Salesforce is out to make the world a better place
One practical way Salesforce aims to make the world a better place is to cultivate a culture of belonging through their Equality Groups. These are employee-led and employee-organized groups – often called employee resource groups (ERGs) – focused on building community and empowering their underrepresented communities. These groups also invite in allies to join and help champion equality by asking, listening, showing up, and speaking up.
Equality groups are centered around common identities, life experiences, or backgrounds. Their mission is to make equality a reality both inside of Salesforce and in the communities in which Salesforce employees live and work. Notably, 1 in 2 Salesforce employees are part of an Equality Group (see below).
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that brings companies and customers together. It’s one integrated CRM platform that gives all departments in a business or organization — including marketing, sales, commerce, and service — a single, shared view of every customer.
Salesforce HQ is located in San Francisco in Salesforce Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi.
Salesforce has a Faithforce
Sue Warnke, Salesforce Senior Director of Content Experience; President of Faithforce San Francisco at Salesforce
One of the newest and the fastest growing Equality Groups at Salesforce is Faithforce. Founded in 2017, Faithforce has over 2000 members in 12 regional hubs across 5 continents and is growing fast.
Faithforce is the interfaith employee resource group at Salesforce focused on celebrating, supporting and fostering understanding of our global faith and spiritual diversity through inclusive and educational events and initiatives.
Faithforce champions faith diversity & inclusion, interfaith & intersectional collaboration and allyship across the company. The goal of Faithforce is to cultivate a culture of empathy, respect and belonging at Salesforce for people from all faiths, backgrounds, traditions and worldviews. All are welcome.
View Sue Warnke’s comments at the Religious Diversity & Inclusion in the Workplace Symposium, Worldwide Headquarters of Texas Instruments, May 6, 2019, cosponsored by TI and the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation.
Below are selected, edited portions from Sue Warnke’s comments at TI.
Sue Warnke: “About two years ago I converted to Christianity after a lifetime as a very proud agnostic (I’ve shared my testimony on YouTube). Suddenly, I was a different person showing up at work, and faith, for the first time in my life, was important. And it wasn’t just important, it was the most important thing in my entire life. And suddenly I felt very alone in the workplace.
I looked around and wondered if I’m the only Christian in this entire company. San Francisco is the second least religious city in the United States out of over 19,000 cities. So that was the environment I was in. And I made all sorts of assumptions, based on the little data that I had, that everybody was going to think I was a freak or was going to be against me.
But I took a step of researching, and I found other Christians and we started to pray. And I thought, ‘that’s not enough.’ I kept seeking, and I found that people of all faiths were actually feeling a little bit alone. And I even found that a couple Trailblazers had started the process, with our leaders, to form this group called Faithforce. And about a year-and-a-half ago we officially launched Faithforce.
The leaders were nervous about this. Would this work? Will this cause problems? What if it offends somebody? The way that they implemented this was very wise.
Number one, we were very clear about what we are not. We are not proselytizing. This isn’t about changing your beliefs. It’s simply about allowing faith to enter the diversity discussion.
When we say, ‘bring your whole authentic self to work,’ what if faith is your number one identifier? Can you still bring your authentic self to work? That’s all that this is about. It’s not pushing or trying to change somebody. It’s just, ‘Can I be seen just like you’re seen?‘
Number two, it’s not political. This is not a front for some political agenda. We make that clear when we have events.
Faithforce has three pillars: Enlighten, Inspire, and Celebrate. We have huge events – Diwali, Eid coming up after Ramadan, Easter, and Purim. They’re not exclusive. They are put on by Faithforce, and that’s really honoring to people.
And we’ve started to have vigils for the recent horrendous attacks in Sri Lanka, New Zealand and the US. We’ve had employees who have lost family members in these attacks around the world. We can’t ignore that.
We’ve had thousands of employees from all around the world and all faith backgrounds come and give their support (see Tweet from Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff).
One thing that all faiths agree on is the need for compassion for those in need – philanthropy. And there’s a lot of need in San Francisco and all around the world. We primarily give to homeless causes, but all sorts of causes.
This includes thousands of employee hours, and millions of dollars of employee donations and company matches, including for for faith-based institutions.”
The Business Case for Faithforce
Sue Warnke, cont.: “We’ve been posting about Faithforce on Twitter and LinkedIn, and other companies in Silicon Valley took note. Some had already started programs but they weren’t too vocal about it. Most of the big tech companies either had faith groups and expanded them inspired by Faithforce, or started new groups.
Let me share a story I share with anyone who is skeptical about the value of Faithforce.
A manager at Salesforce noticed that an employee was looking tired. So he just asked him, “What’s wrong?”
The employee looked down and mumbled under his breath, “I’m fasting for Ramadan.”
The manager said something very important: “Tell me more about that.” And the employee looked up, shocked, for the first time in his career somebody cared; somebody was curious.
And he said, “I’m fasting for the purpose of gaining compassion for those in need.”
The manager was fascinated; he didn’t know about Ramadan. And then he said something even more important: “How can I support you?”
They came up with a plan to change a couple meeting times for prayer, and then to tell the whole team about this so they can all learn about Ramadan. It made this person feel so seen and validated that he now brags about his manager, brags about Salesforce. He’s on Twitter recruiting people to join Salesforce.
I was at a new hire event handing out flyers about Faithforce, and a Muslim man came up to me and said, “Sue! You’re Sue Warnke, right?! I’ve been wanting to meet you. I have to tell you that I am here at Salesforce because of Faithforce. I was at [he named another big company] and I didn’t feel allowed to pray. I heard about Faithforce and I quit, and now I’m here.”
Also, when we have our summer interns come on and we do training for them, all of the Equity Groups get up and explain what they do. The number one question that the Millennials asked is, “Is there a Faithforce near me?” Above all the other things that they could be wondering about – to our surprise – this was the number one thing. Young people expect that you can have your faith and have it be seen in the workplace.
So let us not underestimate the business impact in recruiting, in retention, in morale. Businesses all around the world are getting a taste of this and we really cannot not address this anymore. The tide has turned, and we don’t want to be at the tail end of that. Let’s be trailblazers.
Faithforce and Business Innovation
I want to underscore how this can contribute to innovation. Salesforce did not start as a church or ministry App. That wasn’t in the founder’s vision.
But it has become one of the top tools for churches and ministries. Customers include Islamic Relief Worldwide, which helps orphans all around the world especially in the Middle East; the Salvation Army, which has 3.4 million volunteers and uses our Salesforce platform to help coordinate and manage disaster relief; and Compassion International that used Salesforce to coordinate their response to the [Easter bombings in churches] in Sri Lanka.
All of this is a new ‘use case’ that Salesforce didn’t plan on but is a huge market. We can’t underestimate that impact either. With Faithforce, we not only get talent that is very innovative from other places, but we can use the ‘use case’ of meeting ministry needs to expand our products.
What Challenges Were There to Successfully Launching Faithforce?
We really didn’t have that many bumps in the road, but I’ll share a few. Right when Faithforce kicked off, a Jewish employee emailed me and said, “Faith has nothing to do with work. What are you doing?” The turnaround there was that after the Tree of Life [synagogue in Pittsburg] shooting, we had Ohana Circle vigils. She was the first one there, and said, “I am so grateful for Faithforce I just didn’t see it in this way. I thought of it as an intrusion, but actually now I see it differently.” And she is now one of our top volunteers.
An atheist emailed me with similar objections before the launch, so I asked if I could meet with her, and we had an incredible conversation. That’s when she shared, “I feel misjudged too.” So I asked if she’d be part of our panel when we kick off Faithforce so that she could be a voice for others. She was incredibly brave and we were honored to have her.
What About the LGBTQ Reaction?
One of the other walls we overcame was the assumption that Faithforce and our LGBTQ group, called Outforce, can’t coexist. It’s one of the most destructive assumptions that is made out there.
So we leaned into that and had an event called Multiple Closets. We had Jewish, Muslim and Christian persons who were also LGBTQ. They shared their personal stories of ‘coming out of both closets’ – both as a homosexual and a person of faith. And they simply shared their stories.
It was interesting that while many people were on board, a couple folks from the LGBTQ group were not. They said that they had been too hurt in their past to support something like this. So, we opened a dialogue. “Tell me more about that. Tell me more about your story.”
There is a boundary to faith in the workplace, and we assume that it’s an impenetrable one, but I think it’s paper thin. We can blow it away simply by asking, “Tell me your story.”
Communications
I think that one of the most important roles in Faithforce is the communications role. We do a ton of communications because there’s such a high chance for misunderstanding. We do blog posts using an internal Facebook-type platform called Chatter. We have posts going out for every major holiday and posts recapping events with pictures explaining what we’re doing.
That’s one of the biggest reasons people are open to this. They can see it with their own eyes and see quotes and pictures from our executives. They can see what it looks like, not what the policy doc says, but what the human face of this is. And it’s people just like you and me.”