When corporate America opened the door to remote work during the pandemic in 2020 they had no idea how tough it would be to get people back into their offices.
No one knew how long people would be isolated, but after years of working from home, or on the road, many employees discovered that they don't need the office to complete their tasks and enjoy the freedoms that working remotely offers.
Related: Remote worker backlash leads company to reach deal with employees
When Salesforce (CRM) -), San Francisco's largest employer, went remote the company declared "an immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead."
"We just don't need as much real estate anymore because our employees learned how, during the pandemic, to work from home," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said.
Benioff's stance on remote work has shifted over the years. While Benioff and Salesforce were one of the big champions of remote work when the trend first started, as big businesses began to figure out ways to cajole their employees to come back into the office, Benioff changed his tune.
Earlier this year, Benioff claimed that new employees "do better if they're in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained. If they're at home and not going through that process, we don't think they're as successful."
More work-from-home stories:
- Amazon issues a hard-nosed warning to workers
- JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon delivers a stern warning to remote workers
- Wall Street bankers want to take away your favorite work perk
Wall Street has made a concerted effort to get workers back in the office with everyone from BlackRock (BLK) -) CEO Larry Fink, to Apple (AAPL) -) CEO Tim Cook, to Alphabet (GOOG) -) CEO Sundar Pichai, to Amazon (AMZN) -) CEO Andy Jassy — who said return to office resisters are "probably not going to work out" at the company — have stressed the importance of returning to the office.
But Benioff is once again zagging while his contemporaries are zigging back into the office.
When reminded of his waffling on the issue, Benioff told MSNBC that "I'm a remote worker. I've always been a remote worker my whole life. I don't work well in an office, it just doesn't work with my personality."
"For my people that's my message. They need to mix in person and remote together. Our engineers are extremely productive at home. We have lots of people who are extremely productive at home. But there also has to be sales people being productive in the office selling to customers and we need to make it all work."
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