Apple’s employee letter is less effective because it’s a rambling mess

In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Apple employees that starting in the fall, they’d need to return to the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Many employees signed a rambling and disjointed 1300-word letter of protest. I’ll show how it could be better.

The employee plea isn’t effective

Consider a ROAM analysis of the purpose of this letter:

• Readers: Apple management, as well as a broader public interested in Apple policies.
• Objective: Make it clear that employees feel they can be more productive with more flexible policies on where they work.
• Action: Get Apple management to roll back the mandate for three days in the office.
• iMpression: Apple employees are thoughtful on this issue and their plea deserves respect.

To accomplish this goal, the letter needs to state its goals up front, provide evidence for those goals, and then make a specific set of suggestions. Instead, this letter jumps all over the place, undermining its own contention that the employees are clear about what they want and why.

Here is the original letter with commentary from me:

Dear Tim and Executive Leadership,

Thank you for your thoughtful considerations on a hybrid approach to returning to office work, and for sharing it with all of us early this week. We appreciate your efforts in navigating what has been undeniably an incredibly difficult time for everyone around the world, and doing so for over one hundred thousand people. We are certain you have more plans than were shared on Wednesday, but are following Apple’s time-honored tradition of only announcing things when they are ready. However, we feel like the current policy is not sufficient in addressing many of our needs, so we want to take some time to explain ourselves.

This is respectful. But it fails to get directly to the point.

This past year has been an unprecedented challenge for our company; we had to learn how to deliver the same quality of products and services that Apple is known for, all while working almost completely remotely. We did so, achieving another record-setting year. We found a way for everyone to support each other and succeed in a completely new way of working together — from locations we were able to choose at our own discretion (often at home).

However, we would like to take the opportunity to communicate a growing concern among our colleagues. That Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit. Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have 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. This is a decision none of us take lightly, and a decision many would prefer not to have to make. These concerns are largely what prompted us to advocate for changes to these policies, and data collected will reflect those concerns.

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. Not only do many of us already feel well-connected with our colleagues worldwide, but better-connected now than ever. We’ve come to look forward to working as we are now, without the daily need to return to the office. 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.

For many of us at Apple, 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.

Look at the rambling organization here. First “we did great,” then “we need a change in policy,” then “you don’t listen,” then “we did great.” This makes the employees sound like complainers who alternate between crowing and whining. The points are fine; the order is counterproductive.

Looking around the corner, we believe the future of work will be significantly more location and timezone flexible. In fact, we are already a distributed company with offices all over the world and across many different timezones. Apple’s organizational hierarchy lends itself towards offices that often follow the same structure, wherein people in the same organization are more likely to be co-located in an office. At the same time, we strongly encourage cross-functional, cross-organization collaboration, and our organization’s many horizontal teams reflect this. Such collaboration is widely celebrated across our organization, and arguably leads us to our best results — it’s one of the things that makes Apple, Apple. However, orgs are rarely co-located within walking distance, let alone in the same building, meaning our best collaboration has always required remote communication with teams in other offices and across timezones, since long before the pandemic. We encourage distributed work from our business partners, and we’ve been a remote-communication necessary company for some time, a vision of the future that Steve Jobs himself predicated in an interview from 1990. This may explain how mandatory out-of-office work enabled tearing down cross-functional communication barriers to deliver even better results.

This is a logical argument that belongs much earlier in the letter, before the whining.

Almost all of us have worked fully remote for over a year now, though the experience arguably would have been better less one pandemic. We have developed two major versions of all our operating systems, organized two full WWDCs, introduced numerous new products, transitioned to our own chipsets, and supported our customers with the same level of care as before. We have already piloted location-flexible work the last 15 months under much more extreme conditions and we were very successful in doing so, finding the following benefits of remote and location-flexible work for a large number of our colleagues:

Diversity and Inclusion in Retention and Hiring

Tearing Down Previously Existing Communication Barriers

Better Work Life Balance

Better Integration of Existing Remote / Location-Flexible Workers

Reduced Spread of Pathogens

Now we’re back to crowing about what the employees did.

We ask for your support in enabling those who want to work remotely / in location-flexible ways to continue to do so, letting everyone figure out which work setup works best for them, their team, and their role — be it in one of our offices, from home, or a hybrid solution. We are living proof that there is no one-size-fits-all policy for people. For Inclusion and Diversity to work, we have to recognize how different we all are, and with those differences, come different needs and different ways to thrive. We feel that Apple has both the responsibility to recognize these differences, as well as the capability to fully embrace them. Officially enabling individual management chains and individual teams to make decisions that work best for their teams roles, individuals, and needs — and having that be the official stated policy rather than the rare individual exceptions — would alleviate the concerns and reservations many of us currently have.

We understand that inertia is real and that change is difficult to achieve. The pandemic forcing us to work from home has given us a unique opportunity. Most of the change has already happened, remote/location-flexible work is currently the “new normal,” we just need to make sure we make the best of it now. We believe that Apple has the ability to be a leader in this realm, not by declaring ‘everyone just work from home for forever,’ as some other companies have done, but by declaring an official broad paradigm policy, that allows individual leaders to make decisions that will enable their teams to do the best work of their lives. We strongly believe this is the ideal moment to “burn the boats” — to boldly declare ‘yes this can be done, and done successfully, because there is no other choice for the future.’

We have gathered some of our requests and action items to help continue the conversation and make sure everyone is heard.

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.

Finally, we get to learn what the workers want. This belongs earlier. Leaving this until the end projects weakness.

We have great respect for Apple and its leadership; we strongly believe in the Innovation and Thinking Differently (from “the way things have always been done” and “industry standards”) that are part of Apple’s DNA. We all wish to continue to “bleed six colors” at Apple itself and not elsewhere. At Apple, our most important resource, our soul, is our people, and we believe that ensuring we are all heard, represented, and validated is how we continue to defend and protect that precious sentiment.

This is not a petition, though it may resemble one. This is a plea: let’s work together to truly welcome everyone forward.

As an ending, this is fine. But it really sounds like begging. It speaks to employees whose organization has exerted absolute power of them, and their unwillingness to stand up for themselves.

How could the letter be better?

I’ve rewritten the Apple employee letter. The result is intended to be shorter (1300 words reduced to 900), better organized, and clearer about what they want. Everything in my version was in the original.

Dear Tim and Executive Leadership,

We appreciate your efforts in navigating what has been undeniably an incredibly difficult time for everyone around the world, and doing so for over one hundred thousand people. But it’s time to consider a more flexible response as we return to work. While we know these decisions are difficult, we believe the new plan ignores the improvements and changes we’ve all made in the last year, and how well we’ve operated in a mostly remote environment.

We ask for your support in enabling those who want to work remotely or in location-flexible ways to continue to do so, letting everyone figure out which work setup works best for them, their team, and their role — be it in one of our offices, from home, or a hybrid solution. We are living proof that there is no one-size-fits-all policy for people. To be clear, we are asking for the following:

– We should conduct a company-wide recurring short survey about remote work, with a clearly structured and transparent communication / feedback process at the company-wide level, organization-wide level, and team-wide level so we can all review the results.

– Apple should allow teams to make their own remote and location-flexible work decisions.

– Exit interviews should include a question about whether remote work policies contributed to employees leaving.

– We need a transparent, clear plan of action to accommodate disabilities via onsite, offsite, remote, hybrid, or otherwise location-flexible work.

– We should analyze the environmental impact of returning to onsite in-person work, and how permanent remote-and-location-flexibility could offset that impact.

Why ask for these changes? Because we as a company and as employees have been extraordinarily productive in a remote work environment over the past year, and we’d like to maintain that productivity.

This past year has been an unprecedented challenge for our company; we had to learn how to deliver the same quality of products and services that Apple is known for, all while working almost completely remotely. For many of us at Apple, 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.

We found a way for everyone to support each other and succeed in a completely new way of working together — from locations we were able to choose at our own discretion (often at home). We achieved another record-setting year, including developing two major versions of all our operating systems, organizing two full WWDCs, introducing numerous new products, transitioning to our own chipsets, and supporting our customers with the same level of care as before. We have already piloted location-flexible work the last 15 months under much more extreme conditions and we were very successful in doing so. The benefits included improving diversity, communication, work-life balance, and integration with remote workers.

We believe the future of work will be significantly more location and timezone flexible. In fact, we are already a distributed company with offices all over the world and across many different timezones. Apple encourages cross-functional, cross-organization collaboration, which leads us to our best results — it’s one of the things that makes Apple, Apple. However, orgs are rarely co-located within walking distance, let alone in the same building, meaning our best collaboration has always required remote communication with teams in other offices and across timezones, since long before the pandemic.

Please listen closely. Many of us have felt ignored over the past year, with messages like ‘we know many of you are eager to reconnect in person with your colleagues back in the office’ that don’t account for the positive changes that have come from our new remote working methods.

We understand that inertia is real and that change is difficult to achieve. The pandemic forcing us to work from home has given us a unique opportunity. Most of the change has already happened, remote/location-flexible work is currently the “new normal,” we just need to make sure we make the best of it now. We believe that Apple has the ability to be a leader in this realm, not by declaring ‘everyone just work from home for forever,’ as some other companies have done, but by declaring an official broad paradigm policy, that allows individual leaders to make decisions that will enable their teams to do the best work of their lives. We strongly believe this is the ideal moment to “burn the boats” — to boldly declare ‘yes this can be done, and done successfully, because there is no other choice for the future.’

We have great respect for Apple and its leadership; we strongly believe in the Innovation and Thinking Differently (from “the way things have always been done” and “industry standards”) that are part of Apple’s DNA. At Apple, our most important resource, our soul, is our people, and we believe that ensuring we are all heard, represented, and validated is how we continue to defend and protect that precious sentiment.

Please take these concerns seriously. We look forward to your response.

I don’t know if this letter would be more effective in achieving change than the original. But it certainly would be better at expressing employees’ desires in a more direct, more organized, clearer, and less whiny way.