Monday, May 23, is back-to-school day for Apple employees in the United States. The firm has signaled the end of total telework. But thousands of employees are threatening to quit.
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“Stop treating us like school children to be told when to be where and what to do”: They are more than 3000 employees of Apple to revolt, in a letter addressed to the direction and especially to threaten to leave the box. Figurehead of this fight, Ian Goodfellow, Apple’s director of machine learning, has outright announced that he is resigning immediately. In question, the new policy of the firm of Tim Cook. From today, complete and permanent telework for Apple employees is over. We will have to return to headquarters at least three days a week, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
For employees, there is no question of going back to commuting and sitting still for eight hours a day. Imposing a return to the office would have consequences, they say, for their safety, health and well-being. And then they have even more serious arguments: during all the time that Apple employees could work from where they wanted, the firm’s results remained excellent, productivity was not impacted and all the projects of the company were able to exit on time.
The risk to Apple is barely veiled in the letter from the 3,000 rebels. They threaten to leave. An April survey of Apple employees showed more than three-quarters were unhappy with the return-to-work plan and 56% were considering leaving the company. Nothing could be easier in the field of high technology in the United States, which is experiencing a severe shortage of employees.
The massive departures of collaborators, this is called the “great resignation”. According to Raj Choudhury, a Harvard professor specializing in work, quoted by the Quartz website, companies with too rigid rules could lose their best employees. And besides, some employers have understood this. This is the case of Airbnb, for example. His boss, Brian Chesky told the magazine Time that its employees would be able to work permanently remotely, from anywhere, without any change in salary. For him, the office as we know it is an anachronistic form, which comes from a pre-digital age.