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Apple Employees Asked to Return to Offices for Three Days a Week Starting in September
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I'm just giving my opinion based on my personal circumstances...not suggesting that everyone must follow any particular work pattern! That would be just as bad as saying everyone needs to be in the office 5 days a week...or on mandated days, which is what Apple is suggesting.
What we want is for employers to be flexible whilst still having reasonable expectations of team performance.
I think it is reasonable for an employer to expect attendance for some group activities, e.g. project kick-offs, hands-on training, or major announcements. As a company, you need to create a culture and some cohesion amongst the workforce. That ideally requires you to get to know and trust your co-workers, which is harder to do on a video conference. The actual work can mostly be done remotely, but building relationships is easier face to face in a less artificial setting. This is my personal experience - I started my current job 100% remote, never meeting my manager and colleagues until months after joining.... but I didn't really get to "know" them until that physical meeting or having a meal or some drinks together.
I'll accept that this is less important for a lot of technical jobs, although forming cohesive relationships with your co-workers does make the working experience more enjoyable (for me at least). For building business relationships I think it much more important - so much is based on developing trust with another person.
The point the Apple employees are making is that if it has been proven that they can work effectively without being in the office, why should they be forced to go there?
Apple management's perspective is that they want to build a strong team culture with effective interpersonal communication, and that requires physical presence, at least some of the time.
Both are valid arguments, and both camps could argue that they can (or can't) do this remotely.
I think the corporate world has an opportunity to reassess what works, what doesn't (or is less effective) and to rethink traditional working practices.
This is for the benefit of both employer and employee. Employers can potentially save money on office space, or even shop around for cheaper remote resources. Employees can develop a more flexible and healthier work-life balance, which can benefit both employee and employer (happier, more motivated workers)
The idea of remote working has had a large-scale beta test and found to be mostly functional. It will be hard to put the genie back in the bottle and return to a 5 day/week in the office, and workers are quite rightly questioning whether it is necessary to do that.
I think we are entering a phase where negotiating your physical working conditions and attendance will be part of many job interviews.
Si, capisci.
Employers are not forced, they want those employees for their skills. Conditions of employment can change over time, and this happens all the time. These new ones, related to remote/hybrid work, are just that: new. And we should all adapt to those, as we did with having a gym, prayer room, nursing area, etc.
yes, it was an attempt to make unreasonable work demands “cool” by adding some Apple tech into it….
I think we will eventually settle for somewhere in the middle, but for now, both sides are still trying to find the ideal middle ground, so expect more tug-of-war in the coming days and weeks.
If you go look at the recent post about the employees response open letter, there are clearly plenty of people that don’t understand this concept. That letter is essentially a large group of Apple employees attempting to do the same thing that I did. People are actually calling them “entitled whiners” smdh…
Before the pandemic, for many years there are jobs that employees knew full well could be done from home (remote working) but it could never be put to the test because management would always use mumbo jumbo management language to prevent any such thing from happening. When the pandemic hit, employers needed to find ways to keep their company running and thus resorted to allowing their employees to work from home, something that employers prevented from happening in the past. Thousands upon thousands of employee's have now been proved right that their job can be done from home and that the mumbo jumbo management language used by employers to prevent such a thing from happening is utter BS because if the mangement language was correct, remote working would not have worked. The fact that remote working does work means employers are talking out of their behinds.
Now employers are saying they need these remote workers back in the office and they are using the mumbo jumbo management language as justification but employees know this language is total BS because remote working does work and there is no justification why they should go back into to the office 5 days a week.
If an employee can achieve the same level of efficancy and productivity working from home as they can do from working in the office, where is the justification for the employer to force these employees back into the office?
Now employers are saying they need these remote workers back in the office and they are using the mumbo jumbo management language as justification but employees know this language is total BS because remote working does work and there is no justification why they should go back into to the office 5 days a week.
If an employee can achieve the same level of efficancy and productivity working from home as they can do from working in the office, where is the justification for the employer to force these employees back into the office?
Never had one. You?who are you to say what people should adapt to? that's not an argument. why don't you adapt and get back in your cubicle?
It’s all about adapting to each other’s way of working, needs, etc. So, you are so tight about all this, you can’t even accept that we’re different?
Time for companies to realize that 90% of people fake working in an office. I mean between the hour lunch breaks, needing to go run errands in the afternoon, bathroom breaks, multiple coffee breaks or getting up to refill your water, and then last but not least, talking to people in the hallways, I am willing to bet that someone who is in the office from 9 am to 6pm gets maybe 4-5 hours of work done.
It’s called “presenteeism”. Interesting article on this here:
Why presenteeism wins out over productivity
If the pandemic has taught us anything about work, it's that we don't need to be pulling long hours in an office to be productive. So, why is presenteeism still so important?
www.bbc.com
I just think Apple specifically should have propel in-office most of the time. The whole campus was specifically designed to have people clash into each other and collaborate. Sure things can be done remotely, and people should till have the option to have one or two days a week working from home, but I believe each innovation at this level MUST have personal random interactions with people working n all sorts of projects across the entirety of Apple specifically. You just don’t get that working remotely. It’s like the Hyperbolic Time Chamber of techbology intersecting humanity. Apple employees barely got a taste of the campus prior to the pandemic. I can only dream of taking a tab and just wondering around as an Apple Fellow someday.