As a result of the epidemic, new hires were made, and the wealthy CEO of Salesforce and Slack has attacked them, saying they are less productive.
The creator of the software giant Salesforce, whose stock price has decreased by half in the last year, Marc Benioff, wrote the leaked message.
The 58-year-old Benioff said that the employees employed in 2021 and 2022 were “far less” productive and questioned if this was due to the company’s “office philosophy.”
He used the chat app Slack, which the business purchased last year as part of a strategy to invest in tools for remote workers.
One of the first tech businesses to let workers know they didn’t have to return to work after the epidemic was Salesforce, the biggest private company in San Francisco. Instead, it allowed many people the option to choose where they would work.
Since then, the business has increased its personnel count by 32%, but due to current financial difficulties, it has let go of more than 1,000 staff members, similar to many Silicon Valley businesses.
Bret Taylor, Benioff’s co-CEO of Salesforce, also announced his resignation two weeks earlier, adding to the strains already there.
Benioff’s skepticism of remote work is a shift from the stance he took in mid-2021, when he championed workers’ right to work from home.
Benioff said on CNBC’s Mad Money, “The pattern I see occurring internationally is not as many people are returning back to their offices as any CEO imagined.”
Because workers are so productive at home, you’re beginning to see certain workplaces with really low attendance rates, he said. They are successful no matter where they are.
As the economy continues to deteriorate and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have indicated a recession is coming, Salesforce has seen its sales decline.
Just two examples of IT companies that have utilized having to reduce their workforces to wean out less productive employees are Meta and Salesforce.
The tactic also enables businesses to avoid mass layoffs and persuade employees to leave via manager performance evaluations and internal reorganization.
It’s really typical practice to utilize that opportunity as almost—this is a horrible term—but eventually a “spring clean” of your staff pool, according to Stevie Buckley, cofounder of Talent Stuff, a recruiting platform for tech companies.
Salesforce made the announcement that starting in November 2021, teams will be able to choose the conditions of their employment.
“We’re allowing teams to select how, when, and where they work,” the firm said. “This includes how many days a week they come into the office and what sort of work they’ll continue to complete from home.”
Benioff spoke about utilizing the instant messaging service Slack, which Salesforce acquired last year, to do business while working from home. Similar to Zoom, Slack was a well-liked service used by companies to manage their workforces throughout the epidemic.
The acquisition of the business by Benioff’s Salesforce, according to a statement from him, was motivated by an ambition to build “the digital HQ that empowers any organization to achieve customer and employee success from anywhere.”
The ability to swiftly reply to messages with an emoji is one of the features of Slack. While many people expressed their agreement, several responded with the emojis “WFH” or “citation required.”
The CEO expressed appreciation for the comments in a reply to his first post and said that the volume of responses from employees was evidence of Slack’s effectiveness as a medium for business communications.
As a leader today, he noted, “asking difficult questions of workers (and customers and each other) for their replies is one of the most successful methods to acquire answers.”
There isn’t a better method to ask questions and immediately crowdsource answers, which is why we purchased Slack. It’s incredible and tremendously helpful that we already have approximately 500 responses to these questions today!
Benioff continued by lamenting the exposure of his internal communications.
He once again posted on Slack, “I think you will agree it is particularly regrettable that our private chats here were almost immediately released to the public media.”
I wonder how we might emphasize that Trust is our top corporate value. How can we show the strength of trust and transparency without making an instant announcement to the public? It speaks to the core of who salesforce is.
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