In an all-hands Salesforce meeting described as rambling, co-CEO Marc Benioff sidestepped employee questions regarding plans for layoffs, leading to vocal discontent in the company’s Slack channels.
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Business Insider reports that the meeting, which happened Thursday, resulted in angry internal discussions among employees who felt dismissed and ignored. Insider viewed screengrabs of the chats and has more:
Staff took to a Slack channel intended for questions during the all-hands to point out that many questions had been left unaddressed, according to screenshots viewed by Insider. Benioff first announced the plan for layoffs in an email on Wednesday, saying the cuts will happen “mostly over the coming weeks.”
Insider quotes one employee who asked if Benioff was “filibustering 47,600+ employees right now by talking in circles and avoiding the topic at hand.” Others wrote messages like, “ANSWER OUR QUESTIONS,” or “what are we even talking about?”
Employee sentiment was perhaps best captured by a Slack user who suggested that for “future all-hands calls, it would be nice to know what the intent of the call is.”
“I’m sure many of the 10s of thousands of people on this call could be getting things done,” the commenter continued, “rather than listening to an unstructured conversation about the business…”
Anger over the nature of the Salesforce call didn’t escape executive notice. According to Insider, “one executive apologized in a subsequent meeting.” The exec told anyone who hadn’t seen the meeting “to not bother watching, according to one person present.”
The incident may highlight a lack of transparency and communication within the company, which Business Insider reports has already notified up to 1,000 employees of pending cuts — a move Insider notes “blindsided many managers.”