Salesforce Ends 9-to-5 Work Culture, Lays Out New Flexible Options

Silicon Valley CRM giant Salesforce has officially bid goodbye to the 9-to-5 workday culture, allowing employees worldwide to choose from three flexible working norms to attune to business goals while also maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Salesforce has taken a leaf out of Dropbox’s Virtual-First Strategy, unveiling a new reopening strategy for its 49,000 employees worldwide that lets employees choose from three working norms to maximize productivity, maintain a work-life balance, and focus more on flexibility than the now-obsolete 9-to-5 workday culture.

Salesforce’s new Work From Anywhere strategy results from an employee wellness survey that focuses on employees’ working preference to attune to the post-pandemic era. Not surprisingly, half of its employees chose to work remotely and come into the office only when required, but 80% wanted to maintain a connection to physical space.

To attune to these needs, Salesforce is now offering three work models – flex, fully remote, and office-based. The core of these models is flexibility and empowering employees to be productive in schedules that work best for them.

“An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks,” Brent Hyder, president and chief people officer at Salesforce, wrote in a blog postOpens a new window .

See More: Post-Pandemic Telework Is More Than Just ‘Unbound Offices’

The Silicon Valley giant has 49,000 employees worldwide, of which only a small subset of employees will be required to physically be present at the office four to five days per week. Another set of workers will avail of permanent remote work, especially the ones whose duties and responsibilities will not require them to be in office. These employees will also have the option to relocate to suburbs or cities that are not very expensive.

Once it is safe to return to the office, a majority of Salesforce employees worldwide will follow work guidelines for flexibility. For tasks that are more challenging to perform virtually, like video calls, team collaboration, customer meetings, or presentations, employees will report to the office anywhere from one to three days a week each.

“To start, we’ll be redesigning our workspaces over time as community hubs to accommodate a more hybrid workstyle. Gone are the days of a sea of desks — we’ll create more collaboration and breakout spaces to foster the human connection that can’t be replicated remotely,” Hyder wrote. 

“This isn’t just the future of work, this is the next evolution of our culture. We’re combining the strength of our values, our platform and our people to reimagine the way we work for the better — whether in-person or in the cloud. Everyone has a role to play in driving our culture and no lone leader or employee can succeed without the strength of our community behind them. At Salesforce, we’re looking to our most valuable asset — our people — to help lead us into the future.”

Through this new model, Salesforce strives to explore growth opportunities and expand its talent strategy across all geographies. This way, the company aims to hire fresh talent from beyond traditional city centers and facilitate a sustainable work culture that supports inclusion, belonging, and equality.

See More: Microsoft Eyes a Hybrid Workplace Future, Lets Some Staff WFH Permanently

Given the transition of work from the office to home, Salesforce has also decided to redesign its iconic Salesforce TowerOpens a new window in San Francisco, a 1,070-foot-high skyscraper that cost $1.1 billion to build. The idea is to get rid of a sea of desks and offer a functional space for collaboration, and foster connections that cannot be replicated while working remotely. Salesforce’s notion of a futuristic office space entails revamping the current space “as community hubs to accommodate a more hybrid workstyle.”  

To contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the company has also laid out certain mandates Opens a new window like temperature screenings before entering the building, face coverings, deep cleaning, manual contact tracing, and at-home wellness declarations.

In December 2020, Google also released a memo extending the work from home period for employees till September this year. It will introduce a series of experimental pilot designs to improve productivity, collaboration, and overall well-being. Employees must live within commuting distance from their assigned offices and have to report to work three days a week. The rules are stricter for those with customer-facing roles. Office spaces have also been categorized into levels according to the risk assessment model, and can be booked for collaboration and team meetings. 

Several Silicon Valley tech giants have adapted either permanent or hybrid work policies in the past few months. Many other tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Yelp have also embraced remote work programs.

Let us know if you liked this news on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!