San Francisco, Dusseldorf The Apple Park should be more than a corporate headquarters. The massive ring-shaped complex in Cupertino, California provides work for more than 12,000 people and is surrounded by more than 260,000 square meters of land. The building, which was initiated by company founder Steve Jobs, is said to have cost more than five billion dollars. The problem: it has been largely empty since the outbreak of the pandemic.
This is about to change soon. Company boss Tim Cook has ordered Apple employees back to the offices. “I remain convinced that there is no substitute for face-to-face meetings,” Cook said at the recent shareholder meeting. Spontaneous meetings could promote exchange and innovation. “I’m sure most of us can’t wait to get back in the offices,” Cook said.
Apple is one of the last major tech companies in the US to come up with a timeline for returning to the office. Until April 11, employees should work in the office at least one day a week, as the company confirms. From May 23, the employees should then be on site at least three days a week – namely Monday, Tuesday and Thursday – the Bloomberg news agency quoted from an internal letter.
For the locations in Germany, where Apple operates a research center in Munich, among other things, there are still no published specifications.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
The other tech giants Google, Microsoft and the Facebook parent company Meta Platforms had previously issued similar plans. It sounds paradoxical: The industry that has benefited the most from the home office boom during the pandemic is pushing its employees back to the company desk. There is already dissatisfaction with the procedure among the workforce.
The ring-shaped company headquarters of the Apple group is said to have cost five billion euros.
(Photo: imago/ZUMA Press)
For example, a mother who is walking her son in a playground in downtown San Francisco. The logo of a well-known tech company is emblazoned on her jacket. While the child climbs onto a climbing frame, she vents her displeasure. The plans for the office work are no longer up to date.
Even when the corporations reordered employees last summer, some of their colleagues simply resigned. That could happen again now. The topic is very sensitive, however, and she definitely doesn’t want her name to appear in an article – the name of her company shouldn’t be mentioned either.
Studies show the benefits of being present
Already last year there were major conflicts between the management of large tech companies and their workforce over rules for office work. Google caused outrage in August with a plan to pay US employees less to work from home if they live in a place with a particularly low cost of living.
It was also unusual for Apple that the conflict was carried out in public, while internal matters rarely leak out. In a letter of complaint, employees had accused the group management of having decoupled from the concerns of the workforce.
The Internet company had caused outrage with the plan to pay less for US employees working from home if they live in a place with a particularly low cost of living.
(Photo: AFP)
In fact, studies show that face-to-face exchange is superior to digital communication channels – “especially when creativity and problem-solving are required at work,” says Hannes Zacher, industrial psychologist at the University of Leipzig. Nevertheless, it makes sense “not to order employees completely back to the office, but to enable mobile working on a few days per week”.
Mobile working has many advantages for employee satisfaction and motivation. I’m thinking here, for example, of avoiding long commutes, working in a concentrated and undisturbed manner on reports or presentations at home, and generally greater freedom of decision than in the office,” says Zacher.
Amazon and Twitter: Generous home office regulations for office workers
Other companies in Silicon Valley therefore see the situation as an opportunity. The new Twitter boss Parag Agrawal deliberately opposes an obligation to return. All offices would reopen on March 15 and business trips would also be allowed again. But nobody is pushed or asked to work in the company. “You can work where you feel most productive and creative,” Agrawal wrote to staff.
However, the head of the company also conceded: “Distributed work will be much, much more difficult.” Everyone knows the problems when some colleagues sit in the conference room, but others take part virtually. But together we will solve these challenges.
At Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy is relatively open, at least to his office workers. Each of them can decide where they want to work – as long as their work allows it. “With a company of our size, there is no solution that fits well for all teams,” said Jassy.
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom assumes that corporations worldwide will offer home offices in the long term. “Remote work is here to stay — albeit not as a full-time model and not for everyone,” says the researcher, who surveyed more than 30,000 working-age Americans.
He estimates that around 50 percent of all employees in western industrialized countries will regularly work from home one or two days a week even after the pandemic. The other half does jobs that cannot easily be done remotely.
Bloom’s research shows that it’s best for companies or executives to set fixed days when everyone is in the office or working from home. Otherwise, there are career advantages for those who come to the office frequently, “simply because they are more visible than someone who prefers to work at home because of their living situation or family situation,” says Bloom. Giving people the choice is “not necessarily the best idea” when it comes to working from home.
Even in the tech scene, not all specialists want to work from home in the long term. Ellen Pao, former head of the platform Reddit, now leads the group “Project Include”, which campaigns for a fairer working world. Surveys she initiated revealed numerous problems when working from home.
According to this, around two-thirds of the skilled workers surveyed in the USA worked significantly longer. Mental health problems have also increased and less than half of those surveyed assume that their employers are responding adequately to the problems. For Pao, however, the answer is not office duty, but better organization of work from home.
More: Home office in the pandemic: fear of falling back into old gender roles.