In 2022, people will begin to return to their old ways of living and working as different policies are gradually relaxed around the world. Over the past two years, many companies have had to implement remote work in a short period of time and have learned how to effectively implement a hybrid work model, which means remote work and office work at the same time, to ensure employee safety while reducing the impact of COVID-19 on business operations. As the epidemic recedes, is hybrid working still the way to go? Silicon Valley now appears to be an important indicator.
Apple Inc. ended its two-year work-from-home policy during the COVID-19 pandemic on April 11, and its employees began returning to the office today. While many technology companies have offered some employees the option to work from home permanently, Apple is not one of them. She made it clear that employees will eventually need to return to work in the office.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said,
For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other.
Tim Cook
Even though Apple Inc. did not force its employees to return to full normalcy immediately and return to the office five days a week, but rather adopted a gradual return strategy and a mixed work policy, many Apple employees were quite upset.
Many Apple employees did return to the office, but they only went back to see old friends and then handed in their resignations to find another job, Silicon Valley engineer Lu Yu said on a social media platform. Many of them are already used to working from home and don’t want to go back to the days when they spent a lot of time in traffic, preferring to find a new company where they can work from home permanently. High salaries and good jobs, and even Silicon Valley-style benefits, are no longer the compensation for long commutes.
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, many companies would not have considered working from home because there was no incentive to do so, and they were concerned that it would change the communication and synergy between teams and affect productivity. However, the hybrid work pattern that companies had to implement during the epidemic indirectly proved that many companies’ productivity would not be significantly affected by measures such as working from home.
As a result, not only do employees have a stronger reason to continue to work from home, saving a lot of commuting time and reducing expenses by choosing accommodation far away from the city, but companies also need to strike a balance between retaining talent and maintaining performance by implementing a hybrid work model that allows employees to choose to work from home while also returning to the company regularly to maintain teamwork and performance.
ONES Software now has a dedicated page to introduce a series of smart office measures to help you solve problems and overcome the epidemic. You may wish to go to https://ones.software/covid-19/ for further reference.
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