Days after laying off a tenth of Salesforce employees, CEO Marc Benioff continues his apparent crusade against telecommuters and their reduced effectiveness during the pandemic, he says.
According to a Monday report from Business Insider, the San Francisco tech CEO recently doubled down on remarks he made in a company-wide Slack message last month: New, mostly remote workers need to fill the gap.
At Slack in December, just weeks after announcing the departure of co-CEO Bret Taylor and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Benioff wondered if the employees hired during the COVID-19 pandemic were working hard enough.
“How do we increase the productivity of our employees at Salesforce? In particular, new hires (hired during the 2021 and 2022 pandemic) face much lower productivity,” Benioff said. “Is that a reflection of our office politics?”
It seems his concerns about worker productivity remain paramount, even as workers are more concerned about their job stability and morale.
According to Business Insider, Benioff doubled down on his December Slack messages during a phone call with all employees Thursday — just days after the mass layoffs were announced.
“We don’t have the same level of performance and productivity as we had in 2020 before the pandemic. We don’t have that,” he said, according to the insider. “If we look at a certain percentage of employees, especially some of the people who are new hires, they’re just not that productive.”
To allay reps’ concerns that his message was anecdotal, he said during the call that nearly all of Salesforce’s annual contract value was delivered by 50 percent of sales leaders.
“Aren’t we managing our remote workers well enough?” he said during the call. “Do we need new skills? Because this has never happened before in the history of the company.”
And again, he emphasized his anti-remote work stance – pointing out that younger workers are also less productive.
It seems like Salesforce’s big boss is about to get back in business just two days after he said employees should show love and compassion to laid-off workers.
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