Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, told his global workforce of 137,000 employees that they’d have to return to the office beginning early September. It's expected that employees will spend about three days a week at the office and the other two at home or remotely.  

Not everyone was happy with this decision. In an open letter to Cook, about eighty employees of Apple, according to reporting by the Verge, voiced their displeasure in being told to return to work saying “we feel like the current policy is not sufficient in addressing many of our needs.” The letter pointed out that workers delivered “the same quality of products and services that Apple is known for, all while working almost completely remotely.” 

The future of work will see battles between companies and their employees. CEOs may contend that it is easier to manage people if they’re all herded into one or several central locations. The employees have a different agenda. They want to have a work and life balance. A two hour round trip commute becomes debilitating over time. After spending quality time with loved ones, being responsible for where and when they work, it's hard to comprehend losing this autonomy.

There was concern for losing talent due to the requirement of going back to an office. “Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit,” and it forces people “to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple.”  

The employees who don’t want to return to an office setting are part of a larger dissenting movement. According to a recent survey by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News,  nearly 40% of respondents said they’d consider quitting their jobs if they weren’t offered remote work flexibility.  

“Over the last year we often felt not just unheard, but at times actively ignored. Messages like, ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office,’ with no messaging acknowledging that there are directly contradictory feelings amongst us feels dismissive and invalidating” the letter said. 

There have been a few high-profile instances of CEOs being a little too heavy handed in their approach. WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani’s attempt to rally a return-to-the-office campaign came across as cringey and tone-deaf. Mathrani intimated that the best, brightest and most motivated people will go back to the office. Losers, however, will stay at home.  “Those who are uberly engaged with the company want to go to the office two-thirds of the time, at least,” and  “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home,” he said at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival. He added that “People are happier when they come to work,” and “The bigger issue is do you come to work five days a week or do you come to work three days a week? That’s the bigger issue. There’s no issue of not coming to a common place.”

Cathay Merrill, The CEO of Washington, D.C.-based magazine, the Washingtonian, wrote a tone-deaf op-ed piece for The Washington Post, “While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like.” She ominously said “If the employee is rarely around,” the office then there is a “strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.”  Merrill seemingly threatened that if her staff didn’t return to the office they’d run the risk of being demoted and losing their full time, permanent employment status. “Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics,” wrote Merrill, indicating a not-so-subtle threat to their livelihoods.

The participants in the missive claim that “It feels like there is a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote / location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees.” The dissenting employees  assert that “we have succeeded not despite working from home, but in large part because of being able to work outside the office. The last year has felt like we have truly been able to do the best work of our lives for the first time, unconstrained by the challenges that daily commutes to offices and in-person co-located offices themselves inevitably impose; all while still being able to take better care of ourselves and the people around us.”

In the last few months, we have seen a large number of top corporations issue their plans. The consensus, including the likes of Microsoft and Google, coalesced around a flexible hybrid model of having workers in the office for two or three days a week, similar to what Apple announced.

On the other side of the spectrum, top-tier investment banks Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, along with Netflix, required all of their workers to return to their respective offices.  McKinsey, the large management consulting firm said that a survey of  corporate executives shows that “nine out of ten organizations will be combining remote and on-site working.” There are some outliers, like Spotify and Twitter, that will allow their people to work remotely “forever.”  

The participants in the letter say that the following “is not a petition, though it may resemble one,” and “is a plea: let’s work together to truly welcome everyone forward.”

• We are formally requesting that Apple considers remote and location-flexible work decisions to be as autonomous for a team to decide as are hiring decisions.
• We are formally requesting a company-wide recurring short survey with a clearly structured and transparent communication / feedback process at the company-wide level, organization-wide level, and team-wide level, covering topics listed below.
• We are formally requesting a question about employee churn due to remote work be added to exit interviews.
• We are formally requesting a transparent, clear plan of action to accommodate disabilities via onsite, offsite, remote, hybrid, or otherwise location-flexible work.
• We are formally requesting insight into the environmental impact of returning to onsite in-person work, and how permanent remote-and-location-flexibility could offset that impact.

This may be bigger than Apple. Blind, an app that provides a platform for anonymous career-related posts, conducted a survey of employees at top-tier companies, including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. The survey asked workers if they’d prefer to permanently work from home rather than get a $30,000-a-year raise.  

The survey of 3,000 employees at these well-respected companies overwhelmingly—64%—responded that they wanted to continue staying at home, thank you very much. Only two companies out of the 45 sampled, JPMorgan and Qualcomm, had a higher percentage of their staff go for the $30,000 option. 

According to the study’s findings, “About 64% of Amazon workers who answered the question preferred permanent work from home, as well as 62% of Microsoft employees and 67% of Google employees. Apple employees would rather take permanent work from home over $30,000 were at 69%, and Salesforce employees at 76%.”

To some, this may sound surprising. These corporations are held in high esteem, and they are exceedingly hard to get into. People aspire to work at these organizations. You’d think that since they worked so hard in school and in the workforce to get into these good jobs with high-status companies with the potential to quickly advance, they’d happily go back to the office. From survey, that’s not the case.

The response from Apple workers, along with surveys and public sentiment, shows a strong desire by a significant percentage of employees who vehemently want to remain working remotely.