Apple Employees Protest New ‘Hybrid’ Work Culture, Calling For More Flexibility
Photo 167398865 © Travelarium | Dreamstime.com
Today at Apple, employees aren’t happy. The Cupertino tech giant began introducing a hybrid work format earlier this month, getting corporate staff to step into the office once a week. Come May 23, CNN reports, in-office days will triple.
Rather than addressing the unique day-to-day process each team or role undergoes, the new policy seems to be more rigid and applicable on a larger scale. Disgruntled staff have now published an impassioned open letter, under the group name ‘Apple Together’, to demand more flexibility in their work arrangements.
The group expresses in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch about how employees should decide for themselves “what kind of arrangement works best for each one of us, be that in an office, work from home, or a hybrid approach.”
It doesn’t make sense to them that workers are being “lumped in” with others who have vastly different duties. The authors cite employees in retail operations who have to come into the office the same number of days as retail representatives on the store floor.
The Apple Together group also challenges the company’s adamance on frequent in-person collaborations. “For many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day,” the note shares.
As Apple continues its return to office plan, the company is encouraging people to "show their team spirit" by participating in a weekly photo challenge & getting their hands on the latest spirit swag, according to an internal note.
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) April 29, 2022
One employee described it as "severance vibes"
The campaigners emphasize that employees have been granted enough opportunities for remote collaborations throughout the pandemic to know that those can be highly effective too, especially when communicating with coworkers in international offices. “[The pandemic] enabled a kind of international collaboration that we didn’t see before, where especially colleagues from ‘far-away’ locations could finally contribute as well as people in our major offices and no longer felt like second-class participants in meetings,” they reveal.
Plus, commuting to and from the office takes a mental and physical toll on the body, the group continues. This will, over time, lead to a greater proportion of “younger, whiter, more male-dominated” individuals accessing privileges that prove “who can work for Apple, not who’d be the best fit.”
The protesters also bring forth the hard-hitting observation that Apple’s corporate culture doesn’t complement the way it envisages its products.
“We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work—yet, we ourselves cannot use them to work remotely?” the employees question.
“How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products, if we don’t live it?”
The letter ends by quoting Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who famously said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
The staffers pen: “Here we are, the smart people that you hired, and we are telling you what to do: Please get out of our way, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, let us decide how we work best, and let us do the best work of our lives.”
[via 9to5Mac and CNN, cover photo 167398865 © Travelarium | Dreamstime.com]
