If you can reduce the office footprint you can save money. Bringing people in often means increasing the footprint post wfh.
Wfh will win where it actually succeeds because it saves money.
If it doesn't work then only companies that bring people in will succeed.
My feeling is that about 75% of the non manual non hospitality economy will go WFH
Not that much. And I just read hacker news while sitting on the train which I was going to do if sitting at home anyway.
> Not that much.
OK, let's assume it's not 90 minutes but only 20 minutes a day. That compounds, and it's a lot of time I could spend on what really matters to me, not work. Why should I do it, if I have a choice? Time is the most precious thing we have. I will never come back to the office, period.
I believe employees have to start to get used to being paid less when working remote. People who work in an office or factory have to be rewarded for this commute. Some jobs cannot be made remote.
I assume a lot of people working remote also like the fact that they can do the laundry, clean the house, do some errands etc during the working day. This flexibility should also allow the salary for remote workers to be lower than for people working in an office.
Most of the people here (and at Salesforce) are paid, in theory at least, according to their skillset and the value they bring to a company.
Why should that pay differ depending on where someone is sitting when they deliver said value?
Last I checked, no one paid me" for my commute time or comp'd the wear on my vehicle. If those hours* spent in traffic should have been counted on the clock, then golly gee, I have invoices yo get written!
Seriously, I get it. There should be something for it, but there never will be. Wage theft. Management will do anything possible to get unpaid time out of you.
The firm didnt give 2 bits about your commute. They pay you to be in on time. Not your commute. I know people who travel 6 hours a day. They get paid the same.
Why would any firm increase salaries, for services you were already providing?
You get maybe 12 waking hours a day, 8 working +2 commuting. Getting 2 hours back is a 16% raise.
Salesforce is a publicly traded billion dollar company, not an early stage startup.
A CEO traveling around to meet customers isn't a bad thing. In addition, he's the co-CEO and probably left day to day operations to the real CEO.
I’m kinda jealous, the only thing that is keeping me in management roles is the fantasy that the perfect company will come along with the right product, right growth stage but that is looking unlikely in this economy.
The person posting it probably though it was helpful, but it was just showing how an hell of a place offices have become since they went the open space route.
The only thing that I disagreed with was the "we don't want to lose our stars" mentality. Your mentality should not be about pushing people as far as you can until you have retention problems. Rather, it should be to inform people and provide them with opportunities to be productive in whatever way they prefer, and cut them lose if their output is not sufficient. Make decisions by outputs - not inputs.
He seems to have some nuance and flexibility on the issue that some people lack.
I agree that he seems to have nuance on the topic, but the playing field seems to have already abandoned fair play.
The companies may seem to get away with it, but not because they use a particular language tactic. They have the power to back up their "opinion" by firing people. People who want to keep their job may stop arguing, not because they buy the BS framing but because they have bills to pay.
The folks who hope to take a stand in the interest of worker's rights would be better served by trying hard to stick to the facts, promote nuanced discussions and not let the companies drag them into this kind of pissing contest.
TELL ME MORE
WE MUST STUDY THIS NEW PHENOMENON CLOSELY
What Marc calls "work", you and I can't relate too.
He's spending a disporportionate amount of time talking to investors, talking to customers, talking to his Board.
I wouldn't be surprised if he's traveling 100 business days a year as a result.
Which if you're not at home because you're traveling for work, or if you are at home but just talking phone calls - that's a very different type of "working remote".
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EDIT: why the downvotes? Please comment if you disagree with something I said so that we can have a health discourse.
In reality, he’s probably thinking he’d rather be on the road than stay in his SV ivory tower.
Two stories about Benioff you might find interesting; when we were selling our startup there were two bidders on the table, Google and Salesforce.
Google sent out minions, Larry and Sergey were only reachable via email/call.
Benioff flew over to wine and dine our founders, they found common ground and he charmed them with his vision of where he saw our product going. He won with a lower bid than Google.
After the acquisition closed, he flew over to London too to visit my business unit, we met with him in the office and the senior management team were again taken out for some 1:1 time with him over dinner. Any skepticism they might have had was washed away after that evening, they all came back “brainwashed” into the Salesforce way — he even gifted us one of the domain names from his personal collection to use for our product (my email was marcos@social.com for a while, which I did find really cool)
The second story, he once logged into an all hands call using a shitty satellite connection from his yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean. He could have delegated while he was on holiday, but I don’t think Benioff ever switches off, hence why working from anywhere is his default mode of operation.
>> "He won with a lower bid than Google."
Off topic: why would a company every sell to a lower bidder? If you have any investors in the company (not bootstrapped), don't you have a fiduciary responsibility to always sell to the highest bidder.
My understanding was that Google didn’t really offer us a future plan, and the competitor they ended up acquiring (Wildfire) quickly disappeared — another fun little story is that Arielle Zuckerberg was working for Wildfire at the time, so she ended up at Google — while the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is stronger than ever after more acquisitions, even where the individual products disappeared.
All in all it still was extremely lucrative for founders and investors, the official number was $689m but there were also extra bonuses and employee retention incentives and such so the real number was higher.
I didn’t really gel with the FAANG style culture at the time so I left after I vested most of my stock, but I know some people made long careers out of it.
Just like in any kind of b2b sales, the decisions are never fully data-driven.
I have a job like this (presales; previously consulting). I'm usually on the road/in the air every week and, COVID aside, have been for the last seven years. An office hasn't made sense for me in a long time.
However, the co-CEO saying this just after pushing an RTO mandate feels really out of place. Many will definitely not get the nuance.
There’s no nuance here. There is not a single way in the universe that __everyone else__ needs to be in office but his job is so special that he has to WFH.
