Salesforce to work from home! Announces permanent remote for 50,000 employees, says 9-to-5 workday is dead 🚀‍

Salesforce is among the latest tech companies to jump on the remote work bandwagon. It announced remote working as the primary mode of working for most of its 50,000 employees. Salesforce making work from home a norm is another step towards remote work taking over at a large scale. The company has already been taking strides towards making remote work better and its recent acquisition of Slack is proof of that.

NEW: @salesforce announces permanent remote work for 50,000 employees!

Says:
🙅 9-to-5 workday is dead
🧑‍💻 Immersive workspace not limited to desks in offices
✅ Employee experience >> ping-pong tables & snacks

(contd.) pic.twitter.com/ASbWPT0pI8

— Hrishikesh Pardeshi (@hrishiptweets) February 10, 2021

Some key observations they made are that:

- 9-to-5 workday is dead

- Immersive workspace shouldn't be limited to desks in offices

- Employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables & snacks

Interestingly, the announcement says that Salesforce has to approach this new way of working with a beginner's mind which is an amazing callout since they are aware this would involve a lot of hit & trial/experimentation.

Also, >50% of Salesforce employees had indicated that they want to come in office only a few times per month

Salesforce's work from home plans - 3 models of remote working

Salesforce has written extensively on how they want to make sure that everyone has the best workplace to work in, check out the complete article and all their plans here. Moving forward, Salesforce would implement 3 primary ways of working for all of its employees:

Fully-remote: For those employees whose roles never need them to be in-office

Flex: 1-3 days/week of work in-office, mostly for collaboration & presentations

Office-based: Smallest chunk of employees that need to be in-office 4-5 days/week & remote work ocassionally

Resdesigning offices

Given the offices would primarily be used for ocassional collaboration & presentations/meetings, Salesforce plans to redesign them to offer larger spaces for breakouts & collaboration.

Check out this early snapshot of their resdesigned workspace

Moving towards greater equality & offering flexibility

The 2 main advantages with the move to remote cited by Salesforce are:

1) They can hire talent from anywhere in the world and this will promote greater equality in their workforce by design

2) Remote will also offer unparalleled schedule flexibility to its employees e.g. picking up kids or caring for someone in the family