Why Salesforce’s Expanded WFH Policy ‘Makes Sense’

The cloud software giant says that most of its employees will be able to work from home for most of the week.

Salesforce is the latest tech giant to beef up its work-from-home policy as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, announcing a new policy to allow most of its employees to work part- or full-time at home on a permanent basis.

Most employees worldwide will still have the option to work from the office one to three days a week. The company will continue to have fully remote employees along with those who are required to work in an office four or five days a week — the latter representing “the smallest population of our workforce,” Salesforce President and Chief People Officer Brent Hyder said in a blog post Tuesday.

[Related: Microsoft’s WFH Policy Will Spread, But Data Security ‘Needs To Be Addressed’ By Employers]

Half of Salesforce employees want to come in a few times a month, but 80 percent want to stay connected to a physical workspace, according to the post. The move could also translate into hiring outside of major tech hub cities and working hours outside of the traditional 9-to-5.

Last summer, Salesforce told employees that they can keep working from home through at least July 31, 2021, regardless of progress in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eran Gil, CEO of AllCloud, a San Francisco-based cloud services provider and Salesforce Platinum Partner, told CRN that a distributed workforce is important in an industry that has to meet demands from customers worldwide and is always in need of top talent.

“As long as you can sustain and grow the culture, a distributed workforce makes sense,” Gil said.

Salesforce has 54,000 employees globally, 65 percent of whom Salesforce expects to come into the office only one to three days a week in the future--up from 40 percent before the pandemic, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Last year, Microsoft gave approval for some employees to work from home for less than 50 percent of the week. Jeanne Morelli, chief operating officer at iV4, a unit of Atlanta-based ProArch and Microsoft Gold partner, told CRN at the time that companies that haven’t yet invested in data security solutions will need to do so if they want to emulate the approach Microsoft is taking.

In November, an Indeed survey revealed that 55 percent of tech workers said if they do change jobs, they’ll look for one with flexible or hybrid work options, and six out of 10 tech workers said they were willing to take a pay cut in order to continue working from home.