Apple has a brilliantly simple, yet highly effective strategy to beat employee burnout — despite its fast-paced and demanding hustle culture that would send many running for the hills.
What Apple is doing that employers often overlook is rewarding hard-working employees. Not with more money, a bigger office or Steve Jobs’ favorite employee perk [Apple Park’s 10,000-square-foot fitness center]. But the best perk of all that keeps people happy to hustle: freedom, according to a current employee, and recent Glassdoor reviews seem to attest.
Historically, Apple had earned a reputation for being a tough workplace with little work-life balance. But following much return-to-office pushback, it is prioritizing flexibility and freedom for those who prove they put in the work.
Apple’s approach incentivizes productivity while building a positive hustle culture — and staff happiness. It creates a “cushy” job where staff have some degree of freedom to do what they want when they want.
That is, if they get their work done.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote way 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.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
“People with proper sleep and lower stress levels do better work.”
“Working long hours simply for the sake of working long hours is counterproductive.”
“…a job requirement to be able to reply to emails from managers at 2:00 am.”
Amazingly, many organizations don’t understand these concepts. They talk about “creating margins” but never actually allow employees to do just that.
Well Said MDN!
I don’t think has a healthy culture when manager push for working long hours and just have to “prove” they “get the job done”. This is not a culture where people perform and shine. Not a place where I would want to work.
Sounds nice if you work in the main office, how many apple employees actually have access to these amenities?