This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.
But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.
Absolutely true. Employees do not trust management for good reasons, because they have experience with management not being open and honest with them (speaking generally here, of course there are exceptions).
Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.
Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't. As you say, it's not universal.
The question is: What kind of company is Apple?
I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
>I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
It is the kind of company that colludes with other employers to illegally gain advantage when negotiating with employees about pay and quality of life at work.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
If you want to believe people at Apple have changed, go for it. But in my opinion, it always behooves sellers of labor that buyers of labor are always playing an adversarial game. And vice versa of course.
Can you name some companies that don’t? Very few companies with more than a few employees are more concerned about the bottom line of their employees than the corporation. This is by design due to management training in business schools, motivation by managers to control and yield power over others to signal their prowess, and basic greed by business stakeholders to maximize their returns to name just a few reasons.
Usually the result of past "Say one thing, do another" sort of experiences. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
In the past decade or so, for instance, a lot of the rush to "open office" (which is Hell on Earth for the sort of deep work a lot of tech types are typically paid to do) has been surrounded with all sorts of talk about the benefits of people and ideas colliding and such... mostly coming from people who have an office with a door that closes.
There's a place and time for those ideas, and it's the various "watercooler" places a typical office has - break room, lounge area, etc. "I am not working on something, let's BS on some ideas!" But there's a time and place for "not having random conversations," and it would be where people try to get work done. It's exceedingly hard to focus on deep work when there are lots of conversations around, and having gone from one extreme to another (open office with probably 100 people in line of sight to my own dedicated shed office), even if you know how bad it is, you don't realize how bad it really is. I listen to a lot less music now, and a lot of what I listen to is quieter and instrumental. In the open office plan, I'd acquired an appreciation for some pretty aggressive metal - because it was better than random conversations. And if I'm in the middle of something, I don't get constantly jacked out of the groove by other people being bored or hungry or such. There are many days out in my shed when I couldn't tell you what time it is without explicitly looking, and on more than one occasion it's been my wife pinging me, "Hey, you coming up to the house for dinner?" I'd been buried in something technical for the last few hours and had no idea it was dinnertime.
But despite all this, a lot of tech companies still try to spin "butts in tiny seats with people all around them" as somehow better.
Anyway, if nobody believes what management is saying, there's probably a very good reason for it.
Then it sounds like they probably do want to a full return to in-office work, but don't think they can get away with it. If the argument from your leadership doesn't begin with "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work," then it's reasonable to consider what the real reason might be: Wanting to exert control, or the sunk cost fallacy of leasing commercial real estate, or a justification for managers to have someone to manage. Who knows? These things are often not well explained. But anything except an existential business risk is a bad reason as far as I am concerned, when the "resources" so clearly want it to go otherwise.
Seems like this has absolutely been the case. FAANG and the like aren't gonna to willingly lose 10-20% of their staff unless in office work was more productive. The business will make their decisions based on what will make them the most money at the end of the day. They aren't politicians seeking power, just profit. If remote is more profitable, we will see remote companies dominate the scene in the next few years, but as of now, all management has to go off of is reports showing productivity went down during WFH.
Profitable for the company != profitable for a given manager.
I said "not the least of which because". I didn't say that was the only reason.
This is precisely the kind of cynical reading-between-the-lines that I'm talking about.
But, it was the only reason you gave.
I used to work with them a lot in a past role, and the remote guys seemed to get disappeared much more quickly than the folks who had a home base.
When your boss is in Brazil or whatever and gets a savings target, he sorts a spreadsheet by salary and utilization and poof!
Leadership changes. People change their minds. Something can absolutely be a genuine intent today but that could change in a few years.
So I don't see how that kind of reasoning is useful when making an employment decision today. Getting up in arms about a purported future two years from now is just not rational, and is ultimately a byproduct of fear.
More broadly, this has always been true. Employers have always been in an position where they could change the terms of employment, and employees have always been in the position of being able to make a choice as to whether they would be willing to accept those changes. The WFH situation isn't special in that regard.
Second, this could go either way. Future leadership could equally decide Apple will go full remote. But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment. That's just another form of management distrust.
Edit: And oddly, given the current demand for positions in technology companies, that distrust is especially unfounded. Employees have never been more empowered. The sheer demand for labour means that any company instituting a policy that's broadly unpopular will lose staff. Absent a profound change in the labour market, in that context it would be insane for Apple to communicate a hybrid work policy, now, only to renege on it.
If that were true, we'd all have private offices, or at least the option, instead of open plan office space.
But, yes, in general I wouldn't make decisions based on what could happen in 2-3 years unless I really saw the writing on the wall and wanted to proactively spare myself the pain.
This seems like a reasonable assumption unless the labor seller is in very high demand relative to supply.
There's unquestionably a very strong strain of "management" in our culture that consists almost solely of a) distrusting the employees, b) therefore trying to physically monitor them at all times, and c) justifying their own existence by calling for many hours of (in-person) meetings every week. Personally, the institution I work for has claimed—in defiance of all logic and obvious reality—that certain jobs here can only be done in the office, all the time, and thus anyone in these jobs (which is basically everything below Director-level) seeking to work remote even part of the time will be denied.
Your company many not even have any of these people. I don't know. But so many of us have heard the stories from so many others who do have management like this that we would be stupid not to be wary of any manager—on up to the C-suite/owner/board—who seems unenthusiastic about remote work.
Unfortunately for your argument, their policy speaks to their attitude, which is "fuck what you think". Anyone with a basic understanding of human power dynamics correctly interprets this policy as "in a year all you peasants will be back with your arses in your seats where we can see you". The statement is the evidence.
>But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
The fact that you have a problem with this proves our point. You are not approaching this from the perspective of "how can I empower my team to do their best work and make us all a ton of money". Your frustration is "I know better and these idiots won't do what they are told".
And the fact that you claim to be unable to understand these basic ideas means that either (a) you do understand and are lying or (b) are incompetent, and in either case, your team has come to the correct conclusion.
I look forward to hiring a ton of Apple devs while also being disappointed that macOS will continue to get worse.
What do you think the lack of trust comes from? We have a large body of evidence that management does things in exactly this way. You can argue that this evidence isn't germane, but you can't argue that it doesn't exist.
The technology industry in general is one with some of the most empowered workers in the economy. The incredible imbalance in labour supply-and-demand means that salaries and benefits are sky high, work conditions tend to be quite favourable, and employees have a ton of options in selecting employers that have positive work environments.
And yet there are some who seem to think that tech workers are continuously under attack from heartless corporations looking to maximize profits at all costs, even at the expense of workers.
Absolutely, if you're working in, I dunno, service or manufacturing industries where labour supply is high and anti-union efforts have resulted in a rollback of labour rights, there is every reason to be concerned.
But in tech? I genuinely have no idea where this perception comes from or how it can be justified given the current structure of the labour market.
I've found things made more sense once I realized that the political structure of modern corporations is essentially a kingdom. I think the cynicism of management comes from a combination of factors. First is that the individual contributors have no political voice, so decisions are made for them and they just have to live with the results. Second is that without the individual contributors there is no product, so the ICs fulfill management's goals, but nobody (on a structural level; individual managers may vary) is even asking the ICs what they want. Third, management routinely makes decisions that make the ICs life less pleasant [1], and frequently the ICs know of / are using / know they have the capability to build a system that they want. Fourth, management naturally attracts the people who want power; leaders enable those under them, but rulers tell their underlings what to do. Between the nature of the job and the failings of people, management tends to attract rulers, not leaders. Fifth, tech people tend be individualistic / mavericks, and those kind of people dislike being ruled, especially when the rules are lousy.
This could probably be summarized as ICs want autonomy, mastery, and competency (see Dan Pink). Many tech people got into tech on their own, so have a high sense of autonomy; the corporate structure tends to squelch autonomy. To make it worse, management does not appear to value the ICs, even though the king wouldn't eat if the farmers didn't farm. But ICs have no power within the system, so the best they can do is go quit.
Cynicism is the refuge of the powerless.
[1] The most egregious example I've seen was one very large company had needed a QA system. The IT department liked a particular software package, and apparently nobody else liked it. Probably because it was completely unfit for bug tracking. So, naturally, the company got the package IT wanted. Using it was completely miserable.
Which in turn makes the executive team suspicious which makes them hint at even just one day a month which makes people suspicious which ...
I dont have any solutions - but I agree with you.
> They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy
That is all you can do while hoping that both sides (and yes in this case there are good people and bad people on both sides) chill the fuck out.
Flexibility is not forcing people to come some arbitrary number of days because reasons.
Just reordering them:
> I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office
> the executive team has been ambiguous
> it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise
You can claim all you want but if the CEO and all the chief officers are not the one making it all clear and not just taking about it at a standup but in black and white on paper. Then it means nothing and what you claim means nothing too to your employees. Like someone said next step after that is to put it in the contract.
Also it’s up to you and the other managers and officers, and not the people bellow you, to create a trusting environment and trust with your team. It’s frustrating you to hear comments like that but it should be instead a red flag for you about the health of your team. Because it’s even more stressful and frustrating to be in the very seat of an employee where there is no trust at their work and the leaders are vague about critical part of their work life and don’t care and (not pointing finger at you but just saying) are just frustrated when they voice their concerns instead of listening and acting as leaders.
Same reason I don't like "well let teams decide". It doesn't force the business processes to update themselves to the divergent realities, it pushes all of the burden onto teams and individuals instead, which is not good in aggregate for these sorts of things.
Unless you are in the c-suite and are also the board, you can't make those promises. Your job is to say these things and gain employee trust, only to have a different set of orders come from on high.
If my management expects me to renege on a commitment that they've told me I can make, then I can't trust management any more than my staff can, and I will no longer be willing to work for that company.
Honestly, it's like folks around here don't grok that a) employees are actually empowered, and b) management knows that.
Fool me 7 times ...
Six months from now you get a new CEO and they want asses in seats immediately. What do you say then?
