Apple proposes Cupertino employees work from home during coronavirus outbreak
Employees at Apple's California campuses are told to work from home as an "extra precaution" during the ongoing outbreak of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.
Apple has begun encouraging it's Apple Park and Infinite Loop-based employees to work from home if possible, attempting to prevent unnecessary spread of COVID-19, according to Business Insider.
Apple has not made a public statement regarding the move, so it's not clear what percentage of employees would be telecommuting for the time being. Currently, it is believed that this is only a suggestion rather than a requirement.
The report comes shortly after Thursday's announcement from the Santa Clara public health department warning about the risks of large public gatherings. As COVID-19 spreads in the United States, Apple's WWDC is likely in jeopardy.
Specifically, companies operating in the county are asked to suspend nonessential employee travel, minimize close employee contact at work, cancel large meetings and conferences, and urge employees to stay home when they are sick, among other measures.
Apple is taking additional steps to curb potential COVID-19 fallout and has restricted employee travel to Italy and South Korea. The company also withdrew from SXSW 2020, where it planned to premiere three Apple TV+ originals.
Apple has begun encouraging it's Apple Park and Infinite Loop-based employees to work from home if possible, attempting to prevent unnecessary spread of COVID-19, according to Business Insider.
Apple has not made a public statement regarding the move, so it's not clear what percentage of employees would be telecommuting for the time being. Currently, it is believed that this is only a suggestion rather than a requirement.
The report comes shortly after Thursday's announcement from the Santa Clara public health department warning about the risks of large public gatherings. As COVID-19 spreads in the United States, Apple's WWDC is likely in jeopardy.
Specifically, companies operating in the county are asked to suspend nonessential employee travel, minimize close employee contact at work, cancel large meetings and conferences, and urge employees to stay home when they are sick, among other measures.
Apple is taking additional steps to curb potential COVID-19 fallout and has restricted employee travel to Italy and South Korea. The company also withdrew from SXSW 2020, where it planned to premiere three Apple TV+ originals.
Comments
If there is a silver lining to this, it's for corporate America to further embrace telecommute. Not just for disease prevention, but to ease the traffic and housing problems in urban areas. So many of us are knowledge workers and don't need to be in the office every day. (My current contract is one which allows me to work full-time remotely. In almost 5 years I've never met or even seen my boss; our team works via email, phone, and IM).
For the larger team that process claims of assistance, the database and interface is old. I have driven a few upgrades as budget allows over the last five years, but workflow will has to change quite significantly, and some of the accountability requirements loosened considerably if the processing is to be totally sans paper at remote locations. An option is to have an earnest young courier trucking around wads of peoples’ personal details about, but that is a security issue, let alone the personal contact wrecks the whole reason for working from home in the first place. We are running WFH tests over the next two weeks, but will have to get auditor sign off on the workflow and payment systems.
And that is before you start on the myriad WH&S issues HR (and no doubt lawyers) can dream up.
I think the burden on companies that support widespread working-from-home (WFH) is greater than it is for the employees. Companies sacrifice many economies of scale and informal collaboration benefits when they invest gobs of money into building facilities to bring people together and nobody shows up to reap the benefits. In my experience the human and technical communication costs go up significantly and you have to revisit a lot of basic infrastructure decisions that were made before WFH was an option. For example, centralized source code control systems like Clearcase become more difficult and costly to manage when you have many remote users and limited WAN bandwidth. If you'd planned ahead for WFH maybe Git would have been a wiser choice.
WFH is neither inherently good nor bad. The only issue is when there's a big mismatch between the executional model that you designed your organization to use and the one that you are forced to use. If you've been deeply immersed in highly distributed development, WFH is not a big deal at all because you've already paid for and implemented most of the infrastructure changes needed to make it work well. But as I mentioned earlier, individual productivity should not be affected by where you do your work as lomg as you have everything that you need available to you to do your job. For many organizations, including ones that I've been heavily invlved with, WFH is only one variation of several non-incidental working environments that many technical people have to deal with. There's also working remotely at a customer site, working onboard ships at sea, working inside factories during start-up, working in plants during production operations, working offsite as part of a working group, etc. In none of these cases is there a "supervisor" looking over your shoulder to make sure you're doing your job. It's up to you to deliver regardless of your physical work location.
While I’m not above 50 (close!) I do fall into a higher-risk category, so I’m concerned: more concerned about timing because right now I’m scheduled for surgery Tuesday to get 4 kidney stones removed, while dealing with an infection from that and bleeding from the kidney, so I really can’t afford to wait.
I like the camaraderie of working with people I like. If you don't like the people you work with, get a new job.
I found working from home was that there is more pressure to do work at any waking hour, as well as on weekends. My last job, when I closed my office door, I was done with work for the day. Also, I never let the IT department configure my personal phone for work e-mail. They offered to buy me phones and cover my cellular service; I politely refused that as well.
I liked the work-home separation when I worked in a corporate setting.
Today, I work at home but I work for myself.
In litigious countries, HR has every right to be careful.