Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let employees work remotely
Great to see this become official. I suspect many remote employees weren&#x27;t working strict 9-5 anyway, especially given the lack of things to do outside the house during COVID.<p>How does Salesforce&#x27;s culture compare in terms of respecting peoples&#x27; off time? I&#x27;ve worked at companies that ditched strict schedules before, but it quickly turned into an excuse to expect everyone to be available on demand, 16 hours per day, 7 days per week.<p>The official company position was that no one should feel obligated to respond on weekends or outside of regular hours unless it was an explicit emergency. In practice, when you get a request from your boss&#x27;s boss at 9AM on a Saturday, it&#x27;s hard to say &quot;I&#x27;ll get to this on Monday&quot;. Some of the more toxic teams even weaponized this, by sending out requests at odd hours and then marking their tasks as &quot;Blocked, waiting for response from X&quot;. My heart still sinks when I hear the Slack notification sound on evenings or weekends, because for years that was a signal that several hours of my free time were about to disappear.<p>I firmly believe that good management can overcome these issues, but it must come from the top. Not only that, but managers who abuse the system must be visibly removed from the company for doing so. Unless there are consequences for abusing the flexibility of your employees to extract more work, some percentage of managers will take advantage of the system to get ahead.