Think about your self working at Apple. It’s April 2022. You’re being advised by the higher-ups that you just’ve received to return again to the workplace — by which I imply you’ve learn a Slack message in your laptop computer. You proceed your workday, pissed that your bosses don’t appear to grasp that you are able to do this job remotely.
Then any individual sends you a YouTube hyperlink to a nine-minute industrial for distant work, telling the story of a gaggle of people that stop their firm after being compelled to return to the workplace. The commercial is by Apple, which is at the moment telling you to return to the workplace. You punch your desk so exhausting that your screensaver deactivates.
It’s unusual that the businesses which have made a lot cash off distant work appear to be probably the most allergic to its prospects. Google, which accurately enables you to run an organization in a browser, has been forcing staff again to workplaces three days per week.
Meta, Apple and Google are business leaders, but they’re main their business backward — again to workplaces the place folks will do the identical factor they did at residence.
Meta, which has misplaced billions making an attempt to make us stay within the laptop, has additionally made folks return to the workplace. In studying virtually each remote-work article that has been printed for a yr for my analysis, I’ve but to discover a single compelling argument about why staff ought to return to the workplace.
“In-person collaboration” and “serendipity” are phrases that make sense should you stay in Narnia and consider in magical creatures. In actuality, workplace environments resemble our distant lives, solely with extra annoying conferences and the prospect to odor our co-workers’ lunch selections.
The tech business pretends to be disruptive, however is following a path solid by older firms like Goldman Sachs. How is it that Apple and Google, the businesses that successfully gave us the flexibility to distant work at scale, sound like they’re studying from a generic New York Instances anti-remote op-ed?
