Apple CEO Tim Cook on work-from-home and virtual interactions

Apple CEO Tim Cook says he prefers in-person meetings.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has said that his company is trying to find a middle ground between working remotely and from office.

At the TIME100 Summit held earlier this week, Cook described the altered workplace rules as an experiment.

"We're running the mother of all experiments because we don't know," he said at the event.  "We're running a pilot and trying to find a place that makes the best of both of these worlds."

The Apple CEO also spoke about how mental health is in greater focus now.

"Mental health has become much more important in last couple years," Cook said at the TIME magazine event. "This is not only because of the pandemic but overhang of things going on in addition to the pandemic. I think the employer will increasingly take on more role in that. Earlier many were focused on physical health, now you have to focus on total."

Cook said he preferred in-person interactions. He added that virtual meetings were not inferior, just different.

Apple requires its employees to work from office two days a week. The company is among the many technology and finance corporations who are mandating that employees return to offices, amid a decline in COVID-19 cases.

Apple's return to office mandate had led one executive to quit the company.

Ian Goodfellow, who oversaw machine learning and artificial intelligence at Apple, left the company to join Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind unit in May, citing lack of flexibility.