Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. Photo / Getty
Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. Photo / Getty
Salesforce has become the latest US tech giant to take a radical approach to where staff can work, following the likes of Facebook and Microsoft.
In a blogpost today, the customer relationship management (CRM) software company declared the "the 9-to-5 workday is dead".
Instead, the San Francisco-based multinational's 30,000 staff will get three choices of work day. As Salesforce describes them:
Flex – When it's safe to return to the office, most of our employees around the globe will work flex. This means they'll be in the office 1-3 days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations.
Fully Remote – For employees who don't live near an office or have roles that don't require an office, they will work remotely full-time.
Office-based – The smallest population of our workforce will work from an office location 4-5 days per week if they're in roles that require it.
Like many NZ firms embracing a hybrid workweek, Salesforce says it has plans to introduce more meeting spaces - to reflect that when staff do make it to the office, it will mostly be for a face-to-face confab.
A rendering of a redesigned Salesforce office, opened up for more face-to-face meetings. Image / Supplied
The company says the changes will make its staff more productive.
The Ministry of Health recently disclosed to the Herald that Salesforce is one of two technology partners on a new cloud-based vaccine register - designed for New Zealand's Covid-19 vaccination programme, but yet to be completed.
While many companies have changed the way they work during the pandemic, tech companies, telcos and banks have blazed a trail. Here, Vodafone NZ, Spark, 2degrees, Vocus and Chorus have all introduced hybrid regimes, with many staff now spending two or three days a week remote working.
Vodafone NZ expects up to 40 per cent of staff to work remotely under "the new normal".
The telco now says it will sub-let half its office space in Auckland and Christchurch because hundreds of staff are working from home.
For its part, 2degrees says its new head office, which it will move into later this year, will be purpose-built for the hybrid working age and feature more collaboration spaces.
Earlier, AUT Human Resource Management Professor Jarrod Haar celebrated the trend. While there were challenges - particularly around meetings, health and safety considerations, office politics and acclimatising new staff - overall it was a boon for work/life balance and productivity.
Haar saw remote-working allowances, and staff payments for upgrades like bigger monitors at home, as possible once businesses had managed to renegotiate leases and bank some of the benefits of having fewer staff in the office at any given time during the week.
In the US, some of the gloss has been taken off the work-from-home boom with some companies, including Facebook, indicating staff will face pay cuts if they work remotely long term and move to less expensive areas.
