What Drives the Culture at Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com's (CRM 0.42%) recent investor day presentation highlighted the various ways the software-as-a-service company incorporates its social, community, and environmental ideals into its corporate culture.

In this episode of "Beat & Raise" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Sept. 27, Millionacres editor Deidre Woollard discusses how Salesforce's core values inform its product evolution to "sort of become a virtuous circle."

Deidre Woollard: There's two questions so far, so it's pretty light. Culture is an interesting being at Salesforce because it's so intrinsic to everything they do, it's been something that Benioff has always lead with. He's been involved in homelessness issues in San Francisco, he and his wife have to donate a lot of money to UCSF to study homelessness. We go to the next slide, you can see some of the things that they're working on are really things that are important for the company. Sustainability Cloud, of course, but also quality. They talk a lot about this at Salesforce. In the book, Trailblazer, Marc Benioff talked about when two of the women in his company came to him and said, "We have a pay gap problem," and how the company spent initially 3 million, and then I believe it was another 3 million to fix that problem. They see themselves as leaders, as well as integrating that into part of their business. It's really part of the core culture at Salesforce that employees all get time to volunteer. I believe they get $5,000 match for any nonprofit that they're interested in and supporting. All of that is really important to Salesforce. It becomes a bit of a lab in some ways because the things that they do and the things that they talk about then become things that they can help their customers do, and then they can sell their customers products that relate to those services. It does sort of become a virtuous circle that way. Let's go to the next slide. 1t.org is about planting trees, and this is just some of the things that they've gotten. This is a little bit of them tooting their own horn about their role as sustainability leaders. Yes, similar here, just talking about community within Salesforce and externally as well. The creation of jobs, I thought was an interesting factor. That's something they talked about a lot, was that 9.3 million new Salesforce economy jobs. One of the things that they wanted to make clear to everyone who is listening is that automation, the digital world, it's not taking jobs away. We're not saying replace all of your phone workers with chat bots. There's jobs that become generated through this digital transformation.