Salesforce: Forget the ping-pong and snacks, the 9-to-5 working day is just so 2019, it's over and done with
- Reference: 1612965672
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/10/salesforce_wfh/
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In his [1]sweepingly grandiose missive , Brent Hyder, president and chief people officer of the San Francisco-based cloud biz, proclaimed that the devastating social and economic disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic would mean "the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks".
[2]
For readers whose offices are more like repurposed agricultural sheds than slick high-rise tech HQs, that means Salesforce's 54,000 employees won't be going into their work buildings anything like as much as they did before coronavirus. Maybe not at all.
Hyder foresees three options for the new normality greeting employees as virus lockdowns begin to ebb. The "Flex" option is for those who want to be in the office one to three days per week for "team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations" – yay! Presentations! Staff who don't live near an office or have roles that don't require an office can go fully remote. The smallest chunk of the Salesforce workforce who want to spend four to five days per week in its "immersive spaces" can do so.
[3]
The outcome of this shift in working will be positive, Hyder said, somewhat predictably: "This work-from-anywhere model will unlock new growth opportunities that will help us drive greater equality."
Too bad the statement [4]coincided with allegations of racial inequality from a former employee. Salesforce said it could not comment on the specific case but defended its record in racial equality.
Europe considers making it law that your boss can’t bug you outside of office hours [5]READ MORE
Hyder's statement is as much for the wider business community as it is for Salesforce employees, who would have seen the writing on the wall from other tech sector giants.
In July, Japanese IT services and hardware giant Fujitsu [6]said it would permanently shutter one half of its office real estate in Japan and will ask 80,000 locals to work from home permanently. In August, the chief operating officer of hardware box-shifter [7]Dell said the majority of his 165,000-strong workforce would not return to the office again on a regular basis. October saw cloud storage vendor Dropbox [8]declare itself a "virtual first" company : for all of its employees outside an office remote working would be "the primary experience". Microsoft [9]has also told its workforce to expect work-from-home as standard , with a few caveats.
With grinding inevitability, there is something in this for Salesforce. It wants to promote the remote working/home working ethos as it plays to its strengths as a cloud-only vendor. Who needs office-based systems when you don't need an office?
That opens the door to the creeping suspicion that all this home working and flexible hours might not be quite as healthy as they first sound. [10]A survey of 5,556 employees recorded an opinion on Blind , an anonymous app-based forum, which found 57 per cent said the blend of work and play has been skewed since lockdown measures were introduced. The sample included verified employees from the godfathers of tech, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Intel, SAP, Oracle, Cisco, Adobe, IBM, Nvidia, and more.
"There used to be some delineation between work and home life, now it's gone," said an anonymous person at Google. "Not working from home, just living at work."
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The dream of flexi-home working could so easily turn into a nightmare – and not just for real-estate investors. ®
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[1] https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/creating-a-best-workplace-from-anywhere/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/cloud&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YCQRIn0o77gNOxdO7QQXMgAAAEw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/cloud&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YCQRIn0o77gNOxdO7QQXMgAAAEw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/09/salesforce_microaggressions_resignation/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/27/europe_working_time/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/06/fujitsu_we_are_closing_50/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/28/dell_q2_2021_work_from_home/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/14/dropbox_wfh/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/12/microsoft_work_from_home_policy/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/work_life_balance/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_datacentre/cloud&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YCQRIn0o77gNOxdO7QQXMgAAAEw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: WFHSS
WFH = never leave work
That is what it is all about.
Re: WFHSS
Most peasants are not working in fields, so your idea of poor-but-healthy outdoor folk is a century out of date. The poor people are in factories/nail-bars etc.
Employees need Unions. I'm in one and since the pandemic we've been working from home. I work from 9AM 'til 6PM Monday through Friday, my choice as we have start times as early as 7AM and half hour or hour lunches. I rarely take OT, which would be evenings or weekends at and increased pay rate. Almost always someone in my group will pick up the OT, otherwise I will do it as I understand business does need to keep rolling.
When I logout of my computer I'm done until I log back in. No evening, late night, or weekend phone calls, although that is optional for those who may want additional, unscheduled OT. Of course, I'm starting to wind down my career and most in my group are mid or early career.
Up yours to HP and Yahoo etc
A few years ago it was CEO fashion to ban working from home and make people more productive by making them commute to a hot-desk. Still, someone will have to be around to help the new-grads/interns find their way around a corporate laptop and the many splendid IT/HR/Fin/Eng subsystems. I'm just finishing a year-long contract where I haven't met anyone in the flesh. It's been OK, but then I'm a contractor and used to adapting quickly to a new company's weird processes. If I had to retrain it could be very different.
Re: Up yours to HP and Yahoo etc
Yup. Cutting desks works when things are in decline. When things pick up, many companies will find how hard it is to train people remotely. And not just training skills, but learning a culture, company structure and politics. A lot of that is picked up through idle chit-chat, colleagues taking lunch breaks together, overheard conversations and so on. They all disappear with remote working.
Buzzwords...
"immersive spaces"
The Titanic had lots of those.
Does this mean we can get rid of ...
... eyesore skyscrapers, like Salesforce's Dildo in San Francisco?
WFHSS
Working From Home Stress Syndrome will become a thing along with the 'New Normal™' when it has kicked in fully.
Even peasants in developing countries get to go outside away from the house to practice their subsistence living, so even they, are not imprisoned in their homes for both work and off time.
More than anything else, WFH is a wet dream for bean counters that will ultimately turn out to be flawed, home working may suit many people quite well but the need for access to printers and other infrastructure as well as access to line managers who may not be answering questions as readily as they might in a collective office environment, I can see things going down hill.
Time will tell if I am right or wrong but I am willing to bet that WHFSS will become a thing.