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Apple employees threaten to quit as company takes hard line stance on remote work:
Apple employees claim the company is not budging on plans to institute a hybrid work model for corporate workers and is in some cases denying work-from-home exceptions, including one accommodation covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In June, Apple announced a hybrid work schedule that will see employees return to the office for three days a week starting in September, a shift toward normal corporate operations after the pandemic forced a lengthy work-from-home period. Days later, participants of what is assumed to be the same remote work advocacy Slack channel cited by The Verge asked more flexibility, saying that working from home brings a number of benefits including greater 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, and reduced spread of pathogens.
That request was flatly denied. In a video to employees late last month, SVP of retail and people Deirdre O'Brien toed the company line on remote work policies, saying, "We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future. If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:18PM (4 children)
Well, our local hive survived the pandemic with revenues intact, projects proceeding on schedule, and 100% of R&D working from home for 16 months now. Just because a couple of managers don't like not seeing butts in chairs doesn't mean WFH doesn't generate income for the business. If those managers insist and force the issue, a good chunk of our workers will start WFH with another business helping them to generate their revenues instead.
So, the question is: what "counts" more, results, or opinions of leadership? In the past it has been the opinions in control, but we just got a demonstration of what happens when those opinions are overridden, and the macro-scale savings for businesses, employees and government funded infrastructure provisioning for working from home are enormous - like a +25% margin at least.
Picture Octopus man Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie: Do you fear change?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday July 21 2021, @05:51PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 21 2021, @06:18PM (2 children)
Almost certainly. We "innovate" by acquisition, it's not like much (benefit to the company) was going on in the office when we were all there.
I feel a strong kinship between our product lines and the Apple ones. Loyal customers, "best in class" halo on the products, high prices, slow design cycle update rate... after a decade+ on track it's hard to derail the train, but it is possible if you completely de-staff. The big "Apple Innovation" I've noticed in the past couple of years is a magnetically attached auxillary battery lump - doesn't exactly take a room full of stable geniuses to come up with this kind of stuff, pretty sure that could be accomplished on a Zoom call.
Their resistance indicates the opinions of management - how often do you think these types of opinions reflect accurate facts?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Thursday July 22 2021, @01:08AM (1 child)
And your resistance indicates the opinion of someone who isn't management. I think we're just at a standard conflict of interest where each wants something. We'll see who gets what they want.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 22 2021, @02:23AM
I've been both, and in the 1990s when it was "crunch time" I'd take my work home and accomplish more in 2 weeks than I could accomplish in 3 months in the office - I got other kinds of things done when I was in the office, and for people who do that kind of work they should be there face to face getting those things done. The majority of work that I have done, however, gets done better out of all that, and I believe that applies to large portions of most tech corporations, from R&D to quality to accounting. Sales, marketing and upper management can continue to travel and meet as normal - they'd wither and die without their actual face time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]