Apple employee group rejects planned return to the office
There's no surprise that some large/small subset of employees want to be full-remote. If you're someone who hates the commute, has relocated, or just plain don't want to be around people - going back to the office feels like all downside from your perspective.If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much.Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.