Salesforce reportedly orders staff to return to office ‘four to five days a week’

The thronged Bryant Park area will soon be even more thronged.

Salesforce, the powerhouse software company that’s the largest tenant at 1095 Sixth Ave. at West 42nd Street, is poised to bring most of its employees back to their offices.

An internal Salesforce memo advised staff that most employees must return to their desks by Oct. 1, according to online news site San Francisco Standard.

The directive appeared to apply to Salesforce staff everywhere, not only in its San Francisco headquarters.

The reported memo said, “Select employees in sales, workplace services, data center engineering and onsite support technicians under the chief information officer will be required to come to the office four to five days a week, effective Oct. 1.”

Most other departments must report to offices three days a week.

A Salesforce spokesperson would not answer our questions about New York or the Oct. 1 deadline, saying only, “Salesforce has always been a hybrid work company. Our guidelines focus on in-person connection, while also recognizing the value of working away from the office.”

A rep for CBRE, the national leasing agent for Salesforce, declined to comment.  

But the company appears to be delicately backing off CEO Marc Benioff’s 2022 statement that “office mandates are never going to work.”

The streets and sidewalks around 1095 Sixth are already increasingly crowded, reflecting a much more extensive office return than has been reported.

Bryant Park Corporation founder Dan Biederman said, “It’s so busy you can’t walk half the time. It’s clearly as busy as in 2019 or more so.

“The park is jammed with office workers and tourists,” he said.

Perceptions of large numbers of employees giving up work-from-home — or forced to do so — are supported by the latest data from Placer.ai, which monitors office visits  based on location data  from mobile devices.

According to Placer.ai, New York City metro area (including the tiny Newark and Jersey City markets), office visitation in May climbed to 83.9% of 2019 levels and to 85% in June.

Those numbers are in stark contrast to surveys which tout  lower rates of return, and are widely cited by journalists eager to fuel a narrative of  an office market collapse.

In fact, there are signs that Manhattan’s office malaise has bottomed out, at least for prime properties.  CBRE reported 35% more leasing volume in the second quarter than in the same period of 2023.

The city’s largest commercial landlord, SL Green, said in its second-quarter earnings report that it’s on track to beat its goal of signing two million square feet of leases this year. Ares Management nearly doubled its space at the landlord’s 245 Park Avenue.

The world’s largest owner of commercial property, Blackstone, is adding 250,000 square feet to its space at Rudin’s 345 Park Ave.

Manhattan availability remains at over 17% and won’t likely fall much due to an over-supply of antiquated, undesirable space. Interest rates are punishingly high. Threatened foreclosures abound.

But anyone who sees only doom ahead is clearly not paying attention to the real world.