During a nearly two-hour all-hands meeting on Thursday to discuss the company's mass layoff plans, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff doubled down on a theme that infuriated some employees last month: that Salesforce employees, particularly new workers hired during the pandemic, have a productivity problem.
And this time, he made a new suggestion — that younger employees not coming into the office may be less productive as well, according to leaked audio of the meeting shared with Insider.
"We don't have the same level of performance and productivity that we had in 2020 before the pandemic. We do not," Benioff said during the call. "When we look at some percentage of the employees, especially some of the folks that are new employees, are just not as productive."
Benioff and his cofounder Parker Harris, also on this call, brought up this topic to defend what had become a company uproar in mid-December after Benioff suggested in a company-wide internal Slack message that new employees are less productive.
"New employees (hired during the pandemic in 2021 & 2022) are especially facing much lower productivity," he had said on Slack according to those messages seen and reported on by Insider. Hundreds of employees responded to Benioff's Slack message, many of them pushing back on his assertions.
Benioff addressed that push-back by doubling down on the assertion and offering explanations and examples.
He told the over 47,000 employees in attendance that he was inspired to post on Slack about worker productivity after COO and head of sales Brian Milham told him 96 percent of the company's annual contract value was being delivered by 50 percent of sales account executives. ACV is a way to measure annual revenue from each specific customer.
"Half of our salesforce is not really productive and a lot of them are our new folks. So why is that?" Benioff recounted of the conversation. "Are we not managing our remote employees well enough? Do we need new skills? Because that's never happened before in the history of the company."
Benioff also insisted this wasn't solely because of a softening post-pandemic economy where customers were spending less on software. He said the company was still closing large-scale deals at a rapid rate "but half of our sales organization is really struggling. Like they don't know how," he said. "Must be a few things going on either psychologically and technically."
Benioff wondered out loud if remote work was the problem, particularly for younger employees "maybe they're not building the relationships," he said, then wondered aloud if "younger employees are not having the kind of social experience and meeting folks and getting the kind of swivel-chair enablement we used to have."
Employees who heard their CEO repeat these allegations on the productivity of new employees, younger employees, remote employees — particularly in sales — were less than pleased.
"It's clear he's a CEO from another generation," one person said.
After hundreds of sales employees were targeted for termination in November, several former and current employees then told Insider they blamed Salesforce's performance review system, saying it created unrealistic goals with difficult accounts, setting them up for failure.
"Our sales performance process drives accountability," a Salesforce spokesperson said at the time in a statement provided to Insider. "Unfortunately, that can lead to some leaving the business, and we support them through their transition."
Benioff almost touched on those complaints by discussing Org 62, the name given to Salesforce's own internal use of its flagship customer relationship management product, a tool to help salespeople work more efficiently.
"Is it that we need to rebuild Org 62 with a greater sense of urgency?" Benioff said on the call.
Salesforce employees were rattled by Benioff's references to productivity coming, as they did, as part of a greater discussion on more job cuts, according to people present at the meeting and internal Slack messages viewed by Insider.
For some, the calls to be productive while the company executes a mass layoff only served as a further hindrance to productivity.
"I would say this is a lost week of productivity for Salesforce, ironically," said a person in sales who was present at the meeting.
Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
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