Tech giant Apple has started requiring its employees to return to the office after two years of remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The in-person work requirement has been finalized after months of delays.
The iPhone maker also called for a gradual implementation of in-person work but letting employees start going to the office one day per week and eventually increasing it to three days per week.
However, the sudden increase of COVID-19 cases in May has forced Apple to pause the rollout of its in-person work plan.
Apple Changes In-Person Work Plans
According to Bloomberg, due to the rise of COVID-19 cases these past few weeks, it is unlikely that Apple will implement the three days per week requirements anytime soon and may stick to the one-day per week plan for a while.
9to5Mac reported that Apple employees began returning to in-person work on April 11 after remote work since 2020 due to the pandemic.
The requirement was one day per week in person in the office, but some employees are now doing two days of in-person work per week as of May 4.
Apple's next step in this approach was to bring its employees back to the office three days a week on May 23.
The tech giant wants its employees to show up every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday while doing remote work the other days of the week.
But the company stopped short of implementing the requirement when the COVID-19 cases suddenly increased.
Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported that Apple fully implemented its return-to-office plan is "not imminent." This means that the employees will still work in person two days a week and work from home three days a week.
Apple believes that since more employees are testing positive for COVID-19, there is no reason to push ahead with a full implementation of its new work program.
However, Apple's policies can vary from team to team. Several teams inside the company have been working in person since mid-to-late 2020, while others have settled on more permanent and flexible remote working arrangements indefinitely.
Apple has faced criticism for forcing its employees to do in-person work, with the tech giant's policies being more restrictive than other Silicon Valley companies.
In-Person Requirement Has Led to Departure
According to The Verge, Apple's in-person requirement has led several employees to resign in hopes of looking for a new workplace that is more accepting of remote work.
Apple's director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, has departed the company over its return to work policy.
The tech giant hired Goodfellow after he departed Google in 2019. He then joined the company's Special Project Group as the director of machine learning.
Goodfellow spent six years at Google as its software engineering intern before he was promoted as a Senior Staff Research Scientist.
Referred to as helping develop general adversarial networks or GANs. It is a technology that can be used to detect fake media content, and it has become very important in recent years.
Related Article: Apple Employees Might Quit Their Job if the Company Denies Remote Work Requests As COVID-19 Vaccination Rolls Out
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Written by Sophie Webster
