“Apple employees are voicing growing discontent for the workplace under boss Tim Cook, according to employee surveys ranking the top 100 CEOs,” David Pierini writes for Cult of Mac. “Cook’s spot on Glassdoor’s annual list was 96, down from 53 a year ago in what was the biggest fall for a tech CEO on the list.”
“Glassdoor’s ranking of Cook was based on 12,054 Apple employee reviews,” Pierini writes. “There are a number of reoccurring answers in the Pros and Cons categories and not everyone saw the work culture in the same way.”
“There were 903 reviewers who griped about work-life balance, but 213 others said work-life balance was great,” Pierini writes. “One former or anonymous employee with more than five years with Apple had a short but blunt list of Cons that read: ‘No work life balance. Management does not care if you’re burnt out. Compared to other companies, the pay is below average.’ Asked what advice the employee would have for management, the employee said, ‘Some re-training might be in order because clearly, you have forgotten how to treat people.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in January 2015 in an open letter to Tim Cook:
We occasionally hear things about the company from Apple employees.
Some of those things lead us to wonder if perhaps you should rethink some aspects of the culture at Apple? Specifically, what really should constitute a badge of honor at Apple? Working all day, all weekend and all night in order to squat out iOS 8.0.1 and then have to turn around and do it all over again, in a panic, to get iOS 8.0.2 out the door in order to clean up the mess? Or taking the time necessary to do the job correctly the first time?
People with proper sleep and lower stress levels do better work. Many major medical studies prove these facts. Shouldn’t quality, not quantity, of hours worked be the utmost badge of honor at Apple?
Working long hours simply for the sake of working long hours is counterproductive. It really doesn’t prove anything except that you have no life and that, despite all of their work on Apple Watch, Apple executives still do not understand basic human health requirements and are incapable of properly staffing their departments so that they can function without requiring sleep-deprived, mistake-prone employees who feel that it’s a job requirement to be able to reply to emails from managers at 2:00 am. That’s idiocy.
Driving too hard, too fast, and for too long leads to accidents.
We speak from experience, albeit at a far, far smaller level than yours. We’ve tried and been exposed to several methods as both managers and employees in the television, financial, and online media industries. Regardless of the size of your department or company, people are people. You can push people to a point that’s very productive, but when you exceed that point, it’s all downhill for everyone involved. It’s not a badge of honor. It’s not an “I love this company!” statement. It’s simply mismanagement. It’s verifiably unhealthy and it leads directly to diminished quality, increased turnover, and productivity declines. And customer satisfaction ultimately suffers. Hence this letter.
SEE ALSO:
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015