Salesforce Subleasing Half of Office Footprint in SF HQ Tower

The list of tech companies downsizing or abandoning their office footprints in San Francisco to embrace hybrid and remote work strategies now includes one of the city’s largest employers: Salesforce.

The tech giant, headquartered in San Francisco—where it occupies two office towers with its name on them—now is listing for subleasing about 412K SF of the 817K SF, 43-story Salesforce West tower on Fremont St., according to a report in the San Francisco Business Times.

Salesforce will maintain ownership of the building and may reoccupy the space in the future, a Salesforce spokesperson said, in a statement. About 352K SF of the sublease listing will be available August 1, with the rest being vacated in December.

“We are subleasing floors in Salesforce West to make the most efficient use of our real estate footprint. As the largest private employer in San Francisco, we are deeply committed to the city and are actively welcoming employees back to Salesforce Tower,” the company’s statement said.

Despite the pledge to bring employees back to its HQ, Salesforce made it clear earlier this month at World Tour conference in London that the company is fulling embracing its “Success from Anywhere, Careers Everywhere” strategy, giving employees a say in how much work they do in the office and making hybrid/remote work a permanent part of the corporate culture.

Instead of focusing on where people work, the company said it is looking closely at how they work and how they can “empower great (work) experiences for everyone whether they are in the office or in remote locations.”

“I worry about companies that are [issuing return-to-office mandates]. We would never do that because we fundamentally believe that we’re never going back to the way things used to be before,” said Angela McKenna, a Salesforce executive VP, in an interview with Unleash, a tech trade website.

Salesforce has created what it is calling Flex Team Agreements, which permits work teams at the company to create their own core agreements on how they want to work. In May, the company said its workers in its San Francisco office are coming in to work one or two days a week.

Salesforce also is busy creating a “Digital HQ” that it says eventually will become more important than the physical HQ. The company said it is facilitating the digital HQ through Slack, a platform that focuses on automation and external communication that was acquired by Salesforce last year.

According to McKenna, Slack has enabled Salesforce workers to reduce email by 42% and undertake more “asynchronous conversations.”

In February of last year, Salesforce gave its employees the option to permanently work remotely or on a hybrid schedule. The tech company began changing its office footprint plans in SF last year, canceling a 325K SF pre-lease on a tower that will be built on Howard St.

Two thirds of the Salesforce Tower at 415 Mission St., which was built in 2017, is currently leased. Salesforce has more than 10,000 employees in the Bay Area.