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Apple boss Tim Cook: caused displeasure
Photo: STEPHEN LAM / REUTERS
For more than a year, corona-related home offices have been the trend in many companies around the world.
This is also the case with Apple.
But the US tech company is already planning for the time after the pandemic - and wants to order its employees back to its offices from September, at least most of the time: Presence is mandatory on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, CEO Tim Cook wrote last week his workforce.
On the other two days, you can also work at home after Corona.
For Apple standards, this is actually a relatively generous rule. Before the pandemic, there was a restrictive corporate culture in this regard; Apple was extremely reluctant to work from home. But after having been able to experience the advantages of working from home for more than a year, many Apple employees see it differently, according to a report by the online magazine "The Verge": They defend themselves against the blanket return to the office. In an internal letter to Cook and top management, they demand more flexibility.
"Many of us feel that we have to choose between the combination of family, well-being and the opportunity to do our best job on the one hand and being part of Apple on the other," the letter said, according to the report, around 80 Employees took notes and published the full length of The Verge. Last Friday he was sent widely among the workforce to collect signatures.
In the letter, the proponents of the home office complain about the internal communication of the management: "In the past year we not only often felt ignored, but sometimes actively ignored." Management memos in the style of "We know that many of you can hardly wait to work with colleagues in person in the office again «felt condescending because it is not recognized that there are also contradicting opinions in the workforce.
Some colleagues have already seen themselves forced to quit because of Apple's restrictive stance on home offices.
Many tech companies do not like to work purely from home
Specifically, the authors of the letter demand that the decision about home office should not be made across the group, but at the level of the individual teams.
In addition, Apple should carry out regular surveys among its workforce and also specifically ask in exit talks with outgoing employees whether the home office regulation played a role in the decision to leave Apple.
In fact, some of the other big US tech companies are much more relaxed than Apple when it comes to working from home.
For example, Facebook and Twitter announced a long time ago that their employees could work from home permanently even after the pandemic, if they wanted to.
However, most of the tech companies see things the same way as Apple: At Google, three days of office a week will be mandatory again from September.
Amazon, Netflix and Microsoft have also announced that they will again mainly work in the office in the future.
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