Apple Makes It Easy to Work Remotely (Unless You Work for Apple)

"(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Last month, Apple published a promotional video titled Escape From the Office. The heroes of the almost 9-minute ad are a group of employees at a fictional company called ARCA who respond to the requirement that they return to a physical office by quitting and launching their own startup. Using Apple’s iPads, MacBook Pros, and software, they then build their own office-less business..A week before its tribute to remote work, Apple Inc. gave its own workers a timeline by which they’d have to return to their offices. To some, including the 7,500 of Apple’s 165,000 employees who belong to a Slack room dedicated to advocating for remote work, it was bruising. “They are trolling us, right?” one wrote. Others called the ad “distasteful” and “insulting.” The underlying message: Apple knows corporate employees—using its products as tools—can capably work from home. So why can’t its own staff?.Apple has been a primarily remote company since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. It recorded several blockbuster quarters and shipped dozens of new products while its employees worked from their garages and spare bedrooms; in the last holiday quarter alone, Apple generated about $124 billion in revenue, over 25% more than it had made in the same period before the virus..Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, has said that an increase in remote work drove new demand for products like iPads and was “very critical” to the company’s financial success. The previous version of office culture may never return, he predicted. “Normal will become something different,” he told investors in October 2020..Despite that, Apple wants its own staff to start coming back to its multibillion-dollar suite of global offices, including its estimated $5 billion main hub in Cupertino, Calif. Employees are required back in the office at least once a week by April 11, twice a week by the end of the month, and on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays by May 23. All of them are eligible for an extra month of remote work annually. “We have an opportunity to combine the best of what we have learned about working remotely with the irreplaceable benefits of in-person collaboration,” Cook told employees when announcing the return date in early March.. Read More: Five Days a Week In the Office? It’s Better for Everyone.Not everyone saw the shift as a positive. “Everything happened with us working from home all day, and now we have to go back to the office, sit in traffic for two hours, and hire people to take care of kids at home,” says a former Apple employee who left the company, in part, because of its stringent return-to-the-office policy and who asked for anonymity to avoid hurting any future employment prospects. “Working from home has so many perks. Why would we want to go back?”.The Apple employees demanding to work remotely are a minority; many engineers began returning to the office before the April 11 deadline. The company declined to comment, but pointed to previous remarks from Cook in which he said that the return to the office may be an “unsettling change” and that the company is dedicated to giving employees support and flexibility..Apple’s remote-work policy is in a pilot phase, and it could be either the beginning of a new normal or a step toward a return to pre-pandemic expectations. For now, its policy is less flexible than those of some of its biggest rivals. Meta Platforms Inc. is allowing permanent remote work for those not engineering hardware. Amazon.com Inc. says it’s leaving the decision to individual divisions. “We are intentionally not prescribing how many days or which days,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a message to employees. Microsoft is allowing most employees to work remotely half-time, but requiring approval from a manager for any more than that. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which has begun to require employees to report to the office three days a week, is approving remote work on a case-by-case basis. It says it’s approved 85% of requests to relocate or work remotely..There’s disagreement about how long a more permissive approach to remote work will last. While it’s not hard to find predictions of a permanent shift, former Google HR head Laszlo Bock predicts that things will gradually revert to normal over the next three to five years. In part, workers will realize that physical proximity is helpful to landing promotions and plum assignments. Bock also says companies will likely “boil the frog” by making small shifts toward more stringent policies as workers re-acclimate to getting dressed and showing up five days a week. “There will be some gamesmanship driving them back to the office,” he says..Certain Apple divisions are becoming more flexible in allowing employees to work outside of Silicon Valley, so long as there’s another Apple office they can join. Apple’s chip team is scattered across Florida, Texas, and San Diego, in addition to Cupertino. Apple Pay is setting up shop in Raleigh, Southern California, and New York. AI teams have taken over offices in Seattle, and Apple’s media teams are, predictably, working out of Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville..The majority of Apple corporate jobs, from hardware engineering and design to marketing to software development, still require a Bay Area address. This partially reflects the specific needs of a company that is, at its core, a hardware designer. Despite the two-plus years of the pandemic, Apple hasn’t shipped a major new product category developed remotely. An Apple Car is still at least three years away, and the company’s long-in-development mixed-reality headset has seen multiple delays and may not ship until 2023..Apple is also pushing for at-office work to protect its culture of secrecy, which is easier to maintain when everyone is in the same physical space. It was also a hallmark of the culture developed by Steve Jobs, whose name marks the on-campus auditorium where the company introduces products. He heralded the circular-shaped Apple Park design as a way to spark random conversations and ideas..Some employees say that bringing workers back to the office isn’t going to produce the returns on productivity that some executives may be expecting. Employees argue that the pandemic is still not over, with a variant of omicron actively spreading. People are worried about catching the virus at the office and bringing it back to unvaccinated kids or high-risk family members. While Apple provides shuttle buses, some employees spend up to two hours a day driving their own cars to and from work, an activity that some say undermines both their own productivity and Apple’s environmental goals. “We’re trying to save the planet, but now our employees are driving two hours so we can justify our multibillion-dollar headquarters,” says one employee who asked to remain anonymous discussing their employer.. Read More: What Really Happens When Workers Are Given a Flexible Hybrid Schedule.Software engineers, marketing employees, and sales teams could make a stronger argument to work from home than those involved in hardware development. For months, retail employees lamented that they were expected to be in the stores while corporate workers stayed home. In 2020, Apple launched a remote Retail at Home program that let retail employees split their time at the store and at home, assisting with online sales and technical support. That program is now ending..Apple already knows the benefits of remote work in certain cases. For years, the company has selectively allowed a small number of engineers across the company to work remotely under certain circumstances, employees say. It’s also had a program allowing technical support staff to work from home. This has resulted in people working in Idaho and the most distant parts of Texas. Remote workers had to remain within a few hundred miles of an Apple office and visit from time to time. Those people will continue to work from home after Apple’s return deadline, irking some engineers who have to return to the office..While the takeaway of Escape From the Office is supposed to be the revolutionary potential of Apple devices, there’s another one: If you don’t like your job’s approach to remote work, you should quit. The message may be getting through. With the perception that Apple’s policies on remote work aren’t as good as those of its competitors, its recruiters are expecting some people to leave, and preparing to find replacements . —With Mark Bergen.©2022 Bloomberg L.P."

Apple Makes It Easy to Work Remotely (Unless You Work for Apple)

The company’s relatively inflexible remote-work policies are inspiring some employees to look elsewhere.

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Apple Makes It Easy to Work Remotely (Unless You Work for Apple)

The company’s relatively inflexible remote-work policies are inspiring some employees to look elsewhere.

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