an open letter to Tim Cook signed (to date) by 1,445 current and former employees:
In your first email titled “Returning to our Offices”, you talk about “the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues” when everyone is in the same place. Except we are not all in one place. We don’t have just one office, we have many. And often, our functional organizations have their own office buildings, in which employees from other orgs cannot work. This siloed structure is part of our culture. It doesn’t take luck to overcome the communication silos and make cross-functional connections that are vital for Apple to function, it takes intentionality. We need to be able to reach out to each other intentionally, and have the chance to do so.
Slack has made this much easier over the last two years. Yet, you choose to keep us all in separate siloed Slack workspaces and try to prevent us from talking to each other, so software engineers don’t accidentally talk to AppleCare employees, and retail staff don’t accidentally meet hardware engineers. Over the last year, you have even made it impossible to create shared community spaces where serendipity could have happened, online and remotely. Be this in employee clubs for which there is a “temporary hold on approving any new clubs” or shared public Slack channels, which now need director support and can only be about work in a very strict sense...
In the original “Returning to our offices” email, Tim said “we’d make sure Apple delivered on its promises to its customers regardless of the circumstances”. It’s true, we delivered on our promises and continue to do so. We were incredibly flexible and resilient and found new ways to do our work, despite not being able to go to an office in many cases.
Now we ask you, the executive team, to show some flexibility as well and let go of the rigid policies of the Hybrid Working Pilot. Stop trying to control how often you can see us in the office. Trust us, we know how each of our small contributions helps Apple succeed and what’s required to do so. Our direct managers trust us and in many cases would happily let us work in a more flexible setup. And why wouldn’t they, we’ve successfully done so for the last two years. Why don’t you?
Or as Steve said: “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” Here we are, the smart people that you hired, and we are telling you what to do: Please get out of our way, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, let us decide how we work best, and let us do the best work of our lives.
My take: Tough call. I've been the manager of an in-house staff and I've worked remotely. I could argue this round or flat.
See also: Was Apple’s 12,000-employee spaceship HQ an astronomical mistake?
The purpose of the employee benefit is to afford workers more flexibility in juggling work and family obligations.
Additionally, the employee benefit is not available to all employees, since many employees’ jobs are not suitable for a WFH environment.
Excessive use of the employee benefit leads to worker segregation, separating workers within an organization based on those who work from home against those who work from the office because their jobs are not suitable for such flexibility. The excessive use of the policy leads to worker dissension between those who have access to the flexible worker benefit and those who do not have access.
Workers whose jobs are not suitable for a WFH arrangement incur added expenses such as commuting, eating out, laundry, child care, etc. These added expenses run into the thousands of dollars annually, yet employees working from home elect not to receive a reduction in pay vis à vis workers required to be in the office because their jobs are not suitable for a WFH environment.
Senior staff and supervisors use daily employee interactions to assess, evaluate and judge future worker leadership qualities leading to choice job assignments, promotions and other career development opportunities that cannot be discerned from remote locations. In fact, one employee complaint about the WFH policy is workers in remote locations often suffer from lack of promotions, choice job assignments and other career development opportunities awarded to employees in the office working daily alongside the decision makers.
Senior management offers WFH policies as an employee benefit to be used judiciously, or otherwise that very same employee policy designed to give the worker more flexibility easily can create more employee dissension.
Housing costs in Silicon Valley are insane. For younger employees, especially, that means long commutes. Check Zillow.
Per GlassDoor, Apple’s and Tim Cook’s rating are high, but not quick as high as Apple’s peers. Without talent, we investors lose out.
1445 is about 1.5 % of Apple’s employees and includes former employees.
Apple currently has over 150,000 employees and has had around 250,000 current and former employees.
I have no idea where you came up with a “fact” of 1.5%.
Color me bewildered. If anything, per your numbers Fred vastly OVERESTIMATED the percentage of folks who signed this “letter”.
1445/(150000+250000) = 0.36%
I would put the cap of number employees being 0.5% or so. There is a good chance not a single one is a true lynch-pin employee.
“…. I had to switch employers to get promoted and establish closer working relationships.… if you didn’t regularly show up where you work you barely existed so far as management is concerned.”
This was one of many findings we found in our organization that has more employees than Apple, Inc. as we attempted to institute a WFH policy. Employees stationed in remote work complained of being passed over for promotions, bonuses, choice job assignments and other career development opportunities. When we subsequently initiated investigations we found that the WFH employees complaints were substantiated. Our report-of-findings showed that employees in the offices working daily alongside their respective supervisors and senior managers cultivated more meaningful working relationships involving trust, respect and personal integrity than workers stationed in remote locations, thus leading to more favorable preferential treatment when it came to giving out awards, bonuses, promotions, choice job assignments and other career development opportunities. It became known as the “out-of-sight…out-of-mind” career trap for employees in a WFH environment. It also caused worker dissension.
was great not to have to be working at the production companies office much of the time. However when decisions were made there often was little or no consultation with those of us in the field who might have to execute those decisions. Those who were closer to the Post production process often were more influential even if they were not knowledgeable.
It would be hard to believe that such a large group of employees as Apple has would all agree on the question of WFH schedules. I would be suspicious if they did.
Apple has literally created a perfect environment for personal workplace interaction (the Spaceship), but these “entitled” folks eschew it.
Slack, Zoom, etcetera, created alternative ways to connect, but it’s far from proven that they are as good as, let alone better than, physical gatherings, especially in spaces literally designed for the purpose.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s definitely an advantage to WFH, for both employer and employee. But this is not an either/or situation, as that letter would have us believe, which simply reeks of a sense of entitlement.
As regards serendipity, without a doubt it stems from human interactivity. And that can happen both with physical and virtual interaction. But it also relies in accidental interaction, which best happens physically.
So perhaps that’s a place Apple can bring something to the table. Bring child care on or near campus.
I read that Apple Inc’s plans for its new Austin TX campus includes child daycare.
Reference “New $1 billion Apple campus in northwest Austin has taken shape”
by: Kathryn Hardison, Austin Business Journal, Posted: Jan 24, 2022
Anytime I find a person quoting someone else, and they do not go to great lengths to maintain the thoughts and intent of the quoter, I need to read with great caution, and suspicion, that the article is not being intellectually honest. Case in point. To use examples of improper communication channels (people in different departments who are not supposed to be bumping into each other), to show that Apple prevents serendipitous meetings, is not being fair to the author of the quote. Also the author (complainer) attests to the reality and need of serendipitous meetings, making it hard to figure out why the word “myth” is used.
I can highly recommend some books by Edward T. Hall about human interactions. He did ground breaking research in how we interact through space and time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_T._Hall
I recall that his community was studying a short tape of a family at breakfast. They found countless interactions, mostly nonverbal, between them. We communicate in countless ways when we meet in person. FaceTime or zoom scrapes all that off and reduces your communications to a 2D minimum.
That goes in spades for “bulletin board” communication tools like Slack – or even like Apple 3.0 for that matter. It’s better than zip, but let’s get real….
i guess these employees will do ONLY digital interactions with their loved ones too. And travel around the world once the “so called Meta becomes reality”.OR stay inside their home and want everything done digitally.