Salesforce to close Portland office, asks employees to relocate or take severance

Gary Hershorn / Getty Images

• Salesforce is closing its office in Hillsboro, Oregon.
• Some staffers must relocate or take severance, while others will continue to work remotely.
• In July, Salesforce issued a RTO mandate for its corporate HQ in San Francisco.

Salesforce will close its office in Hillsboro, Oregon, and is asking many of its employees based there to either relocate or accept a severance package.

In virtual meetings Thursday afternoon, the cloud software giant notified staffers who report to its Hillsboro office, thirty minutes outside of Portland, of its decision. Customer success employees, who account for much of the Hillsboro office's staff, were given until November 26 to decide whether to take a severance package or relocate to Indianapolis, Atlanta, or Seattle, where Salesforce also has offices. Other employees were told they could continue to work for Salesforce remotely.

"Like any healthy business, we continuously assess whether we have the right structure in place to best serve our customers and fuel growth areas. In this case, it led to adjustments in our real estate footprint. Local employees are either going remote, being offered relocation or will receive a generous severance package in line with the location strategy of their team," a spokesperson for Salesforce wrote in an email to Business Insider.

Salesforce opened its Hillsboro office in 2013. The company agreed to create at least 205 new jobs and keep people employed for two years with average wages of $67,500 in exchange for $1.45 million in tax incentives, The Oregonian reported at the time.

As of June 2024, Salesforce had 99 offices in 87 cities globally. The company, according to its annual report filed in January, employed 72,682 people, with 51% based in the US.

Nearly two years ago, the company announced a major restructuring plan that included shedding some of its real estate portfolio and commercial leases. Since then, the company has shuttered one of its offices in San Francisco and another in Seattle. The Hillsboro office was Salesforce's only location in the Portland metro area.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has wavered in his public opinion on remote work. In the early days of the pandemic, he embraced it and declared in 2022, that return-to-office mandates would 'never work.' Later, he blamed the company's weakening sales on workers it had trained remotely during a pandemic-era hiring spree.

In July, Salesforce called most workers at its global headquarters in San Francisco back to the office four to five days a week.

The Hillsboro office closure also comes as Salesforce, which makes and sells cloud-based software for customer relationship management, attempts to rebrand as a company powered by artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, Salesforce unveiled its most ambitious AI strategy to date — Agentforce, a platform to build and manage AI bots to perform customer service tasks or improve employee productivity.

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