At Salesforce, we believe that business is a powerful platform for change. We are guided by our core values of trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. As we navigate both the global health and economic crises that have amplified inequalities, our values become even more important. We are taking action to stand with the Black community seeking equality and justice — and we stand against racism, violence, and hate.
To that end, we launched our Racial Equality and Justice Task Force to help drive systemic change in our workplace and community. We invited employees from across the business as well as leaders of our Black employee resource group to help us forge our vision. We built upon the three P’s Mellody Hobson, President and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, says every business should focus on — “People, Purchasing, and Philanthropy” and we added Policy. Here are the actions we are taking across these four pillars:
People
- Our New Leadership Representation Goals: Because representation matters at every level—especially in leadership—we are making a new commitment to double the U.S representation of Black employees in leadership (VP+) by the end of 2023
- Our New Overall Representation Goals: In addition to our existing goal, we are making a new commitment to increase our U.S. representation of Black employees by 50% by the end of 2023.
How will we get there?
- Bring Recruiting and Equality Together: Earlier this year we brought together Global Recruiting with the Office of Equality to foster an inclusive lens at every step in our hiring process.
- Implement New Hiring Strategies: We will add diversity recruiters dedicated to inviting underrepresented minority (URM) — Black, Latinx, and Indigenous — talent to learn more about our open roles and launch a URM referral program to increase access and improve the recruiting and hiring experience for self-identified URM candidates. We will expand our URM professional network with additional strategic partnerships.
- Adopt an Inclusive Promotions Process: We have rolled out a new, inclusive promotions process and training that all managers are required to complete ahead of promoting any talent. We have also engaged a world-class consulting firm to conduct a third-party assessment of all our promotion processes.
- Invest in URM Leadership Development: We are expanding our URM leadership development program, in partnership with the Executive Leadership Council, and we are committed to increasing the representation of URM in our existing executive development programs. We will expand our Equality Mentorship program to pair Black employees with executive mentors to help navigate their careers.
- Empower Allies and Leaders with Training: We will provide company-wide unconscious bias and equality training for all employees, in partnership with a world-class consultancy, by the end of the year. We are also expanding our new Racial Equality Allyship training and launching a Racial Equality learning module for our senior leaders.
Purchasing
- Procurement: We will spend $100 million with Black-owned businesses over the next three years and commit to a 25% year-over-year growth in spend with minority-owned businesses. We will review our supplier onboarding process to mitigate any bias and provide better payment terms for Black-owned and minority-owned businesses where appropriate.
- Investments: We commit to investing $100 million of intentional capital through Salesforce Ventures to empower companies led by Black and underrepresented minority founders. We do this with a goal of building a more diverse ecosystem and collectively increasing our overall number of Black and underrepresented minority founders by more than 3X by the end of 2023. We are modifying our internal processes to build accountability through sourcing, diligence, and hiring.
Philanthropy
- Nonprofits and Education: Over the next five years, we will invest a total of $200 million and 1 million volunteer hours globally with organizations working to advance racial equality and justice at the global, national, and local level. Nearly half of the funds will support public education and close the achievement gap for Black and underrepresented minority students.
- Technology: We will commit $10M in software, training, certifications, and donations through Tableau to empower local changemakers to use data to directly address the inequality and injustice Black communities face across the U.S.
Policy
- Economic Empowerment: We will advocate at federal, state, and local levels for policies to address the equity gap, exacerbated by COVID-19, including: housing, homelessness, health care, education, paid-time off, transportation policy, workforce development, and environmental justice.
- Police Reform: We will advocate at federal, state, and local levels for meaningful police reform, such as: data collection and transparency about law enforcement, accountability, use of force standards, training, and community-oriented policing.
- Hate Crimes: We will work with urgency to advance laws that protect against racism or discrimination. As a recent example, we are proud to be part of the Georgia business and advocacy organizations that supported the passage of a strong state hate crimes law.
- Technology: Our Ethical and Humane Use team is working to ensure Salesforce technology isn’t used in a way that could cause harm or racially discriminate, including our decision not to offer facial recognition. We continue to mitigate bias in AI and in our products as well as empower others to do the same through Trailhead.
We will continue to use our company as a platform for change to inspire others to advance racial equality and justice. We will host critical conversations, amplify Black voices, and provide real paths for allies to take action. For example, in September we will host Representation Matters, our annual racial equality summit where Black, Latinx, and Indigenous talent can see themselves reflected as business leaders, founders, investors, changemakers, and keynote speakers, as we share the importance of representation in our industries.
These actions are a necessary step on the path to racial equality and justice.
