Morale is low at Salesforce, despite co-founder and CEO Marc Benioffs best efforts. At the tech giant, ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behindexcept for the several thousand people the company laid off earlier this year as it faced stiff economic headwinds.
On February 13, after the second round of layoffs in 2023, Benioff shared his annual forward-looking strategy planning document in a company-wide Slack channel. The document digs into the details of Benioffs long-heralded management process he calls V2MOM, which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures.
What I like about the V2MOM is that it encourages creativity, change, and empowerment, Benioff wrote in 2020. Different team members can lead different methods, and they update the V2MOM as the year progresses. We think of the V2MOM as a living and breathing document.
Living and breathing may be apt descriptions for the Obstacles section of this years documentand some Salesforce employees might add rage-inducing. What was intended to explain reasons for the companys performance challenges instead led to outrage among some of its employees.
Reductions in Force could be a distraction to a productivity environment, a section on the Obstacles page, obtained by Fortune, reads. Wellness culture overpowered high performance culture during pandemic. Fear of escalations for people-related issues (burnout, psychological safety, equality, etc.) can make managers reticent to performance manage their teams.
The document quickly received employee blowback, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. One worker wrote on Slack the line about wellness culture was most disturbing and tone deaf and a sad excuse, according to the Journal. On February 20, Benioff sent out a revised document with that line removed.
Representatives for Salesforce and for Benioff did not immediately respond to Fortunes request for comment.
Its not the first time Benioff opined, to workers chagrin, about the productivity shift he thinks accompanied the pandemic. In December, he wrote in the #all-salesforce Slack channel, which at the time contained 86,000 members, that employees hired during the pandemic in 2021 and 2022 were especially facing much lower productivity.
He went on to ask a few questions in an effort to solicit feedbackIs this a reflection of our office policy? Are our managers not directly addressing productivity with their teams?which one employee told Fortune was extraordinarily peculiar because the company, just weeks prior, ended its pandemic-era benefit of one Friday off per month.
The quality of your business is the quality of your questions, Benioff said in a message to Fortune at the time. Asking hard questions of employees (and customers) for their answers is one of the effective ways to get answers as a business leader today. Its why we bought Slack because there is no better way to ask questions and crowd source answers quickly. Already today I have almost 500 replies to my questionamazing and incredibly useful as the CEO of Salesforce.
Defining wellness, culture, and high performance
Its difficult to hone in on what culture looks like at a company as vast as Salesforce, which boasts a $163.6 billion market cap and employs over 70,000 workers. But clues indicate many employees arent happy.
Consider the issues at Slack, which Salesforce acquired in 2021 for nearly $28 billion. The messaging app has long made clear its priorities of flexible work, mental health and work-life balance.
In an internal Q&A with Slacks senior leadership team in January, outgoing CEO Stewart Butterfield discussed the workplace messaging apps cultural rift with Salesforce, which acquired it in 2021.
Butterfield admitted he wasnt very successful in integrating the two cultures, per an audio recording of the meeting Fortune obtained. The problem has been, theres no incorporation of the Slack culture into the Salesforce culture, and unless there is some element of that, then its not integration in any sense. Its just the elimination.
Research has shown that wellness culture and high performance culture dont exist at odds with one another. Rather, the companies that have experienced sustained success throughout the pandemic balanced business needs with employee health needs.
According to the latest Pulse survey from Slacks Future Forum, workers with flexible work arrangements were 57% more likely than fully in-person workers to say their company culture has improved since that flexible policy was implemented.
Executives say, Because I grew up in a certain way and have certain experiences of workplace culture, I feel uncomfortable doing other thingsgoing forward, Brian Elliott, executive leader of Future Forum, told Fortune. Executives are worried about retaining culture with flexible work, but our data shows a completely different story.
It really comes down to trust at the end of the daygive people the flexibility to work where and when theyre at their best, Elliott continued. The survey also found that concerns like Benioffs about declining productivity are unfounded. When compared with workers who have no ability to shift their schedules, respondents with full schedule flexibility reported 39% higher productivity and 64% greater ability to focus.
The most productive, focused workers are those who dont feel overworked. Fifty-three percent of workers dissatisfied with their companys flexibility reported burnout, compared with just 37% among workers who are satisfied.
If youre an executive worried about productivity, stop sweating how many days people are coming in and start sweating the meetings running amok in your organization, Elliott said.
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