It's easy to romanticize the workplaces of the companies with products we evangelize. You know the brands - Google, Starbucks, Wal-Mart and yes, Apple. Free backrubs, great compensation and great morale. What's not to like, right? It's got to be great working for the man in those cultures...
There's just this one little thing that serves as an equalizer. Just one little thing....
People can be nasty. And greedy.
Case in point. Apple is reported to have recently fired 800 of its employees for stealing. They were caught grabbing $100 rebates on the iPhones Apple had given them for free. So they get a free iPhone worth $500-$600, and then cash in the rebate coupon that was off-limits for employees. That's a no-no.
Human nature - it's ugly. Even in the cool cultures everybody wants to be a part of. Must have felt like just another job to those 800 employees when they made that decision. Makes you go hmmmmm.
Here's another question. It sounds like the presence of a rebate coupon wasn't addressed that clearly when the free employee offer was circulated. What would you have done as the VP of HR when someone runs a report and indicates that 800 of your employees cashed in the rebate? Do you make them pay it back and hit them with a final warning? Or fire them on the spot, as Apple is reported to have done?
Before you answer, here's another business snippet. Let's say Apple's cost per hire is a lean $1000 per hire. That's $800,000 out of the staffing kitty if you decide to fire them all...
What's makes the bigger statement to the employee base regarding what Apple stands for? The terms of 800 employees for theft at the risk of very poor PR, or the stellar ads you see every day (like the one below)from Apple?
Love the ads. The terms are probably more important in sending a message to the employee base.....
Yeah, Apple makes cool stuff but their policies can be really ugly. Wired ran an article last year highlighting the company and their "old school" employment structure and practices. There is a great, but old, posting on this blog, http://baceman007.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html, about an incident where Apple censored a private employee e-mail list by interpreting their NDA whatever way they saw fit. Steve Jobs is rumored to just fire people on elevators, etc. if he feels that they don't "get the Apple way." The real problem here is the existence of at-will employment, and therefore the lack of employment law to protect employees. There is little an employee can do when a big company like this decides to be stupid. Yes the rebate was confusing by the way. Yes I'm sure Apple released a document describing it to their overworked retail employees, but firing that many people over $100 bucks a head is just stupid. Dock their pay, reprimand them, etc. but it is very possible that the employees just didn't read the doc. Their fault, sure, but there's a good chance that it was an honest mistake and even if it wasn't Apple is paying their employees less and less every year when they hire them in, so I think Apple is saving enough money to overlook this issue. I'm not saying they should tolerate stealing, but we're not 100% sure that that happened here in every case. Still, when the economy is bad, companies treat these kind of employees however they want. Add to that the creepy Apple cult mentality and you end up with problems like this. Basically overreactions that more sane individuals would not jump to so readily. Still most corporations seem to be pretty insane when it comes to money... I don't know, I like the products, but this kind of stuff makes me not want to buy them. I use GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) for 90% of my work anyway, the machine is way easier to upgrade and support from a hardware standpoint than a Crapple, software wise it does almost everything I need and is easy to use, and I am 1 application away from not having to use Apple computers for multi-media production, but that's where they get you hooked.... If consumers would demand that all Applications run on Windows, one distro of Linux like Ubuntu, and OSX then they could really use what they want. It's the applications that keep people stuck with one machine or another. 80% of people don't even need to use MS or Apple. They just do for whatever reasons. Still as consumers if we're upset with these practices we can just not buy their products...
Posted by: itwatchdogct | January 28, 2010 at 03:08 PM
I should also add that I am not saying that stealing is ok. Sure it's tough to believe that the Apple employees didn't know that they were stealing after being given a free phone, but it was $100 (I think in store credit). People make mistakes. Hell Apple had to release 6 revisions to 10.5 before it didn't suck. I guess it's ok for Apple to make mistakes, just not their employees. The employees probably had 3 choices: don't take the free phone, take it and don't use it as a phone and don't sell it for x amount of time, or take it and subscribe with AT&T for 2 years which helped boost the initial numbers that led to the advertisements that made Apple and AT&T so much more money. Again, dock pay, reprimand, get rid of the worst, but don't just outright fire so many people.
Posted by: itwatchdogct | January 29, 2010 at 05:05 AM