Back to School at Apple Headquarters: Three Days on Location from September

In September, Santa Clara Valley employees will begin returning to offices just three days a week as part of a pilot program.

After several false starts, Apple finally has a concrete and definitive date for the resumption of the hybrid working scheme. The US tech giant is asking employees working out of its Santa Clara Valley offices to show up three days a week starting September 5, according to Bloomberg and The Verge.

In September, Santa Clara Valley employees will begin returning to their offices.

They must come every Tuesday, every Thursday and the third day determined by their own team. In a letter sent to employees, Craig Federighi, VP of Software Engineering, encouraged them to share their choice of this third day with their managers to help them make a decision.

Just three days a week

Apple has begun rolling out a hybrid work system that will require employees to come into the office multiple days a week from June 2021. However, at the time, the Cupertino company wanted them to come every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. The company, which holds in high regard what Tim Cook calls “the irreplaceable benefits of face-to-face collaboration,”has since made several attempts to implement such a hybrid workweek, but has had no choice but to delay several times its projects due to for the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.

A few months ago she was still trying to do it, it was May 23rd. But employees criticized the measure, seeing it as a directive “dictated by fear”—“fear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control”—one could read in part in their open letter. The Cupertino-based company even lost Ian Goodfellow, its head of machine learning and one of the greatest experts in the field, to this policy. Finally, the Apple brand reversed its decision and softened its stance by launching a pilot program requiring certain employees to come to work only two days a week.

As part of the pilot program

Today, it seems that nothing is stopping Apple from bringing its employees back into its walls. “September 5th marks the true departure of our hybrid work pilot from the Santa Clara Valley,” Craig Federighi wrote in a memo. However, as mentioned, this is just a driver. The company will draw the necessary conclusions in the coming months to prepare for the return of employees to offices at its other sites.