Connect with Our Culture
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Learn what makes Salesforce culture unique.
- Identify the Salesforce core values.
- Discover how Salesforce employees bring our values to life every day.
Hello, It’s Nice to Meet You
We’re Salesforce, the global leader in customer relationship management (CRM). Simply put, we bring companies and customers together every day. And our customers include candidates like you, too.
Companies of every size and industry are using our products to transform their businesses across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more by connecting with customers in a whole new way. We harness technologies that can revolutionize companies, careers, and, hopefully, our world.
We believe everyone can be a changemaker, an innovator—a Trailblazer. A career at Salesforce is an opportunity to do just that—while also transforming your everyday. At Salesforce, you get to create the best work of your career, partner with the most brilliant teams, and make an impact.
It all comes back to our unique culture. Our culture is built around the idea that we’re all bound together. At Salesforce, our family includes customers, employees, partners, and communities. We take care of each other, have fun together, and work collaboratively to make the world a better place. Learn more about our culture.
“The business of business is improving the state of the world.” —Chairman & Co-CEO, Marc Benioff
We know that in order to be better, we have to do better. So we rely on a 1-1-1 integrated philanthropy model, where we give 1% of our technology, 1% of our time, and 1% of our resources back to our communities. It’s one of the things that sets us apart and drives our customers’ success. When you’re part of our Salesforce community, you get to be better and do better too.
Our Unique Salesforce Culture
We rely on our core values—trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability—to shape our culture and inform how we serve our customers and communities. Our values are our guiding compass, helping us venture into new places and reach great heights.
Our unique culture and values have helped us achieve global recognition, including being named Forbes’s World’s Most Innovative Companies 9 years in a row, one of Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Diversity 5 years in a row, and one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For 12 years running. We’re also the fastest growing enterprise software company.
But our values are more than just buzzworthy. They concretely shape the experiences of our employees and provide incredible opportunities to transform your career. Let’s take a look at how each of our core values affects the employee experience and contributes to personal and professional growth.
Trust
Trust is our #1 value. It’s at the center of all of our relationships. Salesforce employees build trusted relationships with the members of their team and beyond. We demonstrate trust in our employees in many ways.
First and foremost, we foster trust by keeping open communication and encouraging transparency with tools like Slack, our communication channel. To help keep us accountable, we require all employees and organizations to create a V2MOM, our annual business planning and goal setting tool. It’s an acronym that stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. We also encourage transparency by hosting biannual planning sessions that give visibility to leaders and teams and provide an opportunity to share ideas and connect.
In addition to keeping open communication and encouraging transparency, we demonstrate trust in our employees by supporting them as they take professional risks that will help them progress. One way we do this is through Fearless Teaming, an initiative dedicated to creating a workplace where employees think and act with courage and compassion and challenge the status quo.
Customer Success
Remember when we said our customers include you, too? It’s true. We want to help everyone in our ecosystem succeed—including our employees. That’s why we offer resources and support to help Salesforce employees continue to learn and grow.
Investing in our employees’ professional development is a top priority. Between our Internal Careers Team, which provides career development advice and tools, our Talent Experience Team, which offers open classes, manager training, career guides, and more, we make sure our employees have lots of opportunities for growth and development. Check out the Resources section at the end of this unit for career development resources.
We also encourage our employees to seek personal and professional development opportunities with organizations like Toastmasters, a nonprofit that teaches public speaking and leadership skills; our internal mentoring program; and open source communities for our engineers to learn new languages and skills. Plus, we provide a range of networking and support opportunities, like our Trailblazer Community and Culture Guides program. We thrive on making meaningful connections!
We help you succeed in other ways too. We encourage centering activities and initiatives around self-reflection (oh hey, V2MOM) and personal and professional development, like Pathway, a self-guided wellbeing tool focused on your personal journey of purpose; resilience and Talent Experience webinars; and speaking sessions to help you cultivate your career.
Helping our employees succeed goes beyond the scope of professional development—it includes focusing on your personal wellbeing too. How you eat, rest, exercise, manage stress, and navigate your finances are key components of a healthy lifestyle and productive workforce. That’s where Camp B-Well, our employee wellbeing program, comes in. Camp B-Well provides access to benefits, resources, and support to help employees live well every day, in every way. With that in mind, we encourage employees to leverage resources—including mindfulness zones, on-site yoga, a monthly wellbeing reimbursement and more—to maintain personal wellbeing and excel in their day-to-day job.
Plus, as part of Camp B-Well, we provide robust benefits programs and resources for you and your family—including Benefits Essentials (medical care, EAP, retirement, and time off), Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP), Family Care (parental leave, access to child and elder care), and regional benefits focusing on all areas of wellbeing. Here’s an overview of the benefits offerings available to you in your region.
- US
- Canada
- LATAM: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico
- EMEA: Benefits vary by country. Ask your recruiter for details specific to your location.
- APAC
- Japan
Innovation
Innovation is what drives Salesforce to provide the latest and greatest in products and services to our customers. We’re constantly growing by acquiring new and innovative companies to continue to build and enhance our organization. But innovation is also what drives our employees to challenge themselves.
We foster innovation in our employees by empowering them to think of new ways to solve problems and by providing resources that help you level up and learn in-demand skills on Trailhead.
We also encourage employees to provide feedback and ideas to improve upon and further innovate our processes. One way we do this is through #airing-of-grievances, a Slack channel created to transparently improve our company and culture. But we know it’s not always easy (or comfortable) to provide feedback or speak up. So, we build employee programs, like Fearless Teaming, to encourage you to challenge the status quo and take risks that lead to innovation.
Equality
We believe that businesses can be powerful platforms for social change. Because of this, we focus on providing equality for all. Creating a culture of equality isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing. This empowers us to build deeper connections with our customers, innovate with diverse perspectives at the table, and ultimately become a better company.
We strive to create workplaces that reflect the diverse communities we serve and where everyone feels empowered to bring their full, authentic selves to work. We recognize there is more work to be done on the path to equality. In the spirit of transparency, we publish our annual company representation data on our website. But there’s more to the story than just the data—it’s how we get there that matters.
At Salesforce, we strive to exhibit equality by taking action across four pillars: equal rights, equal pay, equal education, and equal opportunity. Actions like standing against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, investing millions of dollars to address unexplained pay differences between genders and across race and ethnicity in the U.S., volunteering at schools around the globe, and partnering with environmental nonprofits to fight climate change.
We cultivate a sense of belonging by building a culture of allies and empowering employee-led organizations we call Equality Groups. Groups like Abilityforce, Boldforce, Latinoforce, Outforce, Women’s Network, and Genforce help build community for our underrepresented groups. We are proud that half of our employees participate in one or more Equality Group. This is in large part due to our call to our employees to stand up for one another as allies. Allies ask, listen, show up, and speak up for each other.
Equality is also top of mind as we grow our company. We adhere to inclusive hiring principles for all candidates to ensure a fair and equitable hiring process. Both our external Recruiting team and Internal Careers team are committed to hiring the most qualified talent person for every role while opening up access to our opportunities for all. We discuss how equality and our other core values inform our hiring process and what that means for you in the next unit.
Sustainability
We are in a climate emergency and it’s time for bold leadership. At Salesforce, we are committed to bringing our full power to accelerate the world’s journey to net zero, because everything rests on a stable climate.
Resources
- Video: Why Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff believes business should be used for good
- Trailhead: Fearless Teaming
- Blog: Five Pieces of Career Advice for Workplace Services Professionals
- Blog: Growing up at Salesforce: Grabbing My Seat on the Salesforce Rocket Ship
- Blog: How to Have a Successful Sales Career: Follow Your Curiosity
- Blog: Approach Your Career Journey with a Sense of Adventure
- Blog: Salesforce Careers Stories
- Blog: Salesforce
- Site: Salesforce Equality