Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday that some corporate executives have been surprised by employees’ desire to continue working from home.
“A lot of things have changed for our customers in this new world, whether it’s in Europe or the United States, and one of them is getting back to work,” Benioff said in an interview with Mad Money. “The phenomenon I see happening globally is not that as many employees are returning to their offices locally as any CEO expected.”
Benioff’s comments came shortly after the enterprise software maker reported second-quarter financial results, with earnings and earnings per share exceeding Wall Street forecasts, according to Refinitiv. San Francisco-based Salesforce also raised its focus year-round after acquiring the Slack communications app.
While Benioff said Salesforce’s business is strong and he was traveling back to work, the executive believes the Covid pandemic fundamentally changed aspects of the corporate world.
“You’re really starting to see a very low number of office attendances because employees are very productive at home. They can do their work at home. They can be successful from anywhere. Businesses and our customers are successful. It’s amazing, but the way they are succeeding has completely changed. “
Executives have taken different approaches to eliminating Covid-era remote work policies, with some placing greater emphasis on returning to headquarters than others.
Salesforce is one of the companies that offers employees significant flexibility in the places where they work permanently once the pandemic is over. Benioff, who was also a co-founder of Salesforce, previously told CNBC that he expects between 50% and 60% of the company’s employees to work remotely after Covid, up from 20% before the health crisis.
Many other large corporations that had planned to speed up plans to return to the office this fall have delayed those efforts as a result of the highly transmissible delta variant, which led to a resurgence of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the United States.