(NEXSTAR) — Salesforce, the cloud-based software company that employs 54,000 people globally, announced Tuesday that it will allow most employees to work from home indefinitely, even after the pandemic ends.
The news comes about two years after the completion of San Francisco’s massive Salesforce Tower, a 1,070-foot-tall skyscraper located in the city’s downtown area.
Salesforce will offer employees three “ways of working”:
- Flex, meaning employees will spend one to three days in the office
- Fully remote, for employees who don’t live near an office or have roles that don’t require working in an office
- Office-based, “the smallest population” of Salesforce’s workforce, who will work from the office four to five days per week
“Our employees are the architects of this strategy, and flexibility will be key going forward,” the company said in a press release.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Salesforce expects over 65 percent of its workforce to visit the office one to three days a week after the pandemic ends. It did not specify what portion of its employees would work from home permanently.
The company also did not say how the workforce update would affect its real estate holdings, but did mention that it intends to “reimagine” its office spaces “to accommodate a more hybrid work style.” That means “the sea of desks” will be replaced with cafe-style tables and additional space for meetings, according to a rendering.
Salesforce leases about two-thirds of its San Francisco tower, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, and also owns three other office buildings nearby.
Other global tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have accommodated employees to work from home during the pandemic, but most have not promised that the change will be indefinite.
Salesforce purchased the workplace chat service Slack for $27.7 billion in December.