Just days after firing 10 percent of his entire workforce in a major round of layoffs, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took a 10-day vacation to French Polynesia. He was on a day-long digital detox, Benioff told the New York Times in an interview.
“We are so addicted to our devices (at least I am) it’s very freeing to leave them all behind for a while!” he said over text.
The vacation to what Benioff calls one of his favourite places came at the end of a month which saw nearly 8,000 Salesforce employees being laid off. A day after the company announced its layoffs, Benioff got on a two-hour-long virtual meeting with Salesforce employees to explain his decision to make job cuts. The call was expectedly not received well as the remaining employees took to the company’s internal slack channel to make their complaints known. Benioff admits that the call was a mistake
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“We were trying to explain the unexplainable. It’s hard to have a call like that with such a large group and have it be effective, and we paid a price,” he told the NYT. Other tech companies hadn’t bothered with calls, with employees finding out that they have been laid off when they couldn’t enter office premises or access their official accounts. That is little consolation for the thousands of employees who were laid off from the company that has famously called its “family” or “ohana” in Hawaiin. What might have been some relief is the more-than-expected severance package. The package includes a minimum of five months of salary, the option to receive bonuses, and vest ESOPs, reported the business magazine Fortune.
“Our layoff packages are some of the most generous ever,” Benioff said in his interview.
The layoffs are part of the cost-cutting measures that the company has promised to undertake. Activist investors like Elliot Management, Starboard Value, and three others have reportedly put pressure on the company to improve its bottom line.
Apart from layoffs, the company might also be calling its employees back to the office in a complete turn-around from its earlier promises, reported Tech Crunch. The company had touted its Digital HQ as an “all digital, work-from-anywhere workplace” since the pandemic hit. Other measures that are currently being instituted at the company include harsh new performance metrics, which will see employees either agree to improve their performance in 30 days or take a severance option called a "Prompt Exit Package (PEP)," reported Business Insider. If an employee takes the PEP, they would receive a smaller severance package than usual. With the pressure on employees to either perform or leave, remaining workers remain unsure if these performance cuts are part of the 10 percent layoff target.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
