Do Employees Think They Have Too Much Power Now?

The pandemic changed more than the issue of health and crisis. It changed the way life was done now due to isolation at home. One of the big effects was the way that business was forced to change.

Out of office

Apple employees who work in the Santa Clara County California site have a deadline to be back in the office in September. They are expected to be in the office at least 3 times a week.

(See the story reported here)

Apple’s latest plan is in-house days will be Tuesday and Thursday. The third day will be determined by the manager and team the worker is in.

Butting heads

Over 75 percent of the Apple employees are protesting and resisting. They claim they are more efficient and productive working from home. The issue with their claim is that it may not be true. It was found employees were “padding” their hours with meaningless tasks that were not relevant.

Apple wants everyone back in the office because of the type of industry they are in. There are certain meetings, demos, and other tasks that need to be in person to be truly productive. Zoom meetings do not fulfill that need.

I have to agree with Apple

Apple is not being unreasonable. I worked as a software developer for over 40 years now. I have been employed by various companies and went independent at one time.

We needed to be in the office to interact with coworkers on issues of design questions and technical issues that occur. Also, Apple has hardware products and you must have people on site.

With technology, interaction in the office is a high priority. With software development, you might be having an issue with the coding you are creating. Maybe something is not working the way you thought it would and would ask someone to look at the code.

You would look over to ask for help from the people around you and get immediate help. At home, you have to call or email someone. They may not be available right away, but even if they are available they would need to log into your computer to see the problem. All time-wasting procedures.

New employees need in-person contact

When you are starting out in a new company, experienced or not, you interact with others in your group. You may also interact with other departments. This is critical to get to know the people and know the structure.

If you don’t have the benefit of face-to-face contact, you will take longer to integrate into the company. If you have one problem, you may not know who to go to or you may have to contact a person off-site.

You also lose what is known as the “work culture”. What is the overall pace and “personality” of the company? You lose the culture as everyone is isolated and missing human contact. Even though you are there to work in the office, there is a level of friendliness that comes from daily contact.

Workers not realizing when something is good

During the last 10 years or so, communication through computers became more sophisticated. I have always worked in “software houses” which are companies that develop products and services used by others. Apple is one example of that type of business.

All the companies I worked for developed software used by mail order and eCommerce companies. The software ran the entire company from inventory, to sales, to shipping, payments, etc.

We would come up with plans on trying to have the company adopt a 4-day work week. You would work 10-hour days to make the required 40 hours. This would benefit customers in different time zones around the country.

The permanent in-house days would be Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Then you would go by seniority on which day you would come in. If Mondays were chosen by the first people, then the other workers would have to come in the other day, say Friday.

The resistance pre-pandemic

Companies had the mentality that workers would goof off at home without anyone watching them. Even though you knew how productive the person was by the work they accomplished, the feeling was still no trust.

The second part of the resistance was the company was afraid they would be losing time the employees put in each week. The 4-day work week would give the company 40 hours.

But they would lose the extra time each day that workers may have to do before leaving. So they might get 40 – 50 hours per week from an employee and they did not want to lose that.

You may get to the point where you may be replaced

Workers should be happy with the type of deal that Apple was offering. Before the pandemic, most companies were not willing to have any type of work from home offer.