Software company Salesforce.com will expect at least 65 percent of its 54,000 employees to be in its corporate offices only one to three days a week after the COVID pandemic recedes, up from 40 percent now, the company has announced.
As a result, it will permanently abandon an unspecified amount of office space in cities around the U.S.
Remaining office space will be used largely for meetings and collaborations, so the company is revamping its layouts to feature “café-style” seating and open-air conference areas with social distancing, along with some private nooks for individuals, Brent Heyer, Salesforce’s Chief People Officer, told the Wall Street Journal.
An unspecified number of workers will be entirely remote, he noted.
The company will eliminate the “sea of desks” common to pre-pandemic workspaces, Heyer said.
“We’re not going back to the way things were,” he added. “I don’t believe we’ll keep every space in every city we’re in.”
That includes San Francisco, where Salesforce is the largest single employer, the Journal reported and occupies Salesforce Tower, the city’s tallest building.
Salesforce also has offices in Chicago, Indianapolis, and New York, among other cities.
Salesforce is among the largest companies to detail its projected office-space needs in a post-pandemic world.
Tech companies have led the shift to home-based workforces.
Twitter has said it will give all employees the option of working from home and Facebook has announced plans to transition more employees to home-based work.
In contrast, Amazon has added office space in six U.S. cities and announced a lease on new space in Boston in January to house its expanded workforce there.
TREND FORECAST: The facts are the reality of the numbers. Once again, we reaffirm our forecast that as more people work at home, many once-thriving commercial business hubs that depended on office workers, commuters, and business travel will decline, as will real estate values.
TRENDPOST: Exemplifying the desperation facing landlords of tenants fleeing major cities, in January, Manhattan landlords offered new tenants an average of 2.3 months free rent to entice them to sign leases, the heftiest incentive in at least ten years, according to a report by analysis firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman.
While that helped boost January’s new lease signings 58 percent year on year, empty flats listed for rent numbered 12,447, about triple the number open last January.
With the incentives’ value deducted, the average rent for a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment fell to $2,812, 19 percent lower than that for January 2020.
