Salesforce is ending a pandemic-era program in which the company’s engineers and technical staff received a paid day off for “well-being” every month, as the cloud-based software company moves to recalibrate its operations after several years of COVID-19 disruptions.
The so-called well-being days will no longer be offered in Salesforce’s fiscal 2024 year, chief engineering officer Srinivas Tallapragada informed employees on Monday. In a message to the company’s #all-technology Slack channel, which has roughly 12,700 employees, Tallapragada said Salesforce will continue to honor the three remaining well-being days of the current fiscal year.
“Thankfully, our experiences and needs have moved beyond the height of the pandemic,” Tallapragada said in the message, which was viewed by Coins2Day.
A Salesforce spokesperson confirmed the end of well-being days, and pointed to new ways the company is prioritizing employee health and well-being.
“We have learned a lot in the last two years about how to work in a more flexible world, and have created new benefits and tools to support our employees,” the Salesforce spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We give teams the flexibility to decide how, when, and where they work through Flex Team Agreements, and we encourage our employees to take time off and recharge in ways that best support their individual needs.”
According to Tallapragada’s message, Salesforce technical employees have enjoyed 24 well-being days since the program’s inception at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The change at Salesforce comes as corporations seek to bring employees back to the office and to re-instill pre-pandemic workplace norms. At some companies, employees have pushed back against efforts to return to the office.
Salesforce’s specific back-to-office plans remain somewhat unclear, though the company has stated that it “has never had office mandates, and never will,” according to a recent blog post. At this year’s Dreamforce, Salesforce’s 20th edition of the annual event, company co-CEO Marc Benioff referenced President Joe Biden’s recent comments declaring the end of the COVID-19 health crisis, though the comments appeared to have been edited out of the company’s archived recording of Benioff’s talk.
In his message to employees on Monday, Salesforce’s Tallapragada said that managers would help employees handle work-related stress and mental health issues.
“Managers will work with you to identify the root causes of work-related stress and burnout, empower you to take time off when needed, and help you manage a sustainable workload that’s aligned with our priorities,” he wrote in the Slack message.
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