Salesforce donating $10 per day to get workers back to the office is a ‘cute gimmick.’ But will it actually work?

But will it build momentum when it comes to getting workers back into the office? One expert was doubtful.  “It’s a cute gimmick, but if organizations really want employees to come to the office, they need to make the journey worthwhile,” said Melanie Brucks, an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School. 

Instead of providing external incentives or enacting strict remote-work policies, organizations should consider what they can do to make the office a place employees want to be, Brucks said.

“We know that in-person work can be important for tasks such as creativity, but so is employee happiness and company culture,” Brucks said. “Forcing or cajoling people to return to the office is not the answer.”

Brucks co-authored a study suggesting in-person teams generate more ideas than remote teams when working on the same problem.

Companies have to walk a fine line when they try out new return-to-office policies. Hundreds of corporate Amazon
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employees recently held a lunchtime walkout protesting the company’s three-day-a-week office policy, and the new chief executive of Farmers Group recently set off an employee uproar when he reversed course on the company’s remote work policy. Workers at the company said they had bought houses and made other major life decisions based on the assumption that they could work remotely indefinitely.

Worker satisfaction is at a three-decade high, and flexible schedules play a big role in their happiness, according to one recent Conference Board survey. Compared to fully remote or fully in-office workers, employees with hybrid schedules reported the highest levels of satisfaction, according to the Conference Board survey.

At the moment, the return-to-work tide appears to be turning away from offices. Average office occupancy in the 10 largest U.S. cities was at 47.6% as of June 5, down from 49% the week prior, according to Kastle, which tracks badge swipes in offices. In San Francisco — where Salesforce’s headquarters loom in the city’s tallest building — offices were 42.7% full, Kastle found.

After declaring the ‘9-to-5 workday is dead’ in 2021, Salesforce seems to now be attempting to strike a balance between ordering some employees back into the office and allowing others to remain remote.

Chief executive Marc Benioff said earlier this year that he wanted certain teams to come in three or four days a week. But the company has also said that “not all jobs require an office.” Salesforce’s share of full-time remote employees was at 27% “and rising” in May, up from the historical average of 18%, the company said.

The company announced plans to lay off 10% of its 73,541-person workforce after it “hired too many people” during the pandemic. That restructuring, and a proposal — later scrapped — by Benioff to rank employees based on certain metrics and then lay off people with the lowest rankings, may have lowered morale among Salesforce employees, MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti wrote in March. Benioff refuted that in an interview, saying that the company’s culture “is still very strong.”

“It’s a culture of volunteerism and giving, it is still very much alive and well,” Benioff told MarketWatch. The new fundraising initiative, called Connect for Good, is in line with the do-gooder image Salesforce cultivates. The company says it follows a 1-1-1 model, giving 1% of equity, 1% of product and 1% of its employee time to the community.

“Giving back is deeply embedded in everything we do, and we’re proud to introduce Connect for Good to encourage employees to help us raise $1 Million+ for local nonprofits,” a Salesforce spokesperson said in a statement.

Salesforce shares are up 55% year-to-date, compared to a 1.56% gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average
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and a 25% increase for the NASDAQ Composite Index
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during the same period.

Therese Poletti and Emily Bary contributed.