- Salesforce has announced that it will offer three different ways to work forward.
- With the “flex” option, employees can enter the office up to three days a week.
- Other employees will work full-time remotely, while there is a small subset every day.
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Salesforce announced Tuesday that its employees will have the option to work full-time remotely, even if it is safe to return to the office.
The new guidelines, which Salesforce calls ‘Work From Anywhere’, offer employees three different options for how they will work going forward: flexible, fully remote and in the office. Salesforce said the decision to offer new ways of working was based on the well-being of the employees the company had sent since the start of the pandemic.
For employees working within the “flex” option, they will report to the office one to three days each week for tasks that are more difficult to do over video calls, such as team collaboration, customer meetings, or presentations. According to Salesforce, most of its employees worldwide will have a flexible schedule.
Other employees will work remotely – Salesforce said this option will be reserved for those who do not live near one of the company’s offices, or who work in roles that are not necessary to be in a physical office .
According to Salesforce, only a small portion of its 49,000 employees will work in the office four to five days a week.
“An immersed workspace is no longer confined to a desk in our towers; the workday from 9 to 5 is dead; and the work experience is about more than table tennis tables and snacks,” said Brent Hyder, president and headquarters at Salesforce, wrote in a blog post announcing the change.
Read more: Salesforce’s AI ethicist shares three ways to use technology when returning safely to the office
Salesforce expects the new options to help improve business equity and diversity. Since employees are not expected to report to an office in places like San Francisco or New York, Salesforce can broaden recruitment to new locations.
A change in the way employees work will also mean a change in the physical offices of Salesforce. Salesforce has 19 offices in North America alone, including the recently completed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, a 1,070-foot-tall skyscraper that costs $ 1.1 billion to build. Hyder wrote that the offices will be redesigned in the future as ‘community hubs’ with spaces for collaboration and break-out instead of rows of desks.
Hyder did not say when employees would be able to return to the office, but noted that “the distribution of COVID-19 will be carefully managed for most of the year.” The company will also set rules such as temperature screens before entering the building, face coverings, deep cleaning, manual contact detection and wellness at home.
Salesforce initially told employees they could work from home until August 2021. But like many other technology ventures, plans seem to have changed in the intervening months. As the company slowly began to reopen its 160 offices worldwide, it created a more “sterile” and “hospital-like” environment, removing frivolous touches such as trinkets on desks and “large pots of gummy bears everywhere”, Marc CEO Benioff told The The New York Times said.
And early in the pandemic, Salesforce offered a 21-page textbook, available to anyone who wanted it, on how to safely reopen office space. The plan included that the materials inside the office had to be reconsidered, glass dividers had to be added and that social distance had to be done, even in elevators.
With the spread of the vaccine slowly spreading across the U.S. and around the world, Salesforce seems to be thinking after life about the virus: in a version of how the company envisions a more community-oriented office, there are no distributors or social signs, people standing to chat in the halls, and employees sitting around a table to work – unmasked.