Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff told the NYT that he embarked on a digital detox in the wake of layoffs at the company. Reuters / Mike Blake
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Salesforce chief Marc Benioff told the NYT that he went on a 10-day digital detox amid layoffs.
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Benioff said he is “addicted” to his equipment, and the journey was “liberating”.
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Insider previously reported that the January layoff announcement raised questions from the staff.
As layoffs rocked Salesforce, CEO Marc Benioff went on a 10-day “digital detox” trip to French Polynesia, he told The New York Times.
A digital detox is a trend in which someone gives up the use of digital devices such as phones or computers for a period of time – often with the intention of feeling more present and less dependent on social media.
“We’re so addicted to our devices (at least I am) that it’s so freeing to leave them all behind for a while!” He texted The Times in a series of interviews.
Benioff’s Digital Detox offers an interesting glimpse into how a tech CEO navigates a time of change at a company, seeking temporary periods of calm, free from digital communication.
Salesforce employees were expected to cut thousands of jobs at the start of the new year. On January 4, Benioff announced that Salesforce was planning to cut approximately 10% of its 84,000 workforce in the following weeks.
In a letter to employees, Benioff accused the company of laying off a lot of people during the pandemic as a “revenue quick” and “responsibility” for hiring people leading up to the current “economic downturn”. ” Took.
Insider reported that the news raised confusion and questions for Benioff from employees, but the executive did not answer questions about the layoffs in a two-hour plenary meeting with employees. According to Slack messages reviewed by Insider, most Salesforce employees were confused about when the layoffs would happen and to whom.
In an all-hands call the day after the layoffs, Benioff compared losing employees to people grieving those who died from the layoffs. Insiders reported that he arrived about 18 minutes late to a company-wide meeting the day after the layoffs were announced, and then, as the Times of London reported, jokingly said, “Did I miss something?”
Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
He told the NYT that he now thinks the two-hour all-hands call was a bad idea.
“We were trying to explain the ambiguous,” Benioff told the NYT. “It’s hard to make a call like that with such a large group and be effective, and we paid the price.”
After Salesforce began laying off workers, more than 500 employees sent a letter to management expressing “alienation from a lack of information”, and why some managers were not informed or knowledgeable about the first round of layoffs. , and if the cuts were anything to do with Salesforce’s activist investors.
Salesforce continued its planned layoffs in February, with one person telling Insider that it was a “bloodbath” for sales and marketing employees. It’s not clear how many people have been laid off to date, but one person told Insider that 4,000 people were missing from the company’s Slack after Jan. 31, but that could include contractors who were fired at the end of the fiscal year. was removed after.
The cuts to Salesforce are coming as many tech companies, from Google to Meta to Microsoft, have slashed their employee bases by the thousands — with potentially more cuts on the horizon as officials in post-pandemic business boom. want to cut.
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