After telling employees they had to be in the office three days a week beginning May 23, Apple softened its position; it will continue a two-day-per-week office mandate as official hybrid policy. An Apple employee group said the change doesn’t go far enough.
Apple told employees today it will delay a plan to require them to come back to the office a least three days a week amid surging COVID-19 cases. The company had planned to require workers to return to the office thrice weekly by May 23, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. Apple said the requirement is being delayed for “the time being” and didn’t provide a new implementation date; it still expects workers in the office two days a week. The company also re-instituted a mask mandate for employees at Apple Stores, but is not requiring customers do the same. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Apple employees had previously threatened to quit over Apple’s policy, which is among the more strict return-to-work policies among big tech firms. Earlier this month, a group calling itself Apple Together published an open letter to Apple executives calling on them to change the company’s hybrid work policy. Among other grievances, the letter called the company’s office requirement as showing “almost no flexibility at all.”
In a Twitter post today, Apple Together wrote: “Apple‘s inflexible remote-work policy has forced workers to choose between their health, the lives they’ve painstakingly built over the past 2 years, and their jobs.
