How We’ve Built Australia’s Best Workplace

Here’s a look at some of the actions we take to strengthen our culture and ensure our people can bring their most authentic and best selves to work.

Equality is one of our core values – it’s considered in everything we do – and our Equality Groups are one of the most powerful ways that we empower our employees to give even more meaning to their work. 

Equality Groups provide a community for underrepresented groups and their allies, offer professional development and mentoring opportunities, and empower employees to be equality leaders. One out of every three Salesforce employees participates in one or more groups, including: 

• Outforce — LGBTIQ+ community
• Women’s Network — gender equality
• Abilityforce — ability inclusion 
• Faithforce — global faith diversity 
• Asiapacforce  — Asian and Pacific Islander 
• Earthforce — sustainability
• Windforce – celebrating and honouring native cultures

In 2019, Salesforce was a Major Partner to the Sydney Mardi Gras. It was an incredible opportunity to inspire our entire team to be their authentic selves and live our value of equality. With more than 80 employees volunteering to march in the parade, it was a wonderful celebration where we were visible, vocal and proud.

We also brought the Mardi Gras party back to our business community, partnering with CBA and IAG to host a Mardi Gras networking event and celebration at Darling Park, and hosting a dinner for LGBTIQ+ leaders and allies to explore how businesses can help shape and influence our workplaces to drive equality for all.

It's also (Un)Equal Pay Day today – meaning that last financial year, women in Australia would have had to work the 59 additional days that have passed 30 June to earn the same annual salary as men did. 

For us, equal pay day in Australia is 30 June every year – there’s no extra time the women at Salesforce need to work to earn the same as men. 

Since 2016, we’ve committed to equal pay for equal work. Four global equal pay assessments in that time have resulted in the company spending $10.3 million to address any unexplained differences in pay between men and women. And this is an ongoing effort – we’ll continue to review and adjust employee compensation.

And this isn’t just about gender – we ensure that no underrepresented minorities are excluded, that all are fairly recognised for their work. 

As one of our core values, equality is also central to our recruitment, retention, promotion and remuneration processes. We hold diverse interview panels, with male and female leaders from diverse backgrounds and different roles throughout the business. 

Our new Equality Playbook, launched last year, includes unconscious bias training for hiring managers and helps guide the way hiring managers speak about equality to candidates, making sure they clearly understand the importance of this to our company.

Our mission is to help make the world a better place. Our 1-1-1 model – which diverts 1% of our profit, 1% of our time and 1% of our product to charities, not-for-profits and initiatives that improve the communities where we live and work – has paved the way for Salesforce.org to grow into the social enterprise it is today.

We also enable our employees to give back, wherever their passions lie. That ‘1% of our time’ part of the pledge means that employees are expected to volunteer and are given seven paid days off a year to do so.

Over the past year, our Australian team spent more than 40,000 hours working with amazing organisations to support their important work – marching for equality with JoyFM, recording community announcements and digitising their music library; building our 200th house with Volunteer Building Cambodia; preparing kids from underserved schools for the future of work with Schools Plus; creating sanctuaries for more than 300 cuddly wombats; packing boxes for FoodBank, and more.

We also match donations made by our employees  to the NGOs of their choice – contributing up to US$5000 per employee each year – and set aside US$1 million each year to recognise our top 100 volunteers, who are each eligible for a US$10,000 grant to donate to a nonprofit of their choice.

Our V2MOM planning model aligns every employee on our purpose, so we can all understand exactly how our individual work contributes to the overall company, and how we can help the business succeed. V2MOM stands for:

• Vision: what we want to achieve
• Values: the principles and beliefs that are most important to achieving our vision
• Methods: what actions we will take to accomplish our goals
• Obstacles: the challenges we might need to overcome along the way
• Measures: how we know when we’ve accomplished what we set out to do

Our learning platform, Trailhead, started as a tool to guide our customers and user base through our products has become a comprehensive learning platform, covering management and leadership training, management skills development and more.

Our ‘Manage the Salesforce Way’ Trail in Trailhead develops managers into thoughtful, self-aware leaders, covering vulnerability, listening skills, the difference between leadership and management, and much more.

We also reimburse employees up to AU$7400 per calendar year for the cost of fees, tuition and books for job-related education courses at accredited universities, colleges or schools.

Salesforce supports employees to find balance and harmony in all areas of life through our Camp B-Well campaign, which provides tips, challenges and events to help employees explore four key areas: Nourish, Revive, Move and Thrive. We’ve had inspirational speakers come and share their stories, including former pro surfer Mick Fanning, and bestselling author and motivational speaker Saroo Brierely.

Employees can also claim AU$150 every month to be used on health and fitness programs, including cooking classes, nutrition counselling, meditation and mindfulness classes, sleep support, nutrition and genomic testing.

On our 20th birthday this year, we went all out and celebrated with thousands of cupcakes, a donut wall, barista-made coffee and special 20 year celebration stickers, live music and more. Employees shared their favourite Salesforce moments and celebrated on Snapchat using a custom birthday filter in our Sydney office. 

We are incredibly humbled by this award and I’m looking forward to celebrating with our team – it’s the people that make the culture, and every one of our employees has contributed to making this Australia’s best workplace. 

If you’re ready to transform your everyday, join the Salesforce team.