Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

In March 2020, Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, asked employees to return to work from home, saying the epidemic had brought "challenging moments". He may not have expected at the time that he would face an uphill battle when he asked employees to return to the office two and a half years later.

Apple recently announced that employees would be required to work in the office three days a week from September, but just a few days later, Apple employees lashed out at the requirement. A group that calls itself AppleTogether warned on Monday that it should not follow "unified instructions from senior management". A Slack channel that promotes telecommuting among Apple employees has attracted 10, 000 members.

As a leader in Silicon Valley's technology industry, Apple's move has made tech employees increasingly worried about whether their own companies will follow suit. During the outbreak, the tech giants quickly asked their employees to work from home, but were less decisive in "recalling" employees for fear that it could lead to a loss of top talent.

"there is some real anxiety," said one Apple hardware engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Apple is arrogant to think that it provides an ideal place to work and that there will always be people who want to work for Apple no matter what the conditions. "

At the same time, some employees are encouraged by the recent tension in the US labour market, which has boosted demand for hot skilled jobs. About half of all technical jobs in the United States will be telecommuting by 2022, and most people are not interested in fully returning to the office, according to Morning Consulting, a data analytics firm.

These frictions have led to a marked divergence in Silicon Valley technology companies' views on the future work model.

Cook insists that teamwork is best done face-to-face, and that the company's cultural and innovative advantages will shrink with the distance between telecommuting and employees.

For now, Apple's policy on returning to the office is delicately worded, starting with a "pilot" from September 5. Tesla, on the other hand, took a tougher approach.

In June, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, said in an email to employees: "if you don't show up in the office, we think you've resigned." Mr Musk requires Tesla employees to work at least 40 hours a week in the office.

By contrast, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has seen telecommuting as a permanent alternative. More and more Meta executives are scattered in different countries and time zones, including Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.

Dropbox, a cloud storage service, claims to be a "virtual first" company and expects employees to be out of the office 90 per cent of the time. At Airbnb, employees can work anywhere in their country, and can choose to work in any of the 170 countries up to 90 days a year.

Other companies are relatively cautious. Amazon told employees at the end of last year that whether or not to adopt a flexible work model would be decided on a case-by-case basis. After that, the company did not provide any more detailed information.

Google's plan to ask employees to return to the office has failed several times and is now taking a more piecemeal approach. According to an internal FAQ page for Google employees, local offices will inform employees how to return to the office and will provide a 30-day transition period.

For employees who want to telecommute completely, Google requires them to apply to management and then judge the feasibility on a case-by-case basis. Google says the vast majority of applications for full telecommuting or transfer to an office in another location have been approved. In addition, Google said it had not yet set a date when other employees would have to return to the office.

Adrian Perez-Adrian Perez-Siam, who once worked on Google's finance team, said he had been promoted because of good performance, but his application for telecommuting was turned down. He then chose to resign. "they gave me an ultimatum. They really want their employees to be in the office," he said. my view is that if the performance exceeds expectations and does a good job, I can easily continue to play my role. "

Employees who are allowed to telecommute will actually start a new job, and the salary will be adjusted accordingly: if the resident location is not in Silicon Valley, they will not be paid in Silicon Valley. Unlike Mr Perez-Siam, a Google software engineer says he faces other problems after telecommuting approval.

"I think I have to continue to prove that I am as efficient as my colleagues in the office," he said. Managers often blame our team's problems on our telecommuting over the past few years, but in fact this may also be due to mismanagement. "

Researchers at Georgetown University's Mcdonough School of Business studied data from 70,000 home-based workers and found that this was a common mindset. The results show that dislike of bosses is the main motivation for employees to telecommute. However, Jason Schloetze, an assistant professor at the business school, believes Silicon Valley employees should be cautious in this respect.

"in the US, once a company has built its technical infrastructure or is used to employees attending meetings remotely via Zoom, there is not much reason to hire them," he says.

Other technology companies are ready to attract disgruntled employees. The proportion of technology industry jobs that allow full telecommuting has risen sharply from 12 per cent in 2019 to 39 per cent so far in 2022, according to recruitment platform ZipRecruiter.

The beneficiaries of this trend include the human resources platform Oyster. The company helps corporate customers manage telecommuting teams, and it is doing the same. Tony Jamous, chief executive of Oyster, said the chaos at some technology companies was actually a "leadership crisis" for fear of losing control. These companies are "like dinosaurs, no longer at the forefront of leadership, nor at the forefront of organizational design."

Melanie Brucks, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, says such talk has become commonplace in "emotional" discussions about whether to return to the office. She believes that the plans of the tech giants are dogmatic, not based on science, and that executives lack transparency. "it feels very arbitrary to me," she said. Executives gave little reason to explain why they thought the work had to be done in the office. "

In any case, some technology executives in Silicon Valley seem ready to move on. Recent data from the US real estate industry show that managers' belief in physical offices is persistent and even deepening, especially among technology companies. CBRE, a real estate management group, said: "New leases from software, hardware and social media companies have led the rebound in office leasing in the technology industry." Compared with 2021, the total number of office space rented by San Francisco Bay area technology companies increased by 31%, and "large tenants" even sought to own the entire building. But at the same time, tenants are also looking for more flexible lease terms.

Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE Technology Insight Centre, said: "tenants can have more flexibility in terms of space size and do not have to commit to a 10-or 15-year long lease. But there is still a lot of uncertainty about exactly what kind of space is needed."

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