Apple makes employees anxious by asking for a return to face-to-face work

When Tim Cook sent his workforce home in March 2020, calling the coronavirus a “challenging time,” the Apple CEO is unlikely to have imagined that there would be a battle to bring those employees back into the office two and a half years later. .

It took just a few days for Apple employees to react firmly to the tech giant’s request that they work in offices three days a week starting in September. A group calling itself AppleTogether [AppleJuntos] warned on Monday that there should be no “uniform senior leadership order” as a Slack app channel advocating remote working at Apple grew to 10,000 members.

The move by Apple, a Silicon Valley benchmark, has led to growing concern among tech workers about whether their companies will do the same. While big tech firms quickly sent their employees home at the start of the pandemic, the industry has been markedly less decisive in calling everyone back over concerns it could trigger an exodus of top talent.

“There’s a palpable anxiety,” said a hardware engineer at the iPhone maker, who asked to remain anonymous. “Apple is working with arrogance in the belief that it is a desirable place to work and that there will always be people willing to work at Apple, no matter what the conditions.”

Some workers were emboldened by the tight labor market, which spurred demand for highly sought-after tech jobs. Figures from Morning Consult, a data analysis group, suggest that about half of all tech workers have gone fully remote by 2022, and most show no interest in returning full-time.

These frictions have led to a stark contrast in how Silicon Valley tech companies see the future of work.

Apple’s Cook insists that collaboration is best done in person and that the company’s culture and creative edge would diminish with a distant and isolated workforce.

While Apple was soft-spoken in insisting on three days a week as part of a “pilot” program starting September 5, Tesla took a tougher approach.

“If you don’t show up, let’s assume you quit,” Elon Musk told his employees in an email in June, demanding at least 40 hours a week in the office.

In contrast, executives at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, have embraced virtual work as a permanent alternative, with a wide roster of top executives spread across different countries and time zones, including Adam Mosseri, head of the social network Instagram.

Meanwhile, file storage site Dropbox has declared itself a “Virtual First” company. [Primeiro virtual]: Employees are expected to spend 90% of their time away from the office. On Airbnb, employees can work wherever they want in their home countries and, for up to 90 days a year, in any of 170 countries around the world.

Others are taking a more cautious approach. Amazon told its employees late last year that flexible working would be decided team by team. Since then, it has not provided any more specific guidance.

Google’s return to the office plan has already seen several false starts, and the tech group has now resorted to a piecemeal approach.

An internal Google Employee FAQ page seen by the Financial Times says staff will be instructed to return to the local office by location, with a 30-day transition period.

In preparation for the return, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, invited workers who want to remain fully remote to apply to management, with feasibility judged on a case-by-case basis. Google said the vast majority of requests for fully remote work, or transfer to another office, were granted. The company said it has not set a day when all of its hybrid workers must return.

Adrian Perez-Siam, who worked on Google’s finance team, said he was nominated for promotion because of his performance but was denied remote work. Then he resigned.
“They gave me an ultimatum,” he said. “They had a very strong opinion about having people in the office. My argument was that if I was outperforming and doing such a good job, I could easily continue playing my role.”

Those whose remote work applications are accepted will essentially start a new job, with different terms — workers who are no longer in Silicon Valley will not receive Silicon Valley wages. There were other teething problems, said a Google software engineer who, unlike Perez-Siam, received approval to go fully remote.

“I feel like I have to constantly prove that I’m just as productive as the people who work in the office,” he said. “It’s common for my manager to attribute some of my team’s problems to the fact that we’ve been working remotely for the past two years, when in reality it could also be because of poor management.”

That’s a sentiment noted by researchers at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Management, who studied data collected from 70,000 home-based workers and found that bad bosses were the driving force behind the desire to work remotely. But Silicon Valley employees should be careful what they wish for, argued associate professor Jason Schloetzer.

“When a company builds the technology infrastructure, or gets used to people joining Zoom meetings, there’s a lot less reason for those people to be employed in the United States,” he said.

Other tech companies are ready to lure disgruntled workers. According to data from ZipRecruiter, the percentage of tech jobs that offer fully remote conditions has jumped from 12% in 2019 to 39% so far in 2022.

Beneficiaries include companies like Oyster, a human resources platform that helps companies manage remote workforces, including their own. Tony Jamous, chief executive of Oyster, said the messy picture at some tech companies is a “leadership crisis” because of the fear of losing control.

“They’re dinosaurs,” he said of the companies. “They are no longer at the forefront of leadership, they are no longer at the forefront of organizational design.”

Such comments have become commonplace in “emotional” conversations about returning — or not — to the office, said Melanie Brucks, an assistant professor at the Columbia School of Management. She described the tech giants’ plans as dogmatic and unscientific, with a lack of transparency around executive thinking.

“What struck me is how arbitrary it seems,” Brucks said, “without really much justification for why they think the job requires being in the office or not at the office.”

Regardless, some tech execs in Silicon Valley seem ready to move on. Real estate trends suggest an enduring and even growing belief in the physical office, especially among tech companies.

“New contracts from software, hardware and social media companies have led to a recovery in office rent in the sector,” real estate group CBRE said, noting that the total amount of office space leased by tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area increased by 31 % compared to 2021, with “big tenants” trying to control entire buildings – albeit on looser terms than previous ones.

“Tenants can ask for more flexibility in how much space they have, and not have to commit to 10- or 15-year terms,” ​​said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how much space you need.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves