The majority of Apple employees likely won't be returning to work at Apple's Cupertino campuses before June 2021, Apple CEO Tim Cook said today at a town hall meeting, details of which were shared by Bloomberg.
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Cook said that while face-to-face collaboration is important, Apple's success amid the pandemic this year could potentially lead to the company being more flexible about remote work in the future. Still, Cook and Apple executives are eager for employees to return to Infinite Loop, Apple Park, and other offices worldwide.
"There's no replacement for face-to-face collaboration, but we have also learned a great deal about how we can get our work done outside of the office without sacrificing productivity or results," he told staff, according to people familiar with the comments. "All of these learnings are important. When we're on the other side of this pandemic, we will preserve everything that is great about Apple while incorporating the best of our transformations this year."
At the current time, Santa Clara County (where Apple's main campuses are located) has a stay at home order that requires companies to allow employees to work from home where applicable, and that will be in place through the end of the year. Cook in July said that he expected employees to return to work in early 2021, but the ongoing global health crisis has been evolving and Apple has had to modify its plans several times.
Other tech companies like Facebook and Google are also allowing employees to work from home until summer 2021, while some, like Twitter and Square, are allowing employees to work from home permanently. Many other smaller tech companies in the Bay Area have also gone entirely remote on a permanent basis due to the pandemic.
Cook also told employees that because of the challenges over the course of the last few months, many would get an additional paid holiday on January 4.
Top Rated Comments
I can't even work with pants on anymore.At this point a lot of us have shifted to working from home and it’s working well. I can see this becoming the norm
I worked in management at a fortune 5 company for several years. WFH was great for me and many of my team members, I can honestly say I got more work done at home than at the office, some days by twofold. Having said that, we had some people that simple couldn't do it because of distractions, poor work ethic, etc. That company and others have saved millions on office space and overhead, so I think it is a plus in the long term. But getting the 20% of employees to do actual work at home was a major challenge. There's a second challenge, every other VP that came in wanted the traditional come to work model, they just couldn't wrap their head around empty desks at the office. They believed 80% of the work force was at home building model airplanes, and in reality, it's probably the opposite. No commute, no lunch breaks, no water cooler talk.Those who can and want to work from home should be allowed to. I had hoped the dependency on the office would have been less necessary once this is all over.