- Salesforce has announced that it will offer three different ways to work in the future.
- The “flex” option will allow employees to come to the office up to three days a week.
- Other employees will work remotely full-time, while a small subset will arrive every day.
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Salesforce announced on Tuesday that its employees will have the option of working remotely full-time, even when it is safe to return to the office.
The new guidelines, which Salesforce is calling “Work From Anywhere”, offer employees three different options for how they will work in the future: flexible, completely remote and office based. Salesforce said the decision to offer new ways of working was based on employee welfare surveys that the company has been sending out since the pandemic began.
For employees who work with the “flexible” option, they will report to the office one to three days a week for more challenging tasks on video calls, such as team collaboration, client meetings or presentations. Salesforce said that the majority of its employees worldwide will have a flexible schedule.
Other employees will work entirely remotely – Salesforce said that this option would be reserved for those who do not live near one of the company’s offices or who work in functions that do not require being in a physical office.
Salesforce said that only a small subset of its 49,000 employees will work in the office four to five days a week.
“An immersive work space is no longer limited to a table in our towers; the 9:00 to 5:00 working day is over; and the employee experience involves more than ping-pong and snack tables,” Brent Hyder, president and Salesforce personnel director, wrote in a blog post announcing the change.
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Salesforce hopes the new options will help improve equity and diversity across the company – since employees will not be required to report to an office in locations like San Francisco or New York, Salesforce can expand recruitment to new locations .
A change in the way employees work will also mean a change in Salesforce’s physical offices. Salesforce has 19 offices in North America alone, including the recently completed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, a 1,070-foot tall skyscraper that cost $ 1.1 billion to build. Hyder wrote that from now on, the offices will be redesigned as “community centers” with collaboration and resting spaces instead of rows of tables.
Hyder did not say when employees can expect to return to the office, but noted that “managing the spread of COVID-19 carefully will remain critical for most of the year.” The company will also establish rules such as temperature scans before entering the building, facial coverings, deep cleaning, manual contact tracking and well-being statements at home.
Salesforce initially told employees that they could work from home until August 2021. But, like many other technology companies, their plans appear to have changed in the following months. Last year, when the company slowly reopened its 160 offices around the world, it created a more “sterile” and “hospital-like” environment, removing cheerful touches like baubles on tables and “huge jars of gummy bears. everywhere, “CEO Marc Benioff told The New York Times in June.
And at the beginning of the pandemic, Salesforce offered a 21-page manual, available to anyone who wanted it, on how to reopen office spaces safely. The plan included rethinking some of the materials inside the office, adding glass dividers and forcing social distance, even in elevators.
Now, with the vaccine slowly being distributed in the United States and around the world, Salesforce seems to be thinking about life after the virus: in a representation of how the company envisions a more community-oriented office, there are no boundaries or signs of social detachment, people chat in the halls and employees sit around a table to work – without a mask.