Salesforce Ireland: An Agile Workplace for a Changing Workforce

Salesforce has been named as one of the Best Workplaces in Ireland for the seventh consecutive year by Great Place to Work. This ranking comes after a hugely successful year for Salesforce Ireland; we were humbled to also have been listed as a Best Workplace for Women in Ireland for the fourth consecutive year earlier this month too. And with 87% of Irish employees agreeing with the statement: ‘taking everything into account, this is a great place to work,’ it is clear to see that our core values of Trust, Innovation, Customer Success, Equality, and Sustainability are being lived every day.

The past two years have been challenging and demanding for all businesses. When the world changed, employers had to too. At Salesforce Ireland, this meant adapting our workplace policies to guarantee success for our customers and employees. Central to these efforts has been the adoption of agile workplace policies — allowing for continued collaboration between teams, regardless of where, when, or how they want to work.

Some great examples of new initiatives enabling our new ways of working include:

Maintaining our Salesforce Culture

Our Salesforce culture is built on our core values, and as we venture into the new way of working we are committed to ensuring our culture remains strong. To achieve this, we’re combining the strength of our values, our platform and our people to reimagine the way we work for the better — whether in-person or in the cloud. Everyone has a role to play in driving our culture and no one leader or employee can succeed without the strength of our community behind them. At Salesforce, we’re looking to our most valuable asset — our people — to help lead us into the future.

Work is no longer somewhere you go, but rather, something you do. However, the workplace remains important in experiential learning, team bonding, and building our social and professional networks, which in turn are critical in navigating an organisation. We’ve seen our employees really value the opportunity for connection, camaraderie and innovation that come from gathering in person.

Success from Anywhere

Staying together while apart is no easy feat, but we’re committed to taking what we’ve learned from the pandemic and using it to help shape the future. Together, we’re designing an even better workplace for the work-from-anywhere world, where everyone — regardless of location — can feel supported and connected. It’s what we call “Success From Anywhere.” This ecosystem of practices, products, and processes equips our customers, employees, and stakeholders to connect, work, sell, market, and service from anywhere, and will unlock new growth opportunities that will help us drive greater equality. Our talent strategy is no longer bound by barriers like location, so we can broaden our search beyond traditional city centres and welcome untapped talent from new communities and geographies. But it’s about more than that — it’s also about how we create and sustain greater innovation, workplace relationships, and employee development. It’s about how we inspire team spirit, employee engagement, and well-being.

Flex Agreements

Knowing that our ways of working are forever changed, we have introduced Flex Team Agreements (FTAs) to provide clarity on what’s most important in how and where we show up, work, stay connected, and nurture our culture. They demonstrate our commitment to our customers and one another — in other words, the core of what makes Salesforce, Salesforce. FTAs outline how the work gets done, such as how we behave and operate, how we schedule workdays, hold meetings, communicate, collaborate, and document processes and projects.

An example of this flexibility was implemented over the course of several weeks in late 2021 when large chunks of the organisation decided to go meeting-free for one full week, 23,000 employees in all. Everyone from senior executives to individual contributors was encouraged to cancel all internal meetings (with exceptions for critical business issues, training and customer meetings) in an attempt to find better ways to work and take more control of their workday. Creating more flexible schedules allows space for the joys, challenges, and busy-ness of everyday life — from attending school events to caring for sick family members to being home for the electrician. In our always-on, always-connected world, it no longer makes sense to expect employees to work an eight-hour shift to do their jobs successfully.

Founding our UKI Equality Board

We understand that our placement as a Best Workplace for Women is not easily achieved and, at Salesforce, equality is a core value that we put at the centre of every conversation we have, both internally and externally. We believe that

businesses can be powerful platforms for social change and that our higher purpose is to drive Equality for all. In September 2021 the UKI Equality Board was founded. It drives new equality initiatives, programmes, and processes in the UK and Ireland while working closely with the Office of Equality, our UK and Ireland Leadership Teams, and our employee-led Equality Groups. Although we recognize that there is still work to be done, we are committed to creating an equal and inclusive workplace for all.

Personally, I am so thrilled to see Salesforce Ireland achieve the #3 ranking in the Super-Large category this year. We have so much to look forward to in 2022 – from our new Ireland CEO Carolan Lennon taking the helm in July, to our office opening later in the year – it’s bound to be a busy one, but I’m excited to continue on this fantastic journey of growth with all of my wonderful colleagues in Ireland, and beyond, at Salesforce.