An internal survey at Apple shows that a huge majority of the company’s employees want the opportunity to work remotely in the future.
The survey, reported by The Verge, was conducted in early June. Of the 1,749 respondents, almost 90% said they “strongly agree” with the statement “location-flexible working options are a very important issue to me”.
About 58.5% of respondents said they were worried that colleagues would leave their jobs as a result of inflexible working conditions. About 36.7% said they were worried they would leave the company for the same reason.
It’s worth pointing out that the survey was not officially sanctioned – it was simply sent round on Slack by employees – and the sample size is relatively small to draw significant conclusions: those 1,749 respondents represent only around 1.2% of the 147,000 Apple employees around the world. It may also have been self-selecting to a degree, since those with a strong opinion about remote working would presumably have been more likely to respond.
The results of the survey were sent to CEO Tim Cook and HR manager Deirdre O’Brien on 14 June. It’s unclear at this point what effect the survey will have on their thinking: so far Cook has stuck closely to the plan to have Apple employees return to the office three days a week starting in September, despite resistance to the plan within the company.
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation and additional reporting by David Price.