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Salesforce Opts for Wellness Destination Over Office
Facing roughly two years of work from home for employees, Salesforce is opting for a new way to connect employees to a centralized culture: a 75-acre wellness retreat in rural California, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The property — named "Trailblazer Ranch" — sits roughly 70 miles south of San Francisco and will be used to "onboard new hires and conduct off-site team meeting for social bonding and leadership training."
“We’ve hired thousands of employees who have never met in person,” Co-CEO Marc Benioff said. “Trailblazer Ranch will give us and our stakeholders a way to forge deeper relationships [and] experience our culture in a whole new way.”
Nordic Choice Exec Outlines Ransomware Response
HNN's Terence Baker recently interviewed Nordic Choice Hotels vice president of technology Kari Anna Fiskvik to talk about how the company coped with a ransomware attack, which was shut down within hours but has required weeks of work in response.
She said the response was helped by hoteliers being well versed in crisis management.
“We had an infrastructure team that was monitoring the environment, took everything down and followed their routines. And we had a software team in a security-operations center, a specialist team … [this] is everything they do, and we were very dependent on their competence,” she said.
Tech Candidates Now Get Cash Just for Interviews
The depths of the labor crisis for tech workers in particular has reached such a point that candidates are now being lured with money simply for interviewing and other "plush perks" if they take jobs, Wired reports.
“It’s never been harder or more expensive to hire new people,” Joy Nazzari, founder of startup Showhere, told the news outlet. “Yet you also have to defend who you already have, because they’re seeing the bright lights — being hit up on LinkedIn and hearing stories of friends attracted by big salary packages.”
Expedia Sees Opportunites With Tech Revamp
During a quarterly earnings call where Expedia Group CEO Peter Kern expressed confidence in the trajectory of a travel demand rebound, the executive also touted improvements made to their platform, HNN's Bryan Wroten reports.
Improvements will include APIs to tie into external systems, better tech internally and an enhanced end experience for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business bookings.
“It will be able to drive real impact instead of the siloed way we used to have to work our way through it,” Kern said.