Apple Announces Return to Work Plans and Some Employees are not Happy
Now that we are collectively winding down from the pandemic nightmare, despite current news about spikes in case count, businesses are firming up their workplace plans and policies around remote work.
Big Tech companies and their workers have been making their plans known about their future of work. Twitter and Slack, for now, don’t want their executives back in the office, at least not full time. On the other hand, Amazon plans a return of all their staff to their “office centric culture” as soon as they believe it is safe to do so. Apple and Google have announced hybrid remote work schedules and some Apple employees are not happy. In fact, some Apple staff are quitting in protest. Given, what I imagine, is the full stack of job seekers applying to Apple, I am pretty sure filling those vacancies won’t be a major challenge. Apple will have plenty of applicants to sift through who will have no problem with the company’s proposed hybrid 3/2 arrangement.
If we know anything about Apple, it is that they probably studied and surveyed and crunched the business numbers before arriving at this decision. I am speculating that they also looked closely at their organizational culture. I am speculating that the two cultural guard rails that guided their decision were probably privacy and creativity.
First, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, is big on privacy (Tim Cook on Privacy - YouTube). As a HR practitioner, personal privacy and boundaries happen to be my biggest concerns about remote work. When I started writing about remote work (telecommuting) as a strategic HR tool, two decades ago, this was my major concern. It still is. I don’t mean technology security and privacy, even though some of that is very real especially for smaller firms without the infrastructure. I am pretty sure Apple will embrace the best protocols to keep information from prying eyes and enable collaboration. I do, however, have concerns about work permanently encroaching into people’s private spaces and the disappearance of what it means to be off and away from work. This Forbes article sums it up well. Without boundaries, employees “will feel obliged to think about work, check their email, scan their phones for text messages, and in some cases bang away at their keyboards at all hours of the day and night, with little respite and no clear boundaries.”
If the work can be done remotely, and leadership is capable of managing employees virtually, I believe full or hybrid remote work should be an option for employees whose roles are eligible. However, just as there should be conversations about business performance and productivity issues, there should also be conversations about employee experiences such as engagement, fatigue and boundaries. In other words, remote work options have to be guided practice with guard rails - with data on the business, and conversations on the culture. With the right mix of technology infrastructure, operational planning and productivity and employee experience expectations, I think hybrid remote work arrangements, like Apple’s, make sense.
Second, Apple’s culture is all about creativity. You just have to open an iPhone box to understand that creativity lies at the core of Apple’s existence. It is a key value driver for them. Steve Jobs’ is known to have said the following:
“Gather ten smart people into a conference room and two will be creative, two are great at solving problems, the rest are critics. Keep the creatives far away from the critics until they’re ready.”
Maybe Tim Cook still values the concept of gathering for creativity and hence Apple’s hybrid approach of three days in the office and two out still meets those goals. Gathering for creativity appears to be overwhelmingly consistent with Apple’s culture. Maybe the fatigue of gathering via collaboration tools is one permanent hurdle too much? According to the Verge article, Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of retail and people, said that “in-person collaboration was essential” for them. She repeated this while communicating, via video, (I found that interesting, but how else do you talk with all your employees today?) that the company would stick to their planned approach. Although, I believe it is completely possible to be creative in virtual environments, maybe if it’s a core principle for the organization, it would carry more weight in the decisions on remote and hybrid work arrangements.
In my view, it’s Apple’s call. I actually trust that Apple’s leadership, keeping culture and business objectives in mind, has already strategized potential scenarios for a few different eventualities. They have probably determined what is culturally important for them and have made their decisions based on the weight and values behind those issues.
What I do appreciate, is that Apple has made their plans known well in advance with plenty of notice. This allows employees time to react and plan. It also ensures that HR is ready to support employees through the transition. With plenty of notice, no one is blindsided. Already, Apple has denied requests for Accommodations to allow 5-day remote weeks. I know their HR and legal already has their hands full and I am curious how it will all unfold.
A few months ago, a few of us HR practitioners on the Forbes HR Council, offered some suggestions for organizations on how to handle the return-to-work process. My contribution was for companies to give staff as much notice as possible to ease into the transition. Other valuable suggestions included giving employees a voice in the future of their work and workplace, pulling together decision teams from various parts of the organization and making sure appropriate safety protocols were in place.
Not every organization’s culture is ready for fully remote or even hybrid work arrangements. Knowing your organization, like how Tim Cook knows Apple, is the place to start.
Read - 11 Essential Steps For Transitioning Your Team Back To In-Office Work from Forbes HR Council